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1.
The Perfect Symbol of Islam
In 1554, two Syrians went into business together in their adopted hometown of Constantinople. Schems had come from Damascus, Hekim from Aleppo. Amid the stalls of the busy market district near the Bosporus, they opened a coffee shop, the city's first. The shop was furnished "with very neat Couches and Carpets," and it became known as an upstanding social place, "very proper to make acquaintances in." Many of the patrons were students and other "studious Persons," unemployed professionals searching for jobs, "Lovers of Chess," and professors. Coffee had entered the written historical record about fifty years earlier.
Coffee is native to Ethiopia, where the first commercial harvests were gathered from wild plants in the fifteenth century. Early cultivation took place on terraced hillsides in sixteenth-century Yemen, while consumption spread across the Arabian Peninsula and around the Mediterranean through trade and war. A coffeehouse was often one of the first things Ottoman emperors built upon conquering a new city, "to demonstrate the civility of their rule." Given this mode of diffusion, the meanings of the drink were contested. According to many etymologies, the word "coffee" derives from the Arabic qahwah, meaning wine: coffee was "the wine of Islam," and this raised some questions.
In 1511, a policeman in Mecca, returning soberly from prayers one evening, observed a group of his coreligionists preparing themselves for a night of worship by drinking coffee. Suspicious of coffee's intoxicating effects, Mecca's police torched the city's supplies, though that hardly settled the matter. A pamphlet published in 1587 surveyed the history of the drink in the hope of determining "What ought to be sincerely and distinctly believ'd concerning Coffee, that is, if it be lawful for a Mussulman to drink it."
By then European men had also discovered coffee. In 1573, Leonhard Rauwolf, a German scholar, traveled to Aleppo, where he noticed a group gathered around a drink "black as Ink": "Without any fear or regard out of China Cups, as hot as they can, they put it often to their Lips but drink but little at a time, and let it go round as they sit." In 1596 a Dutch physician, Bernard ten Broeke, described the process of coffee making he had seen in the Levant: "They take of this fruite one pound and a half, and roast them a little in the fire, and then sieth them in twentie poundes of water, till the half be consumed away: this drinke they take every morning fasting in their chambers, out of an earthen pot, being verie hote . . . and they say it strengtheneth and maketh them warme, breaketh wind, and openeth any stopping."
"They" were the Turks. So strong was the association that coffee appeared in Europe as "the sign of Turkish difference" and "the perfect symbol of Islam." Viewed across this symbolic distance, the European discovery of coffee was also an encounter with a foreign body, and many early depictions of coffee drinking were inflected with suspicion and disgust. In 1609, William Biddulph, an English minister who had been employed in Aleppo, described "a blacke kind of drinke made of a kind of Pulse like Pease, called Coava; which being grownd in the Mill, and boiled in water, they drinke it as hot as they can suffer it." In 1610, the poet and translator George Sandys tried coffee for himself and found it "blacke as soote, and tasting not much unlike it."
Even when they doubted coffee's appeal, Europeans recognized its power. Like alcohol and opium, coffee changed the people who consumed it, though there was no consensus on exactly how or why. In 1632 the philosopher-librarian Robert Burton likened Turkish coffeehouses to "our Ale-houses or Taverns" and described coffee as an "alterative," a cure for melancholy. In 1640, London apothecary John Parkinson wrote that "the Turkes berry drinke hath many good Physicall properties therein: for it strengtheneth a weak stomacke, helping digestion, and the tumours and obstructions of the liver and spleene."
As Parkinson's endorsement suggests, coffee was often used as medicine. The medical thinking of the age emphasized balancing the body's four humors-blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile-by using foods as drugs, with bloodletting and surgery performed as needed. Foods were classified within one of four categories: hot, cold, wet, and dry. Yet coffee, along with tea and chocolate, did not seem to fit within a single category. It was hot and stimulating, but also cooling and diuretic, confounding ideas of the human body that had been fixed in place for about 1,500 years. Nor was there agreement about coffee's basic effects. Many of its proponents said that coffee was fortifying, but its opponents blamed coffee for a variety of ailments, especially impotence.
