How coffee houses changed the world

JAMES HARPER: So, Jonathan, welcome back to the second series of a History of Coffees.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: It's such a pleasure to be here, James.

JAMES HARPER: Great. Two years later after the first series came out.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Yeah, absolutely.

JAMES HARPER: We are enjoying a coffee here in Cafe 1001. It's in the Truman Brewery off Brick Lane in East London. Awfully trendy.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: It is hyper trendy. I am wondering what we are doing here, Jane. I don't know what we're doing here.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Ok, James have a look around. Tell me what you see.

JAMES HARPER: There's graffiti on the wall, exposed concrete. There is a Rancilio Espresso machine. They are actually the sponsors of this second series and we'll be talking a little bit more about them in the break. But in terms of like the people. So I'm seeing a group of people studying and debating. I'm guessing what must be a history assignment at university. I'm seeing a couple, maybe they're on the first date gazing lovingly.

JAMES HARPER: Into each other's eyes.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Absolutely. In this case, everyone is being social. But the thing that has always been a feature of coffee houses and has always led coffee houses to be viewed with some suspicion is the fact that people get together and swap ideas in coffee houses.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: People usually authorities are very worried about what they might be saying to each other.

JAMES HARPER: I now I'm thinking back to the beginning of the story of coffee and you know, as it slowly spread from Ethiopia to Yemen and across Arabia, you know, up into Turkey, they experienced coffee for the first time. So what kind of effect would that have had?

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Well, it's highly confusing for the authorities because here is a beverage that brings people together outside the mosque talking to each other. It's no surprise James that fairly soon after coffee first makes its appearance in Arabia, there are people trying to ban it.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: So in Mecca, for example, there are people who are not even meeting in a coffee shop, they're just meeting outside a mosque to enjoy coffee together and the governor tries to get them shut down and get coffee banned because people coming together and exchanging ideas could be seditious and dangerous, dangerous, very dangerous.

JAMES HARPER: So really coffee and the idea of the coffee shop, it sounds like a quite a revolutionary concept.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Absolutely. And it continues to be throughout coffee history.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: You know, the coffee shop is the location of so many meetings that transform our societies, whether that's politically, whether that's scientifically, whether that's through literary or cultural types of vendettas.

JAMES HARPER: So on this episode, we're going to explore how the coffee shop has changed the world, but also whether it still has what it takes to change the world.

JAMES HARPER: I'm James Harbor, documentary maker and the creator of the Filter Stories Coffee podcast.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: And I'm Jonathan Norris, professional historian and author of Coffee, a global history.

JAMES HARPER: And this is the second series of a History Of Coffee, a podcast that explores how a tiny psychoactive seed changed the world and continues to shape our lives today.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: And so we're back again now in Cafe 1001 in in super trendy Shoreditch Rancilio machine is going great guns in the corner. We want to take the opportunity to thank Rancilio for their support in producing this free education resource for the entire coffee community to understand coffee history.

JAMES HARPER: Yeah, it's honestly, without their support, we couldn't have sunk in the hundreds and hundreds of hours that it takes to make this sort of podcast.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Yeah, absolutely.

JAMES HARPER: And if you don't know, Rancilio produce espresso machines for the cafe and the home, the technology in them, I've always found to be quite innovative. For example, they have temperature profiling technology where you can begin your extraction at 88 go up to 93. And for me, when I worked for a roastery, it really unlocked new ways of pulling interesting flavors out of my espressos.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: That's interesting for me, Rancilio has always been about Rancilio Sylvia machine that really transformed home brewing and indeed was the first espresso machine I had in my House James. There we go. That's why I learned to make espresso the way I did, they.

JAMES HARPER: Basically put professional components into a home coffee machine.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: That's exactly why it's so good.

JAMES HARPER: So if you are in the market for a high quality home espresso machine or for your cafe, do consider Anillo by supporting them. You're also supporting us n in this podcast. So thank you very much. We have link in the show notes.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Please do that. And now let's get back to the story, James.

JAMES HARPER: So Jonathan, we know that in Mecca in the early 15 hundreds, coffee is being drank publicly, like you would maybe at a picnic. But when do we actually have the first Coffee House?

