The Social Life of Coffee

The Social Life of Coffee BRIAN COWAN The Social Life of Coffee THE EMERGENCE OF THE BRITISH COFFEEHOUSE Yale University Press New Haven & London Published with assistance from the Annie Burr Lewis Fund. Published with the assistance of the Frederick W. Hilles Publication Fund of Yale University. Copyright ∫ 2005 by Yale University. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Set in Sabon type by Keystone Typesetting, Inc. Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cowan, Brian William, 1969– The social life of coffee : the emergence of the British coffeehouse / Brian Cowan. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-300-10666-1 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Coffeehouses—History. 2. Coffee—History. I. Title. tx908.c68 2005 647.9509—dc22 2005043555 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. 10987654321 Contents Acknowledgments vii A Note on Styles and Conventions xi Introduction 1 Part I Coffee: From Curiosity to Commodity 5 1. An Acquired Taste 16 2. Coffee and Early Modern Drug Culture 31 3. From Mocha to Java 55 Part II Inventing the Coffeehouse 79 4. Penny Universities? 89 5. Exotic Fantasies and Commercial Anxieties 113 vi Contents Part III Civilizing the Coffeehouses 147 6. Before Bureaucracy 152 7. Policing the Coffeehouse 193 8. Civilizing Society 225 Conclusion 257 Notes 265 Bibliography 311 Index 355 Acknowledgments The history of coffee has been on my mind for almost a decade now, and over the course of this time I have had many opportunities to share these thoughts with a number of individuals in a variety of locations. I am acutely aware of just how fortunate I have been to work with so many interesting people along the way. I began working on this book at Princeton University, where Peter Lake offered his indomitable support, advice and encouragement at every step along the way. The rest of the historical community at Princeton also played an important role in shaping the ways in which I began to think about the rise of British coffee. Robert Darnton’s graduate seminar on the social history of eighteenth-century ideas first inspired me to pursue this topic and he has continued to be an important source of guidance and encouragement. Law- rence Stone enlivened my first thoughts on this topic and they will be forever poorer for lacking his continued insights; the magnificence of his historical imagination remains an example to us all. I was also fortunate to study British history along with a remarkable cohort of historians including Susan Why- man, Alastair Bellany, David Como, Margaret Sena, Ethan Shagan, Ignacio Gallup-Diaz, John Hintermaier, and Brendan Kane, each of whom encour- aged me to think more clearly about this project in numerous discussions. The argument of this book is based on a wide reading in archival sources on vii viii Acknowledgments both sides of the Atlantic. I am particularly grateful to the archivists, librar- ians, and staff at the British Library; the Public Record Office (now the Na- tional Archives); the London Metropolitan Archives; the Corporation of Lon- don Record Office; the London Guildhall Library; the archives of the Royal Society; the Department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum; Dr. Williams Library; the National Art Library at the Victoria and Albert Mu- seum; the Westminster Archives Centre; the National Library of Scotland; the Bodleian Library; and the Cambridge University Library. In the United States, I am indebted to the staff at Princeton University’s Firestone Library, especially the late John Henneman. At Yale, the staff at Sterling Library, especially Sus- anne Roberts; the Beinecke Library, especially Stephen Parks; the British Art Center, especially Lisa Ford and Elisabeth Fairman; and Maggie Powell at the Lewis Walpole Library have been immensely helpful and supportive. The Huntington Library, the William Andrews Clark Library, and the Folger Shakespeare Library have offered substantial research support and source materials which have been immensely helpful. Research for this book was made possible by a Leverhulme Foundation Fellowship at the University of Kent at Canterbury in the year 2000. The University of Sussex in Brighton, England, and Yale University in New Haven, New England both offered welcome bases from which I was able to continue to refine my arguments as well as begin my teaching career. I am particularly grateful to Master John Rogers and Associate Master Cornelia Pearsall for welcoming me as a Resident Fellow of Berkeley College and providing me with a wonderful set of college rooms in which I was able to rethink and rewrite the bulk of this book. My new colleagues in the Department of History at McGill University have received this work enthusiastically, and I look forward to working with them in the years to come. The arguments presented