The best books on the history of coffee and coffeehouses

This is a book that I wished had been published when I was working on the origins of coffee drinking in early modern Britain. It offers a broad overview of the history of coffee around the world from its origins in the Ottoman empire to the present day. The book focuses mainly on the economic history of coffee production and consumption, and so it has less to say about the history of cafes and coffeehouses. It is very short and succinct and as such, it’s the obvious introduction to this fascinating topic. If you want a quick and reliable guide to the history of coffee, this is the book you need.

Pinsker’s A Rich Brew combines Jewish history and the literary history of modernist fiction as a way of studying the social history of café culture in five cities with large Jewish populations: Odessa, Warsaw, Vienna, New York City, and Tel Aviv-Jaffa. Café culture from the mid-nineteenth until the mid-twentieth century was particularly associated with Jewry and with modernism. This book helps us understand why this elective affinity between Jews, modernism and coffee developed in the way in which it did. Discerning readers will also find references to loads of novels, stories, and journalism from the era that are worth reading in their own right.

While one probably associates tea drinking with Japan more than coffee, Japan is now the third-largest coffee-consuming country in the world, surpassed only by the USA and Germany. Written by an anthropologist, White’s book serves as both an ethnography and a history of coffee life in modern Japan. Coffee came later to Japan than it did to Europe, being introduced only in the later nineteenth century. Here you will learn how coffee came to be associated with global modernity in Japan as well as how Japanese cafés came to serve a key role as centers of urban sociability and for self-expression.

Haine provides his readers with a solid social history of the French café in the long nineteenth century. While coffee was introduced to France earlier in the seventeenth century and cafés became a notable aspect of the social scene in Enlightenment Paris, it is only after the French Revolution that the café became a crucial place for working-class people to gather, socialize, and to drink (alcohol more often than coffee, as it happened) together. This is the book to turn to when you want to know how many cafés could be found in Balzac’s Paris, who got arrested for what in those cafés, and who could be found drinking and hanging out there.

Mintz’s book is about sugar, but it is still a key work in the history of coffee. It served as one of the major inspirations for my own study of the reception of coffee in early modern Britain. Sugar was a key ingredient in coffee by the later seventeenth century and would become a staple in the hot drinks consumed by the English working class. Mintz shows us how this symbiotic relationship between sugar and coffee developed, and he places the construction of an Atlantic slave system and the industrial revolution at the heart of his story. This is a classic work of both anthropology and history; it inspired a whole new way of thinking about the Atlantic world and the history of consumption at a time when both of those fields were still newborn.