How Coffee Created the Modern World

☕ How Coffee Created the Modern World (TLDR version)

Let’s take a step back and consider your daily cup(s) of coffee for a moment. Historically, coffee was not just a pick-me-up; it fueled the rise of capitalism, replacing an alcohol-infused leisure-oriented culture with one obsessed with productivity. Coffee houses became training grounds for this new world, fostering revolutionary ideas while subtly shaping entire societies. But this caffeinated focus comes at a cost. Not only in terms sleep disruption, but also wrt. monoculture farming while potential exploitation raise ethical concerns. Perhaps next time you have a cup, you may be slightly more mindful and ponder its impact, appreciating the focus it brings while acknowledging the complex web it has woven within our world.

Read more about how caffeine affects your sleep in this article: The Science and Importance of Sleep

The Full Story: ☕ How Coffee Created the Modern World

Introduction
The arrival of caffeine in Europe changed everything. Coffee (and tea) ushered in a shift in people’s mental state, from being fogged by alcohol to being much more sharpened. It freed people from the natural rhythms of the body and the sun, which made possible whole new kinds of work, and arguably new kinds of thought as well. Having brought what amounted a new form of consciousness to Europe, caffein went on to influence everything from global trade to imperialism, the slave trade, the workplace, the sciences, politics, social relations, and even the rhythms of English prose.

About 90% of people ingest caffeine on a regular basis, which translates into an estimated two billion cups of coffee being consumed every day! This makes coffee the most used psychoactive drug in the world. It is also the only one that we routinely give to children, typically in the form of soda. Few of us think of it as a drug. To be caffeinated is not baseline consciousness, but in fact it is an altered state. It just happens to be a state that virtually all of us share, which makes it seem invisible to us.

Caffeine is currently on World Anti-Doping Agency’s (WADA) monitoring list, which means it is not prohibited, but WADA is monitoring it in case it becomes an anti-doping issue in the future. However, there are limits to the amount of caffeine athletes can use in NCAA sanctioned events.

How It Was Discovered
Coffee is believed to have been discovered in Ethiopia in AD 850. The story goes that an observant goat herder, in what is Ethiopia today, noticed how goats would behave erratically and would stay awake all night after eating the red berries of the Coffea Arabica plant. He shared his observations with an abbot at the local monastery, who concocted a drink with the berries and discovered its stimulating properties.

We know that by the 15th century, coffee was being cultivated in East Africa and traded across the Arabian peninsula. Initially it was regarded as an aid to concentration and used by Sufis in Yemen to keep them from dosing off during their religious observances. Tea also started out as a kind of tool to help Buddhist monks to stay awake through long stretches of meditation.

The Start of Coffee Houses
Within a century, coffee houses had sprung up across the Arab world. In 1570, there were more than 600 of them in Constantinople alone. They spread north-west with the Ottoman Empire. These new public spaces were hotbeds for news and gossip. They were also places to gather for performances and games. Coffee houses were comparatively liberal institutions were the conversations often turned to politics. At various times, governmental and clerical powers attempted to close them down. But never for long, or with much success.

Coffee in the Islamic World
Coffee offered the Islamic world a suitable alternative to alcohol, which is specifically prescribed in the Quran (in the fifth chapter of the Quran, the sacred book of Islam, verse 90 forbids the drinking of “intoxicants.”). It came to be known as qahwa, which is loosely translated into “wine of Araby“.

This notion that coffee somehow exists in opposition to alcohol, would persist in both the east and the west. It comes down to a common and erroneous belief that black coffee is an antidote for drunkenness.

The Islamic world at this time was, in many more respects, more advanced than Europe in science, technology and learning. Whether this flourishing of work requiring clarity of mind had anything to do with the prevalence of coffee and prohibition of alcohol is difficult to prove. However, as the German historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch has argued, coffee “seemed to be tailormade for a culture that forbade alcohol consumption and gave birth to modern mathematics.”

Tea is older than coffee. It was discovered in China where it has been used as a medicine since 1000 BC. Tea was not popularized as a recreational beverage until the Tang Dynasty (AD 618 – 907). The popularity of tea during the Tang Dynasty, also coincided with the olden age. Moreover, the far reaching impact of caffeine’s introduction in Europe, gives the idea of causal link some plausibility. Europeans had been fascinated by the exotic practices of the Orient for a long time, and the practice of drinking hot dark liquid that could keep a man awake, sparked their curiosity.

