i don't really like studying social history but
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_social_history/v035/35.2jamieson.html
In a culture drinks give structure to social life, acting to label expected forms of behavior. To drink a beverage is to carry out a small ritual, an act that momentarily constructs a slightly more bearable, intelligible world from the chaos that [End Page 279] threatens at all times. The European Renaissance population was increasingly urbanized and divorced from traditional folk remedies, allowing caffeine beverages to be introduced as exotic medicinals. The consumption of caffeine drinks soon became more than medicinal, as Europeans created rituals and places of consumption modeled distantly on both the tea rituals of China and the coffeehouses of the Arab world. The pleasant stimulant effect of caffeine, and its ability to stifle hunger, were added bonuses. The caffeine drinks served at European tables were an essential part of the demonstration of colonialism, a visible reminder of the possession of the foreign.
Europe in the seventeenth century was a society in transition, and the acceptance of commercial caffeine drinks was part of that transition. Part of this was due to Renaissance ambiguity over social hierarchies. The idea of fashion as a means of social discrimination was tied to the creation of a market for many exotic luxuries, imported through overseas trade and appealing to wider and wider segments of the European elite through time.
/The Essence of Commodification: Caffeine Dependencies in the Early Modern World -Ross W. Jamieson/
In a culture drinks give structure to social life, acting to label expected forms of behavior. To drink a beverage is to carry out a small ritual, an act that momentarily constructs a slightly more bearable, intelligible world from the chaos that [End Page 279] threatens at all times. The European Renaissance population was increasingly urbanized and divorced from traditional folk remedies, allowing caffeine beverages to be introduced as exotic medicinals. The consumption of caffeine drinks soon became more than medicinal, as Europeans created rituals and places of consumption modeled distantly on both the tea rituals of China and the coffeehouses of the Arab world. The pleasant stimulant effect of caffeine, and its ability to stifle hunger, were added bonuses. The caffeine drinks served at European tables were an essential part of the demonstration of colonialism, a visible reminder of the possession of the foreign.
Europe in the seventeenth century was a society in transition, and the acceptance of commercial caffeine drinks was part of that transition. Part of this was due to Renaissance ambiguity over social hierarchies. The idea of fashion as a means of social discrimination was tied to the creation of a market for many exotic luxuries, imported through overseas trade and appealing to wider and wider segments of the European elite through time.
/The Essence of Commodification: Caffeine Dependencies in the Early Modern World -Ross W. Jamieson/