Black as hell, strong as death, sweet as love," and "shot through with grit" - there is your recipe for coffee in 17th-century London. "Yum," you might say, and quite right, it does sound more exciting than the stuff in modern coffee cups. Even more yum when you follow the argument in a terrific new essay by media historian and journalist Matthew Green on the Public Domain Review website.
Green points out (and this you may know) that in the old days there was no good way to make water safe to drink, so most people drank weak ale or beer instead. It follows, not surprisingly, that "until the mid-seventeenth century, most people in England were either slightly - or very - drunk all of the time". In 1652, however, an enterprising Greek called Pasqua Rosee opened London's first coffeehouse, and though it was a mere lean-to in a side alley it soon became a big hit, selling 600 "dishes" of coffee a day. The local tavern-keepers were the only ones put out.
Green's point is not the rapid spread of coffeehouses in London, which shortly had many more than any other European city bar Istanbul - perhaps 8,000 by the early 18th century. His point is the clarifying effect on London's heads. "The arrival of coffee," he writes, "triggered a dawn of sobriety that laid the foundations for truly spectacular economic growth in the decades that followed as people thought clearly for the first time".
He's not joking, no. He gives examples: the stock exchange, the insurance industry and auctioneering. He can name the coffeehouses where each idea originated. These advances, he says, spawned "the credit, security, and markets that facilitated the dramatic expansion of Britain's network of global trade in Asia, Africa and America". How's that for a multiplier effect?
So it is not just that Londoners were sober for the first time. They were also talking to and arguing with each other in this new public space. The early coffeehouses were "smoky candlelit forums for commercial transactions, spirited debate, and the exchange of information, ideas, and lies". Individual chairs and booths came much later; first there were convivial benches where different sorts sat down together, friend and stranger, high and low. Pamphlets and newssheets were read and picked apart. Politics was debated, as were theatre, journalism and literature.
Public spaces, when properly used by the public, have this kind of effect. There still are the bus and the train, the stop and the station, universities and canteens, the barbershop and the market, Irani eateries, parks, India Gate and the seaface, newspapers - and they all appear in Indian writing at every level. Some of these sites even play a role in public action (witness urban protest) but of how many of them can it be said that they are capable of sparking useful new ideas? Chain coffee shops simply do not count.
And where now is the time and will, and the vocabulary, to sit and argue?
Which is why Jeff Bezos's purchase of The Washington Post this week is potentially so fascinating. This is not just another big businessman buying himself media clout. Bezos is the founder-CEO of Amazon.com, and the Post is the home paper of Washington DC, capital of the American empire. Like other Western papers, the Post has been struggling to keep readers and revenue in a Net-centric world.
Online and offline, everyone was asking why a bright guy like Bezos would invest in the print media. But a few insightful commentators pointed to Amazon.com's relentless focus on the "customer experience" - just the thing that no newspaper, with its one-way model (we make the news, you consume it), has mastered. Any Amazon.com page offers a dozen ways for "users" to interact with the site and with each other. Bezos's company has built itself a genuine community base, online. There is a slim chance that, with Bezos as distant steersman, the Post and others who follow its lead may eventually find themselves in a position to enter and enrich the only remaining public space where social atomisation hasn't choked off free and broad conversation. It could lead to big things.