The "Turkes berry drinke" became English, and then European, by way of the coffeehouse. The first coffeehouse in London opened in the early 1650s, bankrolled by agents of the Levant Company who had acquired the taste for coffee while trading spices, wool, tin, and gunpowder in the East. One merchant, Daniel Edwards, employed a domestic servant from Smyrna, Pasqua RosŽe, who made coffee for him every day in his London home. When Edwards's friends began dropping by regularly to get a bowlful, he saw a business opportunity. Selling coffee at retail was below his station, so he set up his servant RosŽe as a proxy.
RosŽe's coffee stall, built of "thick planks of pine or fir" and wedged in among the shops and offices that lined the narrow St. Michael's Alley in the City of London, lacked the comforts Schems and Hekim had provided, though he did hang a sign featuring an image of himself dressed as a Turk. The stall flourished, but soon RosŽe suffered a fate familiar to pioneers of new foods in the West. Alehouse keepers in the neighborhood, worried that he was taking their customers, tried to drive him out of business by using his alien status against him. By law only citizens of London could do business in the City, so RosŽe's merchant backers got him a native partner, a farm boy named Christopher Bowman. Together RosŽe and Bowman moved into a bigger storefront and carried on, but before long RosŽe's name was off the lease. Then the coffee shop, along with the other makeshift wooden structures jammed into the market district, burned in the fire of 1666.
Nevertheless, coffee was catching on in London, and many of the new coffee shops opening around the city were more than market stalls. Offering ample seating and reading material, they became "penny universities," open forums for the discussion of news and ideas. Visiting London coffeehouses in 1660, diarist Samuel Pepys recorded talk of the weather, the sex lives of insects, and the proper distribution of wealth. Philosopher JŸrgen Habermas suggests that such coffeehouse conversations gave rise to a new social class free from old hierarchies of title and wealth-a nascent civil society beyond the court, church, and state, with far-reaching implications for politics and governance.
In mid-seventeenth-century London a lot was happening in the way of governance: the execution of King Charles I in 1649, the establishment of a republican Commonwealth under Oliver Cromwell, and the subsequent restoration of the monarchy and the Church of England under Charles II in 1660. As "the primary social space in which 'news' was both produced and consumed," London's coffeehouses embodied emergent democratic norms of freedom of speech and assembly, nurturing "the public" that was increasingly questioning the authority of the royal court. Registering the threat, Charles II tried to snuff out dissent by getting rid of the coffeehouses, which were condemned as "seedbeds of political unrest" and hives of "false news"-talk of affairs of state that diverged from the authorized accounts of the court. Charles's fears were not assuaged when, in response to his campaign to clean up the coffeehouses, London reached "a mutinous condition." Trying a new approach, the king issued licenses to coffeehouses on the condition that they not allow subversive literature or talk. To escape surveillance, some coffeehouses recast themselves as pubs.
The shadow of foreignness heightened suspicions hanging over coffeehouses. Patriotic ale-drinkers were supposed to hate coffee "as Mahomatizm." Still, London employers could see the benefits. "Whereas formerly apprentices and clerks with others, used to take their mornings draught in ale, beer or wine," one scholar wrote at the time, "which by the dizziness they cause in the brain, make many unfit for businesse, they use now to play the good-fellows in this wakefull and civill drink." Coffee seemed to have none of alcohol's dulling effects: it was "a drink at once to make us sober and merry." The use of the first-person pronoun is striking. By the turn of the century, a hundred years after the first mention of coffee in English, London had several hundred coffeehouses. By comparison, Amsterdam had thirty-two.
In a century, coffee drinking had gone from unknown to epidemic in England. Especially in light of the physiological questions coffee raised, overconsumption had become a concern. In June 1699, John Houghton, a druggist and commodity trader, gave a "Discourse of Coffee" before England's most distinguished learned society, whose members often gathered in a coffeehouse called the Grecian. Largely in the tone of local gossip, the paper describes the introduction of coffee into an entire culture and way of life. Houghton dared not put forward an answer to the question of coffee's effects on health and wakefulness, for he did not have what he judged to be a sound "Theory of Sleep." But he did note that coffee had made "all sorts of People sociable" and so "improved useful knowledge very much."
