Power Of Coffee: How Coffee Inspired Independent Financial Systems In The Enlightenment

The Power of Coffee: How Coffee Inspired Independent Financial Systems in the Enlightenment

In the Age of the Enlightenment, coffee houses were an incubator for radical ideas about finance and provided a venue for public discourse, leading to the creation of free and independent financial systems.

In 1585, reports of a dark, bitter, and umber-colored drink appeared in the Ottoman Capital of Constantinople. Allegedly “containing the power to stimulate mankind”, the strange drink fascinated and terrified nations across Europe. Upon taste of the brew, the Pope baptized it, while detractors declared it “the Drink of Satan”. The drink in question was coffee, and its introduction to Europe forever altered the course of history. After its introduction

This solution evolved once it became evident that the customers in these coffee houses, often business owners and merchants, needed to purchase insurance, and that insurance necessitated the need for investment capital. An example is the London Stock Exchange. After a group of stockbrokers and traders were expelled from the Royal Stock Exchange in London, they relocated to a certain coffee house named Jonathans. These like-minded brokers and traders made the bold choice to establish their own stock exchange and open it to the public. This entrepreneurial venture eventually grew into the famous London Stock Exchange. Another financial invention is the origin of the New York Stock Exchange. Unhappy with the corrupt, disorganized, and bureaucratic systems for trading in America, a group of merchants who were regular customers of the Tontine Coffee House met under a buttonwood tree, next to the coffee house. It was under this tree that they signed the Buttonwood Agreement in 1792, and chose the Tontine Coffee House as their headquarters. This became the founding document of the New York Stock Exchange. These instances illustrate how coffee houses were essential in bringing people together, enabled the sharing of ideas through the formation of social networks, and solved real problems that non-noble classes faced

Coffee, the elixir of the Enlightenment, the democratic tool which spurred the creation of the modern financial system and by extension, immense wealth and a middle class, was cultivated and harvested by slaves. First, in Africa and later in Asia and Latin America, colonization, the slave trade, and coffee are inexorably intertwined. Generations of slaves living in brutal conditions were exploited to feed the demand for coffee houses in Europe, North America, and beyond. The elixir with the “power to stimulate mankind” apparently did not include the hundreds of thousands of slaves that were forced to toil to harvest the crop of the Enlightenment. However, despite the horrid crimes committed in the name of coffee houses, its strength as a social lubricant was what felled the stratified hierarchies of Europe, and led to the birth of contemporary financial