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: So we have a manuscript that certainly identifies a Coffee House by 15 34 being opened in Damascus and in Istanbul in 15 54.

JAMES HARPER: I really wanna get a flavor of what these early coffee houses would have looked like.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Let's go to Istanbul down by the harbor where you'd be looking over the Bosphorus and you'd have a Coffee House and you might go in the garden and have your coffee and kind of look over the evening. You'd be out on the sort of the, the promenades, you know, down by the jetties and so forth, you could go into one of the rooms, you've got these luxury sofas, you'd probably see poets trying their workout on each other.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: You'd see merchants discussing the deal that they were going to do, but maybe doing it over a game of backgammon. But then a lot of what you would see as government officials, the bureaucrat, they're bureaucrats. And of course, you know, again, bureaucrats doing as it were business that involves a lot of entertaining but also might involve a little bit of brown nosing or networking is networking. James got to be done.

JAMES HARPER: So it sounds like coffee houses in Istanbul at the time are very popular in Istanbul.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: We went from having, you know, the first Coffee House in 15 54 by say 40 years after that, we've got about 600.

JAMES HARPER: Hold the phone, hold the phone. You're saying in 40 years, 600 new cafes opened.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: I'm saying 600 places that were called coffee houses. Yeah.

JAMES HARPER: Wow, Mr Jonathan. Here we have a picture of a lot of different people meeting haphazardly in these coffee houses that are springing up across the Middle East. Turkey discussing many ideas, maybe some ideas that the people in power don't like back in Mecca. You know, when coffee was first introduced the governor there saw it as quite the threat. And I can imagine the governor of Istanbul. Was he equally threatened?

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Well, of course, you know, you refer to the governor of Istanbul, but we're talking about the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire. We're at a whole different level, a whole different level, my friend of authority at this point and the answer is yes, Suleiman. The magnificent is the sultan who is in power at the time that this first Coffee House is opened.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: And again, within about 10 years was saying, oh, you know, we want controls on these, we want to shut them down because they're distracting people from their correct activities. The actually issues a decree in coffee houses. People are continuing to pass their time by amusing themselves and committing illicit and banned acts that prevent them from carrying out their religious obligations.

JAMES HARPER: Hold on. So he's saying people who are in coffee houses are doing things which are illicit, banned.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Like, like what there are various possibilities there, we know that there was gambling. There's a hint here about Boza alcohol. The other thing that becomes really problematic in Ottoman society and that's smoking tobacco.

JAMES HARPER: I mean, smoking tobacco is a weird one because I mean, today we know how bad it is for our health. I can't imagine they knew back then. So why was it a.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Problem if people are smoking in coffee shops? This creates a fire hazard and a fire hazard is a big thing, right? Because all the buildings are made of wood.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: And actually in 16 33 there's a big fire that destroys five districts of Istanbul and it's believed that that was started by smoking tobacco in a Coffee House. So Murad basically says that every coffee shop has to be closed, right?

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: And he sends orders to the rest of the Empire saying the same thing. So I'm gonna quote you the order from now on. Anyone who opens a coffee shop should be strung up over its front door. Oh, my goodness, me.

JAMES HARPER: Wow. Ok. Let me be clear about this. So, yeah, he's using the pretext of fire and smoking in a coffee shop to close it down across, you know, the Empire he controls. I mean, it feels a little extreme. If you're concerned about fire risk, you're gonna string up the owners of coffee shops for daring to open one is fire. The thing he's really concerned about.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: And we can say that Murad was an extreme autocrat. He came to the throne very young, he came to the throne as a miner in the 16 twenties. So he probably has distinct paranoia, right?

JAMES HARPER: But coffee shops have been around for almost 100 years now. At this point, how do you ban something after 100 years? That's been around?

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Well, I mean, there's some interesting things about this ban, right? It's more effective in Istanbul than elsewhere.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: And that takes me to the point that I really want to make, which is soldiers are very big patrons of coffee houses. So if the people who you employ to shut down the coffee houses are the people who most like the coffee houses. To the point that there was an estimate that about 40% of coffee houses were owned by state officials perhaps unsurprising that it doesn't really work out that well.

