Coffeehouse Culture in the Atlantic World, 1650-1789 - by E Wesley Reynolds (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

This book argues that coffeehouses and the coffee trade were central to the making of the Atlantic world in the century leading up to the American Revolution. Fostering international finance and commerce, spreading transatlantic news, building military might, determining political fortunes and promoting status and consumption, coffeehouses created a web of social networks stretching from Britain to its colonies in North America.

As polite alternatives to taverns, coffeehouses have been hailed as 'penny universities'; a place for political discussion by the educated and elite. Reynolds shows that they were much more than this. Coffeehouse Culture in the Atlantic World 1650-1789, reveals that they simultaneously created a network for marine insurance and naval protection, led to calls for a free press, built tension between trade lobbyists and the East India Company, and raised questions about gender, respectability and the polite middling class. It demonstrates how coffeehouses served to create transatlantic connections between metropole Britain and her North American colonies and played an important role in the revolution and protest movements that followed.

Review Quotes

E. Wesley Reynolds deftly maps the key role coffeehouses played in carrying ideas from print into practice through personal encounters among colonists. Long known as places to make deals, he shows in vivid detail how and why they also provided the venues where Americans made history.
William Anthony Hay, Professor, Mississippi State University, USA

E. Wesley Reynolds' innovative and richly sourced examination of anglophone coffeehouse culture both narrows and broadens the eighteenth-century Atlantic, and his interpretation of the multifaceted roles of these spaces is shaped by ironies that should speak loudly to a generation grappling itself with the energy released by modern information technology and social media.
Ian Crowe, Associate Professor of History, Belmont Abbey College, USA

About the Author

E. Wesley Reynolds is Adjunct Instructor of History at Northwood University, USA. He was awarded his PhD from Central Michigan University, USA, in partnership with the University of Newcastle, UK.