Though it may be hard to believe, coffee – that thing you’ve probably described “as life” in your Instagram profile, along with illustration, kittens, and traveling – hasn’t always been so widely accepted. In fact, according to Innovation and Its Enemies, the past 500 years of coffee history have been fraught with turmoil.
Though not specifically about the world’s most popular beverage, the new book by Harvard professor Calestous Juma follows the history of coffee, using its bumpy road to mass acceptance as a context for “contemporary debates surrounding technologies” like artificial intelligence, gene editing, and renewable energy. In a recent article, Business Insider highlights some of coffee history’s more turbulent moments as they are described in Juma’s book.
You might have heard that the French Revolution was planned in coffee houses, where members of the so-called “intelligentsia,” the class of political thinkers and polemics, gathered to plot their rebellions.
Coffee houses’ potential to facilitate the exchange of ideas and information scared leaders long before the French Revolution. In 1511, Khair Beg, a young governor of Mecca, called for the closure of all coffee houses, fearing they’d be centers of a secular uprising. Anyone caught drinking or selling coffee at that time was beaten.
