Coffeehouse Culture in the Atlantic World, 1650-1789

Coffeehouses were essential to the Atlantic world in the 17th and 18th centuries, fostering international finance and commerce, spreading news, building military might, determining political fortunes, and promoting status and consumption. They created a network for marine insurance and naval protection, led to calls for a free press, built tension between trade lobbyists and the East India Company, and raised questions about gender, respectability, and the polite middling class.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 264 pages
Publication date: 19 October 2023
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC

Coffeehouses and the coffee trade played a significant role in shaping the Atlantic world in the century leading up to the American Revolution. They fostered international finance and commerce, spread transatlantic news, built military might, determined political fortunes, and promoted status and consumption. Coffeehouses created a web of social networks that stretched from Britain to its colonies in North America. They were hailed as "penny universities" for their role in political discussion, but they were much more than this. Coffeehouse Culture in the Atlantic World 1650-1789 reveals that coffeehouses simultaneously created a network for marine insurance and naval protection, led to calls for a free press, built tension between trade lobbyists and the East India Company, and raised questions about gender, respectability, and the polite middling class. It demonstrates how coffeehouses served to create transatlantic connections between metropole Britain and her North American colonies and played an important role in the revolution and protest movements that followed.

Dimension: 234 x 156 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781350247253