The Significance of Hot Beverages
The notion of drinking any beverage boiling hot, was in itself exotic. In fact, boiling the water as part of preparing it, proved to be one of the most important elements of both coffee and tea, to humanity. The fact that you needed to boil the water to make them, meant that they were the safest things a person could drink. Prior, it would have been alcohol, which was more sanitary than water, but not as safe as tea or coffee. The tannins in all these beverages also have anti-microbial properties (antioxidants). The significant contributions of coffee and tea to public health, may help explain why societies that embraced these hot beverages tended to thrive, as microbial disease declined.

The Proliferation of Coffee Houses Across Europe
In 1629, the first coffee houses in Europe, styled on the Arab model, popped up in Venice. The first such establishment in England was opened in Oxford in 1650. They arrived in London shortly thereafter, and proliferated virally. Within a few decades, there were thousands of coffee houses in London. At their peak, one for every 200 Londoners. We think of England as a tea culture, but it was coffee that flourished there first. It was not until the 18th century that tea consumption surpassed that of coffee. As in the Islamic world, coffee was mainly consumed in public coffee houses in Europe as well. Vibrant meeting places where the news of the day, political, financial and cultural was as much the attraction as the coffee. Coffee houses became uniquely democratic public spaces. In England they were the only such spaces were men of different classes could mix. Anyone could sit anywhere. But only men. At least in England. Women where welcome in French coffee houses. The English coffee house was not only a new kind of public space, it represented a new kind of communications medium. Since you typically paid a penny for the coffee, while the information in the form of newspapers books, magazines and conversation was free, the coffee houses were often referred to as penny universities.

The Topical Specialization of Coffee Houses
London’s coffee houses were distinguished from one another by the professional or intellectual interests of the patrons, which eventually gave them specific institutional identities. E.g. merchants and men with interests in shipping, gathered in Lloyd’s coffee house. Here you could learn what ships would arriving and departing, and buy an insurance policy on your cargo. Lloyd’s coffee house eventually became the insurance broker Lloyd’s of London.

Similarly, the London Stock Exchange had its roots in the trades conducted at Jonathan’s coffee house. Learned types and scientists known then as natural philosophers, gathered at the Grecian, which became closely associated with the Royal Society. Isaac Newton and Edmund Halley debated physics and mathematics here, and supposedly once dissected a dolphin on the premises. Tom Standage, writes in “The history of the world in six glasses” (3 of which happened to contain caffeine: coffee, tea and cola), that coffee houses “provided an entirely new environment for social, intellectual, commercial and political exchange.” and became “the crucibles of the scientific and financial revolutions that shaped the modern world.“

As specialized as they were by field of interest, London’s coffee houses were also linked by patrons who spent the day moving from one to another. Carrying news, but also rumors and gossip which spread more quickly through London’s network of coffee houses than by any other medium.

The Breaking of the Arab Coffee Monopoly
The soaring popularity of coffee house in 17-century Europe, posed a problem for business interests there, since at the time Arab traders had an absolute monopoly on coffee beans. They profited from every cup of coffee consumed in London, Paris or Amsterdam. It was a monopoly that the Arabs guarded very well. To prevent anyone from growing coffee, anywhere than in the lands they controlled, Arab traders roasted the coffee beans before they were exported to make sure they could not be germinated.

In 1616, a clever Dutchman smuggled live coffee plants out of Mokha, a port city in Yemen, and took them to a botanical garden in Amsterdam where they were grown under glass. Additional plants were created through cutting. One of those clones ended up in the Dutch controlled island Java, in Indonesia, where the Dutch East India Company successfully propagated it. Eventually producing enough coffee plants to establish a plantation there. Hence, the strain of coffee called Mokha Java.

In 1714, two descendants of the Dutchman’s coffee plants where given to Luis XIV, who had it planted in a garden in Paris. A few years later, Gabriel de Clerc, wanted to establish a coffee plantation in the French colony of Martinique (where he lived). In a second momentous coffee theft, he claimed to have recruited a woman in the court to steal a cutting of the King’s coffee plant. After successfully rooting the cutting, de Clerc put the little plant in a glass box to protect it from the elements and brought it with him on a ship to Martinique. The crossing proved difficult, taking so much longer that the supply of drinking water onboard had to be strictly rationed, but de Clerc shared his meager ration of water with it to keep it alive. His sacrifice ensured that the plant made it safely to Martinique, where it thrived. By 1730, France’s Caribbean colonies were shipping coffee back to what by then was a Europe hopelessly addicted to caffeine.

Many of the coffee grown in the new world are descendants of that original plant, smuggled out of Mokha in 1616. Offspring of a theft that had an enormous impact. Now the West had taken control of coffee, and coffee took control of the West.

