coffee-started-out-in-ethiopia-then-spread-to-yemen-and-the-rest-of-the-middle-east-in-the-16th-century-it-was-known-as-qahwa

Though it may be hard to believe, coffee โ€“ that thing youโ€™ve probably described โ€œas lifeโ€ in your Instagram profile, along with illustration, kittens, and traveling โ€“ hasnโ€™t always been so widely accepted. In fact, according to Innovation and Its Enemies, the past 500 years of coffee history have been fraught with turmoil.

Though not specifically about the worldโ€™s most popular beverage, the new book by Harvard professor Calestous Juma follows the history of coffee, using its bumpy road to mass acceptance as a context for โ€œcontemporary debates surrounding technologiesโ€ like artificial intelligence, gene editing, and renewable energy. In a recent article, Business Insider highlights some of coffee historyโ€™s more turbulent moments as they are described in Jumaโ€™s book.

Possession of coffee punishable by beating:

You might have heardย that the French Revolution was plannedย in coffee houses, where members of the so-called “intelligentsia,” the class of political thinkers and polemics, gatheredย to plotย their rebellions.

Coffee houses’ potential to facilitate the exchange of ideas and informationย scared leaders long before the French Revolution.ย In 1511,ย Khair Beg, a young governor of Mecca, called for the closureย of all coffee houses, fearing they’d be centers of secular uprising. Anyone caught drinking or selling coffee at that time wasย beaten.

Phony science to deter coffee consumption:

“Coffeeโ€™s critics likened the drink to wine and attempted to outlaw it on this basis repeatedly,” Juma wrote.
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In fact, when the drink started spreading to Europe in the 17th century, the wine and beer industries attacked. One winemaker in Marseilles allied with a university studentย to write up a thesisย titled “Whether the Use of Coffee Is Harmful to the Inhabitants of Marseilles.”

Juma wrote:

“[The student]ย asserted that the ‘burnt particles, which [coffee] contains in large quantities, have so violent energy that, when they enter the blood, they attract the lymph and dry the kidneys.’ The result, he claimed, was one of ‘general exhaustion, paralysis, and impotence.'”

Racism:

When coffee started arriving in England in the 1660s, the coffee houses that served itย became go-to places for political conversation, socializing, and roughhousing. They started competing with taverns, and detractors came out of the woodwork. Someย blamedย the Turks for bringing the drink over.

Juma wrote:

“A 1663 broadside entitledย A Cup of Coffee: or, Coffee in its Colours, derided those who had turned into Turks by drinking coffee. These ‘Pure English Apes,’ the author charged, ‘might learn to eat Spiders.'”

Violence, sanctions, junk science, xenophobia โ€“ all have been used to keep people from drinking coffee at some point in the last half millennia. It doesnโ€™t take too much racking of the brain to think of other parallel historical arcs โ€“ like, oh I donโ€™t know, a certain plant that many are fighting to legalize here in the US.

Itโ€™s said that those who donโ€™t learn from history are doomed to repeat it, and Jumaโ€™s new book seems to support that sentiment. But at least coffee has made it to the other side. With the massive amounts of caffeine we now freely consume each day, hopefully coffee will help us #staywoke.

Zac Cadwaladerย is the news editor at Sprudge Media Network.

*top image via Wellcome images

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