Given its popularity, there was strong interest in planting coffee across the Atlantic in Britain's New England, Virginia, and Caribbean colonies. Yet British merchants couldn't get past the Arab traders working out of Yemeni ports on the Red Sea who had all but monopolized the world supply of coffee. In this regard, British trading companies were more successful with tea than with coffee. Tea had been introduced to the British consumer market after coffee, and it was initially more expensive, for the tea trade was controlled by the Dutch, who used their island colony of Java as a transshipment point. But then, in the first quarter of the eighteenth century, the British East India Company at last gained access to Chinese ports, and cheap tea flooded the British market. British tea imports increased by perhaps 4,000 times in the eighteenth century, while the Dutch shifted the focus of Java to coffee. As a result, it was tea, not coffee, that was destroyed in protest in Boston Harbor in 1773, and it was East Indian tea, taken with West Indian sugar, that fortified the workers who powered the industrial revolution that took off in the North of England shortly after.
2.
Cottonopolis
Before he was Karl Marx's benefactor and coauthor, Friedrich Engels was the poet son of a rich Prussian textile-manufacturing family. In 1842, when Friedrich was twenty-two, his father sent his idealistic heir across the North Sea to Manchester, England, where the family had recently opened a large mill for the manufacture of cotton thread, called the Victoria Mill, after the queen.
The mill was in Salford, a rural district just then beginning to be swallowed up by the fast-growing city. Scarcely half a century earlier, Manchester was a provincial market town in the riverine northwest of England, home to about 30,000 people and a single tall chimney. By the time Friedrich Engels arrived, Manchester had become the capital of what historian Eric Hobsbawm called "the most important event in world history," the Industrial Revolution. The city's lone chimney had sprouted into a defoliated forest of smokestacks, below which lived 300,000 people and above which bloomed a bruise-colored canopy of smoke so thick it extinguished sunlight, the result of the coal-burning, steam-powered mills that were turning more cotton into cloth than in any other city on earth. In tribute to its leading industry, Manchester had been popularly renamed "Cottonopolis." Likewise, in markets far from England, things made of cotton were called simply "Manchester goods," and from distant corners of the earth the curious traveled to see where their stuff was made.
To arrive in Cottonopolis in the age of Queen Victoria was to suffer insults to every sense. "As I entered your city, a sort of hum, a prolonged, continuous vibration struck my ear, as if some irresistible and mysterious force was at work," wrote the American railroad baron Richard B. Kimball, who would not have been unacquainted with great noises, in 1858. At street level, the city was terrifying and exhilarating, "monstrous and awe-inspiring." To Scottish writer Thomas Carlyle, the sound of the mills starting up at 5:30 each morning was "like the boom of an Atlantic tide." Others had never heard anything like it. "A thousand noises disturb this damp, dark labyrinth, but they are not at all the ordinary sounds one hears in great cities," observed the French journalist Alexis de Tocqueville, not long returned from his tour of the United States when he traveled to Manchester in 1835. "The crunching wheels of machinery, the shriek of steam from boilers, the regular beat of the looms, the heavy rumble of carts, those are the noises from which you can never escape."
Down each alley, "largely hidden from public view," people lived in "almost unimaginable" squalor. The smells were "excrementitious." Exhaust from the mills displaced the air and reduced the sun to "a disc without rays." In 1872, a worried scientist who had been studying Manchester's "chemical climatology" coined the term "acid rain" to describe the sulfuric dilute falling from the sky.
The clangor, the stench, the poverty, the gloom, and the acid rain were by-products of the accumulation of an immense fortune. Factories in and around Manchester generated around half of the value of the trade of Great Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century, when the British Empire was growing to encompass a quarter of the planet's population and land, and when British factories were taking almost a third of the world's raw materials and producing almost 40 percent of the world's manufactured exports each year. Sometimes the capitalists get the credit for this dynamism, seeking profit, shaping policy, setting armies into motion, ruling their global empire of cotton from well-appointed merchant houses and banquet halls. Sometimes the machines do: steam engines, mechanical looms and frames, locomotives, steamships, telegraphs. Yet all the powerful new forms of governance and technology that combined to remake Manchester into Cottonopolis, the center of industrial capitalism in the nineteenth century, were at bottom tools for the extraction of unprecedented quantities of hard labor. There were the distant laborers, many enslaved and others simply coerced, who worked to supply the raw materials-the coal, the cotton, and the food-that Manchester turned into finished goods. And there was also, for the first time, an industrial working class, an innovation as important as the steam engine. Before Manchester became Manchester, "the world had seen extreme poverty and labor exploitation for centuries, but it had never seen a sea of humanity organizing every aspect of their lives around the rhythms of machine production." Though perhaps an organized sea is not the best metaphor in this case.
