Coffeehouse Culture in the Atlantic World, 1650-1789

This book argues that coffeehouses and the coffee trade were central to the making of the Atlantic world in the century leading up to the American Revolution. Fostering international finance and commerce, spreading transatlantic news, building military might, determining political fortunes and promoting status and consumption, coffeehouses created a web of social networks stretching from Britain to its colonies in North America.

As polite alternatives to taverns, coffeehouses have been hailed as 'penny universities'; a place for political discussion by the educated and elite. Reynolds shows that they were much more than this. Coffeehouse Culture in the Atlantic World 1650-1789, reveals that they 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.

ISBN-13: 9781350247253

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC

Publication Date: 10-19-2023

Pages: 264

Product Dimensions: 9.21h x 6.14w x 0.56d

E. Wesley Reynolds is Adjunct Instructor of History at Northwood University, USA. He was awarded his PhD from Central Michigan University, USA, in partnership with the University of Newcastle, UK.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

Introduction


Part I: Coffee's Transatlantic Society

I. “Trifling,” An Urban Experience

II. “Trifling” in the Colonies

III.Murders, Officers, and Naval Headquarters


Part II: Polishing Communities and Negotiating Empire

IV. Coffee-Women, Licensure, and a Polite Public Sphere

V. Coffee-Men, Lobbyists, and Conmen of Empire

VI. Transatlantic News Feeds and Imagined Coffeehouse Publics

Part III: Empire and Revolution

VII. Empire, Free Association, and Slavery

VIII. Bringing Down the Empire


Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

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