Alcohol’s Role Changed in Favor of Coffee, and Its Impact on Work
Before the arrival of coffee and tea, alcohol was being consumed in Europe morning, noon and night. Not only in taverns after dark, but for breakfast at home, and even in the workplace where it was routinely given to laborers on their breaks. The English mind was fogged by alcohol most of the day. Campaigns for temperance sprang up from time to time but, without a substitute beverage, they failed to gain traction.

Then came coffee. As early as 1660, writer and historian James Howell recognized so early the impact of coffee on the conduct of work “It is found already that this coffee drink had caused a greater sobriety among people. For whereas formerly apprentices and clerks used to take their mornings draft in ale, beer or wine, which by the dizziness in the brain make many unfit for business, they now play the goodfellas in this wakeful and civil drink.” Years later, the impact of coffee would prove far reaching as the English economy would begin its shift from reliance on physical labor to mental labor. Long before the coffee break, there was the beer break. Commonly offered to laborers doing physical work outdoors. Mental clarity was not a priority, nor was attention to the time of the clock. For laborers working with machines, however, a mind dulled by alcohol was a hazard to both safety and productivity. For clerks and others, who worked with numbers, the alertness, focus and all around mental clarity coffee afforded made it the ideal drug. As Wolfgang Schivelbusch put it “the beverage of modern bourgeois age.“

Coffee showed up in Europe in exactly the right moment “it spread through the body and achieved chemically and pharmacologically what rationalism and the protestantic ethic sought to fulfill spiritually and ideologically.” The rationalist drug, coffee, helped disperse Europe’s alcoholic fog, fostering a heightened alertness and attention to detail. Also, as employers soon discovered, the caffeine in coffee dramatically improved productivity. It is not merely a coincidence that caffeine and the minute hand on clocks arrived at more or less the same historical moment. For Medieval men and especially for the men doing physical labor outdoors, the angle of the sun mattered more than the hand of the clock. There had been no minute-hand, because there had been no need to subdivide the hour. But new kinds of work demanded much closer attention to time and its increments. Work not only moved indoors, but also reorganized on the principle of the clock. Regularized and routinized. This shift called for a new kind of discipline that coffee and tea could help to enforce.

Impact on our Circadian Rhythm
The most important contribution that caffeine made to modern work, and in turn to the rise of capitalism, was to liberate us from the fixed rhythms of the sun. The sun reliable also sets the clocks of our bodies. The whole idea of a late shift, let alone a night shift had been unthinkable. However, the impact of caffeine keep us awake and alert to hold the natural tide of exhaustion at bay, freed us from the circadian rhythms of our biology and along with the advent of artificial light, opened the frontier of night to the possibilities of work.

The Association of Tea with Femininity
The 17th century war of the sexes over coffee, lead to the association of tea with femininity and domesticity that endures to this day in the West. A Londoner could get its cup of tea in a coffee house, but tea did not get its own dedicated venue until 1717 when Thomas Twining opened a tea house. Here women were welcome to sample the various offerings and buy tea leaves to brew at home. Thanks, in part, to Thomas’ innovation, tea came under the control of upper and middle class women who developed a rich culture of tea parties, high teas and low, and a whole regime of tea accessories including china and porcelain, the tea spoon, the tea-cosy (fabric to keep the teapot hot), and finger food specifically designed to accompany tea.

Furthermore, the temperance movement who promoted tea as an alternative to gin, would later solidify tea’s feminine image in the West.

The Political Consequences of Discourse in the Coffee Houses
The conversations in London’s coffee houses frequently turned to politics in vigorous exercises of free speech that drew the ire of the government. Especially after the Monarchy was restored in 1660. Charles II were worried that plots were being hatched in coffee houses, and decided that these places were dangerous fermenters of rebellion that the Crown needed to suppress. In 1675, the King moved to close down the coffee houses on the grounds that “false, malicious and scandalous reports” emanating therefrom were a “disturbance of the quiet and peace of the realm.”

Like so many other compounds that changed the qualities of consciousness in individuals, caffeine was regarded as a threat to institutional power, which moved to suppress it. A forewarning of the wars against drugs that was to come much later.

The King’s war against coffee lasted only 11 days. Charles discovered that it was too late to turn back the tide of caffeine. By then, the coffee houses were such a fixture of English culture and daily life and so many eminent Londoners had become addicted to caffeine, that everyone simply ignored the King’s order and went on drinking coffee. Afraid to test his authority and find it lacking, the King quietly backed down and rolled back his first proclamation.

