The History of Coffeehouses

Today a coffeehouse is mainly a comfortable place to relax, work, or meet friends. In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, however, the coffeehouse was something far more powerful: a bustling center of news, conversation, and the exchange of ideas. When coffee first arrived from the Middle East, these new establishments spread rapidly through cities such as London, Paris, and Vienna, and they quickly became an important part of public life. For the first time, large numbers of ordinary people had a public place, other than a church or a tavern, in which to gather and talk freely.

What made coffeehouses so remarkable was who gathered in them and how those people behaved. For the price of a single cup of coffee, a customer could sit for hours, read the newspapers that were provided free of charge, and join in lively discussion with complete strangers. Unlike many social spaces of the time, coffeehouses brought together men of very different backgrounds—merchants, writers, scientists, and politicians—who might otherwise never have met at all. In England, some people called them "penny universities," because a person could learn so much there for the small cost of a cup of coffee.

This mixing of people had important and lasting consequences. Coffeehouses became places where the latest scientific discoveries were eagerly debated, where business deals were arranged, and where political opinions were formed and then spread outward. Some rulers grew deeply suspicious of them, fearing that such free and open discussion might encourage criticism of those in power, and attempts were occasionally made to close them down. Yet by then the coffeehouse had already changed how people shared information. In an age before mass media, it served as a kind of social network, helping ideas to travel faster and further than ever before.