The social life of coffee: Commercial culture and metropolitan society in early modern England, 1600--1720

Through an exhaustive analysis of the reception of coffee, and the concomitant development of the novel institution called the coffeehouse by seventeenth-century English people, this dissertation interrogates the consumer revolution and the public sphere paradigms that have come to dominate recent accounts of post-Restoration English historiography. Both are found wanting an explanation for the legitimation of the novel consumer habits and the novel social institutions that comprised these late seventeenth century ‘revolutions.’ Understanding the ways in which new social and economic practices were legitimated requires a careful study of the specific languages that were used to articulate the significance of new consumer demands and new social spaces in early modern England.; What induced the English to adopt the custom of a foreign, and even non-Christian land during the seventeenth century? Why did they develop an entirely new social institution, the coffeehouse, as the primary center for the consumption of this new drink? In order to answer these questions, I devote careful attention to the subjective motivations articulated by the earliest English consumers of coffee and the earliest patrons of the coffeehouses.; I place particular emphasis on the innovative role of England's ‘virtuoso’ community, those gentlemanly patrons of the arts and sciences whose aesthetic preferences led them to place a high value on things strange, curious, and exotic. It was the virtuosi who led the way in spurring consumer interest in coffee. The virtuosi were also central to the development of the coffeehouse as an innovative social institution. I also explore the ways in which these virtuoso ideals were transformed as the coffeehouse became an accepted part of the urban social scene in later seventeenth-century England.; The final chapters question the Habermasian narrative of an emergent liberal and democratic coffeehouse politics in which a unitary ‘public opinion’ became a rational counterweight to state authority. I offer instead a story of the ways in which a variety of communicative media arose to suit an increasingly diverse metropolitan social order. Different publics emerged to suit different tastes and this process was fraught with anxiety.