William Congreve’s Restoration comedy The Way of the World (1700) tells the story of two lovers, Mr Mirabell and Mrs Millamant. In Act IV, Sc. 5, Mirabell instructs his future wife to ‘restrain [herself] to native and simple tea-table drinks’ such as ‘tea, chocolate and coffee.’^[1] Given the exotic origins of these drinks, however, Mirabell’s orders show, albeit in a somewhat ironic fashion, how quickly they had become appropriated by English society. Coffee and coffeehouses, for instance, arrived in England during the seventeenth century, and by the turn of the eighteenth they had already become an urban commonplace, in which the emerging middle class discussed business, politics and literary trends. The story of their momentous effects on English culture has often been told, most famously by German social philosopher Juergen Habermas (1989) and more recently by Markman Ellis (2004) and Brian W. Cowan (2005), but less well known are the origins of coffeehouse culture in the Muslim world and its early modern empires. This blog post will, therefore, discuss the interconnected histories between East and West at the same time as it sheds new light on the messy thing we have come to call democracy.

As English exploration started to intensify at the beginning of the seventeenth century, several travellers provided their readers with detailed descriptions of Ottoman social life. George Sandys (1610), William Lithgow (1632) and Henry Blount (1636), amongst others, reported how Ottoman men gathered, talked and drank in public. Seeking in vain for a tavern in Istanbul, Sandys, for instance, describes ‘their Coffa-houses, which something resemble them. There sit they chatting most of the day; and sippe of a drinke called Coffa…in little China dishes, as hot as they can suffer it.’^[2] Unlike alcohol in English ‘Innes and Ale-houses’, writes Henry Blount more than two decades later, their ‘Cauphe…never causeth drunkenesse’ and is merely ‘a harmless entertainment of good fellowship’.^[3] For both travellers, male conviviality in the coffeehouse seems to have been a rather striking feature of Ottoman society, not merely for the novelty of coffee, but also for the comparatively peaceful interaction it engendered. And as the ‘Turkes’ sat together, they had ample opportunity to gossip, exchange news and discuss politics.

Unsurprisingly, then, Blount continued to champion coffee throughout his life. In 1657, he published Organon Salutis. An Instrument to Cleanse the Stomach, a short text, in which he described the wholesome effects of coffee. And by that time, the first coffeehouses had already opened in London, and in subsequent decades, they would become ever more popular destinations for government officials, fashionable fops and men of the middling sort, who were keen to advance their commercial interests and propel social change through political discussions. We can get a glimpse into the complex and multi-layered social world of the coffeehouse through the naval administrator Samuel Pepys’s diary, which he kept from 1660 until 1669. On 3 February 1663/64, for example, Pepys notes the following: ‘In Covent Garden to-night, going to fetch home my wife, I stopped at the great Coffee-house there, where I never was before; where Dryden the poet (I knew at Cambridge), and all the wits of the town, and Harris the player, and Mr. Hoole of our College. And had I had time then, or could at other times, it will be good coming thither, for there, I perceive, is very witty and pleasant discourse.’^[4] Throughout his diary, Pepys relates his frequent visits to London’s coffeehouses, detailing both the company and the kinds of conversations that were to be had there. The English in general, and Pepys in particular, it seems, were rather fond of this Ottoman import, incorporating it at once into the cultural fabric of Restoration London and enabling the middles classes to participate in news dissemination and political debate.

In his hugely influential study The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1989; German orig. 1962), Juergen Habermas regarded coffeehouses, as well as the interactions they bred, as an English innovation and ‘model case’.^[5] Many social and cultural historians have followed in his wake, offering feminist and gender-based critiques of public sphere theory and debating the extent to which it existed either as factual reality or an ideal that had yet to be realised. Such historical nuances and theoretical differences aside, however, the central thrust of Habermas’s argument is still with us today and goes somewhat like this: for much of the early modern period, the ‘literary public sphere’ existed only in the private realm, allowing individuals outside the absolutist courts to discuss primarily contemporary literary production in a more or less apolitical fashion.^[6] Restricted to the royal courts, political matters were both centrally administered and culturally policed. But as the rigid social structures of the absolutist state became more porous through the emergence of a commercially-inclined middle class and such momentous political changes as the Glorious Revolution of 1688, societal debates began to incorporate more pressing political material. And with the advent of the coffeehouses in England, these exchanges found a public and accessible forum. Through their discussions in the coffeehouses, so Habermas’s argument continues, the people acquired political weight, ultimately establishing a fully-fledged ‘political public sphere’ by the early eighteenth century and leading to the development of nascent democratic institutions (for example, an independent press).

For instance, Richard Steele and Joseph Addison, founders of, respectively, The Tatler (1709 – 11) and The Spectator (1711 – 12), expected their periodicals to be read aloud and debated in public in order to spread the issues of the day.^[7] Over a cup of coffee, then, the ‘English middle classes began,’ as sociologist Hans Speier has argued, ‘to accomplish their own education in the coffeehouses.’^[8] But as fledgling democratic structures gained traction in subsequent decades, the memory of the Ottoman origins of coffeehouse-culture began to recede, leading eventually to the reification of democracy as a genuinely European invention. Yet without either coffee or the coffeehouse, the trajectory of political developments in Europe would probably have been very different. And viewed in this way, the roots of modernity, multi-cultural societies and democratic institutions lie undoubtedly in the Muslim world. And whenever we obliviously sip a cup of coffee, we actually imbibe a mouthful of interconnected history, cultural indebtedness and ethno-religious diversity that could, in an ideal world, re-write a lost Anglo-Islamic past and lead to more desirable futures for both Europe and the Middle East.

[1] William Congreve, The Way of the World (1700), Act IV, lines 240-1.

[2] George Sandys, A Relation of a Journey begun An. Dom 1610 (London: W. Barret, 1615), 66.

[3] Henry Blount, A Voyage into the Levant (London: John Legatt, 1636), 105-6.

[4] Samuel Pepys, ‘Wednesday 3 February 1663/64,’ in: The Dairy of Samuel Pepys: Daily Entries from the 17th Century London Diary. https://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/1664/02/03. Accessed: 10 July 2020.

[5] Juergen Habmermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Burgeois Society, transl. by Thomas Burger (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989), 57 – 67.

[6] Brian Cowan, ‘What was Masculine about the Public Sphere? Gender and the Coffeehouse Milieu in Post-Restoration England,’ History Workshop Journal, No. 51 (Spring, 2001), pp. 127 – 157, here: 129.

[7] Gerald MacLean, Looking East: English Writing and the Ottoman Empire before 1800 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007).

[8] Hans Speier, ‘The Historical Development of Public Opinion,’ in Speier, ed., Social Order and the Risks of War (Cambridge, Mass. & London: M.I.T. Press, 1952), 323–338, here 329-30.

Image: A Coffee House in Tophane, from Wikimedia Commons