The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780300106664)

What induced the British to adopt foreign coffee-drinking customs in the seventeenth century? Why did an entirely new social institution, the coffeehouse, emerge as the primary place for consumption of this new drink? In this lively book, Brian Cowan locates the answers to these questions in the particularly British combination of curiosity, commerce, and civil society. Cowan provides the definitive account of the origins of coffee drinking and coffeehouse society, and in so doing he reshapes our understanding of the commercial and consumer revolutions in Britain during the long Stuart century. Britain's virtuosi, gentlemanly patrons of the arts and sciences, were profoundly interested in things strange and exotic. Cowan explores how such virtuosi spurred initial consumer interest in coffee and invented the social template for the first coffeehouses. As the coffeehouse evolved, rising to take a central role in British commercial and civil society, the virtuosi were also transformed by their own invention.

Author: Brian William Cowan
ISBN-10: 0300106661
ISBN-13: 9780300106664
Publisher: Yale University Press
Language: English
Published: 11/01/2005
Pages: 384
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.54lbs
Size: 9.52h x 6.34w x 1.03d