HIST 2710 Coffee, Coffeehouses and the Creation of Modernity

Coffee, one of the most valuable commodities traded on world markets, is ubiquitous in contemporary American culture - so much so that it's difficult to imagine that there was a time before coffee. But there was. Coffee wasn't introduced into the Ottoman Empire until the end of the fifteenth century and into Europe until the seventeenth century. The world at the end of the eighteenth century looked very different than it had at the beginning of the sixteenth, and coffee had much to do with it. The early modern world saw the birth of many aspects of culture and society that we consider 'modern,' including 'nightlife' in all its varieties; a bourgeois 'middle class;' 'consumerism,' a 'public sphere' and 'globalization.' Students will analyze the central role coffee as beverage, drug, commodity and artifact of daily life played in their creation and in the creation of what we have come to know as 'modernity.' Students will examine the introduction and reception of coffee in the late medieval Ottoman world and in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe. Using journalistic, literary, and visual sources students will explore how multiple societies responded to the introduction of coffee - a novel, foreign and exotic drink - as well as how the eventual European thirst for coffee impelled the development of a system of colonialism or world trade. Drawing on approaches from disciplines including history, sociology and anthropology, students will trace how coffee, an everyday object, transformed various cultures into which it was introduced. Students will also consider how the act of drinking coffee took on divergent political and cultural symbolism in disparate contexts, including the Ottoman world, European nations, and colonial societies. Students will devote much of their time in class to analysis and close reading of primary sources, including texts of multiple genres as well as images. Of course, coffee drinkers and non-coffee drinkers are welcome.

Credits

3