here have been discussed and debated with count- less excellent scholars. I have received particularly useful advice and assistance from Tricia Allerston, John Demos, Paul Freedman, Tim Harris, Negley Harte, Michael Hunter, Adrian Johns, Jane Kamensky, Newton Key, Law- rence Klein, Peter Mandler, Neil De Marchi, David Ormrod, Nicholas Phillip- son, Steven Pincus, James Rosenheim, David Harris Sacks, John Styles, Keith Wrightson, and several anonymous readers for Yale University Press. I have also presented versions of many of the chapters to audiences at Warwick University; the Berkshire Women’s History Conference in Rochester, New York; the Institute of Historical Research at the University of London; the Victoria and Albert Museum; the University of Utah; Harvard University; the University of Leeds; Edinburgh University; the North American Conferences on British Studies in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and in Toronto; Emory Uni- Acknowledgments ix versity; Stanford University; and the Melbern G. Glasscock Humanities Cen- ter at Texas A&M University. I am grateful to all of the participants in these seminars for their helpful comments and questions. Grants from the Whitney Humanities Center and the Huntington Library helped expand the research base upon which my arguments have been based. Funding for the illustrations has been kindly supported through the assistance of the Frederick W. Hilles Publication Fund of Yale University. Portions of this book have been previously published in earlier form as: ‘‘What Was Masculine About the Public Sphere? Gender and the Coffeehouse Milieu in Post-Restoration England,’’ History Workshop Journal 51 (2001); ‘‘The Rise of the Coffeehouse Reconsidered,’’ Historical Journal 47:1 (2004); and ‘‘Mr. Spectator and the Coffeehouse Public Sphere,’’ Eighteenth-Century Studies 37:3 (2004), although each of these articles has a separate histo- riographical point to make that is distinct from the wider argument of this book. I am grateful to the publishers of these journals for permission to reprint excerpts from these articles here. Yale University Press has been an exemplary publisher for this book and I must thank my editors Lara Heimert and Molly Egland as well as Keith Con- don for their help in bringing this book into print. The most important debts are often reserved for last, and this is no excep- tion. The book is dedicated to my parents, William and Beverly Cowan, who have unstintingly supported my studies from the very beginning. A Note on Styles and Conventions The Social Life of Coffee refers extensively to early modern source mate- rial in various media, printed, manuscript, and visual. My quotations from these sources attempt to capture the character of the original sources without sacrificing readability. To the latter end, abbreviations have been expanded, the punctuation has often been silently altered, and characters such as u, v, w, i, and j have been modernized except in book titles. Until 1752, Britain recognized the ‘‘old-style’’ Julian calendar, which was ten days behind the ‘‘new-style’’ Gregorian calendar used by most of the rest of Europe. I have retained old-style dates throughout this work. The legal year began in late March, but I have followed standard convention in modernizing all dates so that the new year is understood to begin on 1 January. References to Acts of Parliament are given by the regnal year as well as the session, chapter, and pertinent section numbers. The statutes can be found in a number of reference works. References to the royal proclamations of James VI and I and Charles I may be found in the 1973 and 1983 editions of James F. Larkin and Paul L. Hughes. References to post-Restoration royal proclamations are identified by their numeral in the older work of Robert Steele, ed., Bibliography of Royal Proclamations of the Tudor and Stuart Sovereigns (1910). The longstanding conflation of ‘‘British’’ and ‘‘English’’ identities has come xi xii A Note on Styles and Conventions under serious scrutiny in the current age of devolution and growing European union. For the majority of the period under consideration here, the term ‘‘Brit- ish’’ with reference to the multiple monarchies of England and Scotland is anachronistic. Nevertheless, I continue to use the word as a heuristic means of referring to the various different areas ruled by the Stuart monarchs and their post-1688 successors. While this study has taken Scottish and Irish evidence into consideration in its account of British coffee culture, the preponderance of its evidence concerns the English case. One of the main reasons for this is that the history of British coffeehouses is intimately related to the urban history of metropolitan London, a city whose cultural predominance loomed large over all of the British Isles.

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