The Social Life of Coffee

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. 布莱恩·考恩（Brian Cowan），加拿大麦吉尔大学历史学副教授，加拿大英国近代早期历史研究中心主席，获普林斯顿大学历史学博士学位，美国加拿大双重国籍。曾任教于英国萨塞斯大学和杜克大学以及美国耶鲁大学。主编《亨利·萨谢弗雷尔博士的审判》（The State Tria l of Doctor Henry Sacheverell）议会历史文献研究（卷6），牛津威立·布莱克威尔出版社，2012年版；参与撰写《印刷饱和时代的其他阅读元素》（Elements of Reading in an Era of Print Saturation），芝加哥大学出版社，2018版；与斯科特·索尔比（Scott Sowerby）合著《斯图亚特后期英格兰的国家审判与司法政治》（TheState Trials and the Politics of Justice in ...