Though it may be hard to believe, coffee โ that thing youโve probably described โas lifeโ in your Instagram profile, along with illustration, kittens, and traveling โ hasnโt 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 worldโs 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 โcontemporary debates surrounding technologiesโ like artificial intelligence, gene editing, and renewable energy. In a recent article, Business Insider highlights some of coffee historyโs more turbulent moments as they are described in Jumaโs book.
Possession of coffee punishable by beating:
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:
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:
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 doesnโt take too much racking of the brain to think of other parallel historical arcs โ like, oh I donโt know, a certain plant that many are fighting to legalize here in the US.
Itโs said that those who donโt learn from history are doomed to repeat it, and Jumaโs 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.