Brain Brew

By Brendan I. Koerner, Washington Monthly. Posted July 5, 2005.

Coffee is the drug that changed my life. Without its brain-perking effects, it's doubtful that I could have passed astronomy in college, read The Wealth of Nations cover to cover, or made a favorable first impression on my girlfriend's parents despite suffering from a colossal hangover. In fact, this very review would be immeasurably harder to write were it not for the steaming cup of milk-tinged joe to my laptop's left.

But I seem to have derived less benefit from my addiction than many other habitual caffeine ingesters whom Antony Wild describes in Coffee: A Dark History. A British coffee merchant who is credited with introducing specialty brews to his native country, as well as the author of several histories of the East India Company, Wild credits the brew, somewhat outlandishly, with having inspired some proverbial Great Men to create the modern stock exchange, the British insurance house Lloyd's, and London's first organized police force, among other legacies. Without the energizing effects of the native African bean, he argues, the world would be a far more Neanderthal place.

But Wild's chief goal with Coffee is laying out how the First World's modern addiction to the drink is wreaking havoc on the poor and powerless. The book's sweeping ambition, if not its politics, is similar to that of several other recent single-topic histories, from Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World to Mauve: How One Man Invented a Color That Changed the World, which all promise to prove, in the space of a few hundred pages, that some hitherto overlooked thing in fact played a pivotal role in world history. Though his storytelling and logic could often use refinement, and despite his unfortunate tendency to meander off topic, Wild does conjure up some eye-opening trivia on the coffee manufacturing process, and there is merit to his claim that Third World farmers are facing a raw deal in part because of free trade's unintended consequences.

It's unknown exactly who first discovered coffee's sprightliness, but Wild surmises that it was likely a resident of Ethiopia, where the Arabica bush grows wild in the highlands--perhaps a shepherd who noticed his animals skipping about after chowing down on the plant's cherry-like beans. And, in due course, some clever person figured out that roasting the beans over a fire, then brewing them with boiling water, made the process of caffeine-ingestion much more enjoyable. Members of the Sufi sect of Islam were among the most famous adopters of this practice, and, by the 1400s, they had incorporated coffee drinking into their mystical rites. Arab traders, and perhaps a Chinese naval commander or two, soon spread the beverage throughout the Middle East.

Any Ottoman fashion was bound to hit Europe soon enough, and, by the mid-1600s, coffee houses were all the rage in Paris and London where the stimulant helped kickstart the latter-day brain explosion known as the Enlightenment. Wild argues that the creative output of the movement's greatest artists and thinkers might have been significantly less if they'd been fans of sloth-inducing ale instead of energizing coffee. The Royal Society, for example, a group of pals who gathered to slurp coffee and discuss alchemy at an Oxford café named Tillyard's, was later responsible for publishing the works of its chairman, Isaac Newton. The Coffee Club of Rota met in Westminster at the Turk's Head, where luminaries such as Andrew Marvell and Samuel Pepys discussed and promoted new political concepts, including the early adoption of the modern ballot box. In France, meanwhile, Voltaire was reputedly downing between 50 and 72 cups of coffee a day, a habit that many link to the brevity and mania of Candide.

None of this mental activity much pleased the powers-that-be, who viewed coffee drinkers as a threat. Unlike alcohol, which merely caused buffoons to pound on each other and pass out in the gutters, coffee seemed to foment true anti-establishment behavior among the intelligentsia. England's King Charles II went so far as to issue a proclamation banning coffee houses, though popular uproar forced him to quickly rescind the order. And his Prussian peer, King Frederick, urged his subjects to drink more beer instead of coffee, though he wasn't entirely motivated by a desire to suppress dissent--he also wanted to keep the nation's money out of the hands of English and French coffee merchants.

Brendan I. Koerner is a contributing editor at Wired and a fellow at the New America Foundation.

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