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.

“Cafes are where change happens and people feel most themselves. In this surprising book we see how Japan came of age in the café—where women became free, where people jazz and poetry could reign. And, of course, where coffee is at its perfectionist best. Always a congenial companion and teacher, Merry White shows us a whole society in a beautifully made cup.” —Corby Kummer, The Atlantic “Merry White's book is vital reading for anyone interested in culture and coffee, which has a surprising and surprisingly long history in Japan. Tracing the evolving role of the country's cafes, and taking us on armchair visits to some of the best, White makes us want to board a plane immediately to sample a cup brewed with ‘kodawari,’ a passion bordering on obsession. “ —Devra First, The Boston Globe "Coffee Life in Japan features highly engaging history and ethnographic detail on coffee culture in Japan. Many readers will delight in reading this work. White provides an affectionate, deeply felt, well reasoned book on coffee, cafes, and urban spaces in Japan."—Christine Yano, author of Airborne Dreams: "Nisei" Stewardesses and Pan American World Airways "Combining unmistakable relish for the subject with decades of academic expertise, Merry White skillfully demonstrates that the café, not the teahouse, is a core space in urban Japanese life. Her portrait of their endurance, proliferation, and diversity aptly illustrates how coffee drinking establishments accommodate social and personal needs, catering to a range of tastes and functions. It is a lovely and important book not only about the history and meanings of Japan’s liquid mojo, but also about the creation of new urban spaces for privacy and sociality." —Laura Miller, author of Beauty Up: Exploring Contemporary Japanese Body Aesthetics

West looks at the process from which coffee is grown, gathered, sorted, shipped, and served from the highlands of Papua New Guinea to coffee shops in far away places. She shows how coffee becomes a commodity, the different forms of labor involved, and the way that coffee shapes the lives and understandings of those who grow, process, export, sell and consume coffee.

Coffee Culture: Local experiences, Global Connections explores coffee as (1) a major commodity that shapes the lives of millions of people; (2) a product with a dramatic history; (3) a beverage with multiple meanings and uses (energizer, comfort food, addiction, flavouring, and confection); (4) an inspiration for humor and cultural critique; (5) a crop that can help protect biodiversity yet also threaten the environment; (6) a health risk and a health food; and (7) a focus of alternative trade efforts. This book presents coffee as a commodity that ties the world together, from the coffee producers and pickers who tend the plantations in tropical nations, to the middlemen and processors, to the consumers who drink coffee without ever having to think about how the drink reached their hands.

Drawing on the accounts of early European travelers, original Arabic sources on jurisprudence and etiquette, and treatises on coffee from the period, the author recounts the colorful early history of the spread of coffee and the influence of coffeehouses in the medieval Near East. Detailed descriptions of the design, atmosphere, management, and patrons of early coffeehouses make fascinating reading for anyone interested in the history of coffee and the unique institution of the coffeehouse in urban Muslim society

In January 1927 Gus Comstock, a barbershop porter in the small Minnesota town of Fergus Falls, drank eighty cups of coffee in seven hours and fifteen minutes. The New York Times reported that near the end, amid a cheering crowd, the man's "gulps were labored, but a physician examining him found him in pretty good shape." The event was part of a marathon coffee-drinking spree set off two years earlier by news from the Commerce Department that coffee imports to the United States amounted to five hundred cups per year per person. In Coffee, Society, and Power in Latin America, a distinguished international group of historians, anthropologists, and sociologists examine the production, processing, and marketing of this important commodity. Using coffee as a common denominator and focusing on landholding patterns, labor mobilization, class structure, political power, and political ideologies, the authors examine how Latin American countries of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries responded to the growing global demand for coffee. This unique volume offers an integrated comparative study of class formation in the coffee zones of Latin America as they were incorporated into the world economy. It offers a new theoretical and methodological approach to comparative historical analysis and will serve as a critique and counter to those who stress the homogenizing tendencies of export agriculture. The book will be of interest not only to experts on coffee economies but also to students and scholars of Latin America, labor history, the economics ofdevelopment, and political economy.

“A lively survey…her research and insights make us conscious of how we, today, use books.”—John Sutherland, The New York Times Book Review Two centuries before the advent of radio, television, and motion pictures, books were a cherished form of popular entertainment and an integral component of domestic social life. In this fascinating and vivid history, Abigail Williams explores the ways in which shared reading shaped the lives and literary culture of the eighteenth century, offering new perspectives on how books have been used by their readers, and the part they have played in middle-class homes and families. Drawing on marginalia, letters and diaries, library catalogues, elocution manuals, subscription lists, and more, Williams offers fresh and fascinating insights into reading, performance, and the history of middle-class home life. “Williams’s charming pageant of anecdotes…conjures a world strikingly different from our own but surprisingly similar in many ways, a time when reading was on the rise and whole worlds sprang up around it.”—TheWashington Post