back in the day

By the early-sixteenth century, coffee had necessitated the creation of its own institution: the coffeehouse.  With the spread of such novel public places throughout the Early Modern Ottoman Empire, a distinct culture of urban leisure began to take shape.  

For Ralph S. Hattox, author of Coffee and Coffeehouses, the coffeehouses of Istanbul were the new secular centers where the exclusively male cliental could exchanging ideas.  These medieval café dwellers were seen as “young idlers” and “professional loungers” participating in the unrespectable trend of ‘utlah, or ‘doing nothing.’  The scholar Kâtib Çelebi linked the coffeehouse culture of Istanbul with the city’s clandestine world of “loose living” (Hattox).  Despite the negative associations with the drink, coffee was and remains to this day, a public affair. 

European centers of commerce followed suit in the seventeenth century as coffee culture spread to London and Paris via Venice, then over to the American colonies. In his book Tastes of Paradise, Wolfgang Schivelbusch uses London as case study.  By 1700, the city boasted about 3,000 coffeehouses for its population of 600,000.

Lloyds of London, now a major insurance company, started out as a coffeehouse in the eighteenth century.

Coffee and tea were already international commodities by the seventeenth century, stimulating colonial investments and trade to cater to the emerging European culture of leisure.  Middle class intellectual culture was kept satisfied with goods from the colonies in a system much akin to the modern importation of coffee beans.