In France too, coffee houses became synonymous with sedition, and would play a decisive role in the events in 1789 (The French Revolution). Paris’ coffee houses were rife with intrigue. The mob that ultimately stormed the Bastille, assembled in the Café du Foie, roused to action by the eloquence of political journalist Camille de Moulin and intoxicated by caffeine.

It is hard to imagine that the sort of political, cultural and intellectual ferment that bubbled up in the coffee houses of both France and England would ever have developed in a tavern. If alcohol fuels our Dionysian tendencies (excess, irrationality, lack of discipline and unbridled passion), caffeine nurtures the Apollonian (reason, culture, harmony, and restraint). Early on, people recognized the link between the rising tide of rationalism and coffee. The European mind had escaped from alcohol’s grip, freeing it for new kinds of thinking that caffeine helped foster. You can argue what came first. But the kind of magical thinking that alcohol fostered in the Medieval mind, began in the 17th century to yield to a new spirit of rationalism, and a bit later enlightenment thinking.

Coffee became, along with the microscope, telescope and the pen, one the Enlightenment Age key tools. But, unlike the others, this was a tool that was taken up in the brain and mind. The enthusiasm for coffee among intellectuals in both England and France reflected perhaps its novelty as much as its power. New drugs always seem miraculous. For that reason, new drugs are always credited with astounding properties and consumed to excess. Voltaire was a fervent advocate for coffee and supposedly drank as many as 72 cups a day. Coffee and coffee houses lead to heroic labors in enlightenment writers. Rene Diderot compiled his Magnum Opus while in Café de Precoup. It is safe to say that the encyclopedia would never have gotten finished in a tavern.

Performance Enhancing Properties of Caffeine
An experiment done in the 1930s found that chess players on caffeine performed significantly better than players who abstained. In another study, caffeine users completed a variety of mental tasks quicker, though they made more errors. In other words, People on caffeine are faster, but not smarter.

In a 2014 experiment, subjects given caffeine immediately after learning new material remembered it better than subjects who received a placebo. Tests of psychomotor abilities also suggest that caffeine gives us an edge. In simulated driving exercises, caffeine improves performance, especially when the subject is tired. It also enhances physical performance on such metrics as time trials, muscle strain and endurance. However, its reasonable to take these findings with a pinch of salt. This kind so research is very challenging to do well. Finding a good control group in a society in which more or less everyone is addicted to caffeine is hard. Chances are strong that the placebo group will be in caffeine withdrawal. So, it is a distinct disadvantage performing any sort of cognitive or motor tasks. It could also be that the caffeine is merely restoring volunteers to normal baseline mental function rather than enhancing it. Researchers can overcome this problem by making sure their volunteers have been free of caffeine for a week or two, and many of them do. The consensus, seems to be that caffeine does improve mental and physical performance to some degree.

Two Types of Consciousness
Caffeine improves our focus and ability to concentrate, which surely enhances linear and abstract thinking, but creativity works very differently. It may depend on the loss of a certain kind of focus, and the freedom to let the mind wander off the leash of linear thought. Cognitive psychologists sometimes talk in terms of two distinct types of consciousness: spotlight consciousness, which illuminates a single focal point of attention, making it very good for reasoning. The other is lantern consciousness, in which attention is less focused, but illuminates a broader filed of attention. Young children tend to exhibit lantern consciousness. As do many people on psychedelics. This more diffused form of attention, lends itself to mind wandering, free association, and the making of novel connections. All of which can nourish creativity.

By comparison, caffeine’s big contribution to human progress has been to intensify spotlight consciousness. The focused, linear, abstract and efficient cognitive processing are more closely associated with mental work, than play. More than anything else, this is what makes caffeine the perfect drug, not only for the age of reason and the enlightenment, but for the rise of capitalism as well.

Caffeine allowed us to adopt our bodies and our minds to the requirements of modern life and industry. What coffee did for clerks and intellectuals, tea would soon do for the English working class. It was tea from the East Indies, heavily sweetened with sugar from the West Indies that fueled the industrial revolution.

We think of England as tea culture, but coffee, initially the cheaper beverage by far, dominated it first. It was not until the British East India Company, which had limited access to coffee producing regions, began trading regularly with China in the first part of the 18th century, that tea could displace coffee as principal medium for delivering caffeine to the English bloodstream.

The above text is adapted, re-ordered and summarized from Michael Pollan’s work. To learn more, read “This Is Your Mind on Plants” or listen to “Caffeine: How Caffeine Created the Modern World“, both by Michael Pollan.