Like their early equivalents, modern coffee shops are great vehicles and promoters of commerce. In 1699, a dealer and scholar of coffee, John Houghton, remarked that "Coffee has greatly increased the Trade of Tobacco and Pipes, Earthen Dishes, Tin wares, News-Papers, Coals, Candles, Sugar, Tea, Chocolate and what not". By the same token, Starbucks, Costa et al have greatly boosted the trade in milk, mugs, muffins, paper cups, CDs, chocolate and what not.
These are heady times for the manufacturers of nutmeg-shakers. More significantly, the coffee shops have enabled commercial activity to happen in a neutral "third place" between home and the office, just as the eighteenth century coffee house provided a place for the stockbroking fraternity to set up deals and exchange information. In his earlier book on the subject, Markman Ellis wrote that coffee houses - both in Britain and America - "played a central role in the institutionalization of financial markets; coffee houses in Boston and New York had hosted auctions of commodities and real estate - called vendues - since the seventeenth century". In a way, therefore, it was the coffee houses of these earlier times which paved the way for the New York commodities market, the nemesis for Ethiopian coffee farmers now.
If we asked of the eighteenth-century coffee shop the kind of questions of global ethics which are posed by Black Gold, I suspect they would come off even worse than their modern equivalents. Coffee-shop sociability was not at all the same as the kind of global citizenship which the Fairtrade movement aspires to.
There are numerous references in eighteenth-century pamphlets to coffee as a "Turk's" or "Arabian" berry, but this did not entail much sympathy with the Turkish or Arab world. True, works of Natural History may refer to the Turkish ways of making coffee in an ibrik, and sometimes to the habit of mixing in a few grains of cardamom, and using coffee, as one treatise of 1685 puts it, as "an entertainment and a past-time, making the hours to slip away merrily in conversation, intermingling with their drink several pleasant and recreative discourses, which unawares brings up on their mind forgetfulness of sorrows".
On the other hand, in The Coffee-house, a comedy from 1664, Mahoone, the Turkish coffee-man is presented as an entirely ridiculous figure, endlessly chasing after "de hore my Vife" and proclaiming that "de Chocolet and de Coffee make a de man live forever!" In Exchange-Alley, another coffee house comedy from 1720, a stockjobber called Africanus, who aspires to the position of a gentleman, is shown dressed in a boar's skin and walking on all fours.
Despite the centrality of coffee to all of these texts, there is little attempt to consider those who physically produced it. Perhaps this is in part because the coffee itself tasted so bad. There are many familiar accounts here of the effects of coffee - while caffeine was not isolated until 1819, coffee was always regarded as a "wakefull" drink or a "hinderer of sleep" - but when it comes to taste, many writers describe it as "insipid" or soot-like, or as a difficult taste to acquire.
Visitors to England from the Continent agreed that the coffee was badly transported, badly kept, badly roasted and badly brewed. James Lightbody's recipe for coffee from 1695 recommended boiling the coffee up with water for a quarter of an hour, which must have made it impossibly bitter, with most of the volatile oils destroyed; such advice remained typical for well over a century.
In 1789, the traveller Johann Wilhelm von Archenholz complained that the custom for drinking weak coffee was so prevalent that "even the richest people will not use it when strong; the most contemptible tradesman in all Germany drinks better coffee than they do". The reason was partly, Archenholz said, that the import duties on British coffee were so "exorbitant".
Behind the cultural history of the coffee house is an economic story which struggles to come to the surface in Markman Ellis's chosen texts. It is a lot less romantic than the Habermasian tale of sociability, but may be more instructive. Throughout the eighteenth century, British excise duties on coffee were swingeing - much higher than those in France, for example.