JAMES HARPER: So Jonathan, we saw how coffee spread through the Ottoman Empire coffee shops exploded in what is today Istanbul. And I know at some point, obviously, it reaches Europe because you know, I can go down the stairs of my House and get a coffee today.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: So well observed James, that's what I call deduction.

JAMES HARPER: So how did the coffee shop concept go from the Ottoman Empire to Europe?

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: People who set up the first coffee shops are usually emigres from the Ottoman Empire, generically described as Armenians. Are they actually from Armenia? Well, this is the point in this period. Ok.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Anyone who is an Orthodox Christian but living under the Ottoman Empire is quite often described as Armenian. So the first people who open coffee houses in Vienna are Armenians. The first people who sell coffee in Paris in the markets are identified as Armenians.

JAMES HARPER: Ok. So coffee shops are now being brought into Europe by so called Armenians. Orthodox Christians from the Ottoman Empire. We've seen some of the ways they were disruptive in the Ottoman Empire. What's their impact in Europe?

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: So, listen, let me tell you about my hero, the man who I've named my fantasy football team after you.

JAMES HARPER: Don't seriously have a fantasy football team, do you?

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: I seriously have a fantasy football team and it is seriously called the Pasco Rose 11. Are you serious? Yeah, absolutely.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Listen, Pasca Rose was a man servant to an English trader. He came back from the port city of Izmir. So that's on the Aegean. That's the kind of, you know, Western Turkey. And we know he comes to London 16 52. He opens up actually. What is really a coffee stall, a stall, you know, those Christmas markets, James.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Yeah. Yeah. Imagine something like that. A little hut? Ok. So it's a courtyard around this church and he's got his little hut in there. He's one of many people who do. And where exactly is the church? So he is just opposite the Royal Exchange building.

JAMES HARPER: And what exactly. Is the Royal Exchange?

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: It's like a massive trading floor.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: So, because they are all those merchants in the exchange and quite often they're chatting away and doing all those things that merchants do, money, money deals, networking, brown nosing, et cetera. Anyway, they often it appears walk out of the exchange, go into the church courtyard and get a coffee together from Pasco Rose in his stall.

JAMES HARPER: I'm imagining men with wigs stockings perhaps in a churchyard. And, I mean, we're talking in the 16 fifties here. So it must have been absolutely filthy like London. That muddy and filthy.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Yeah. Fair enough. Yes, we don't have paved roads. So we're having sort of detritus everywhere. We don't have sewers and this, of course, is very important because, you know, the general lack of hygiene means that you have to be very careful what you drink, right? Because you're not just gonna drink water, especially not water in a city.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: You know, I mean, there, there are rivers, there's a river in London. The Fleet, which is right close to that, you know, becomes subsequently paved over at Fleet Street.

JAMES HARPER: That Fleet, it was a river?

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: The Fleet was a river.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: But of course, the Fleet's a river but it's also a sewer, a washing place the whole lot.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: And in terms of drinking, they're very careful what they mostly drink is what's known technically as small beer. So it's very light, fermented alcoholic drinks. And they do that because of course, when you prepare those drinks, you boil the water before you do the fermenting.

JAMES HARPER: Oh, I see. So it's part of the brewing process by boiling the water. They're killing the germs.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Now, coffee bang. This is a safe drink.

JAMES HARPER: You got to boil water too, to make coffee.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: And it's not going to get you slightly more drowsy.

JAMES HARPER: So I would imagine caffeine is also a major selling point.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Absolutely. So we were talking about my friend Mr Pasqua Rose. Mr Rose had published a hand bill which was called the Virtue of the coffee drink. And what he says is coffee is a sweet little innocent thing. It will prevent drowsiness and make one fit for business. It will hinder sleep for three or four hours.

JAMES HARPER: It will make you watchful Pasco Rose seems to have also figured out marketing.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Yeah, it's a great example of marketing. I mean, there are some other great claims in this pamphlet. Yeah. So in Turkey coffee is generally drunk. They're not troubled with the stone gout dropsy or scurvy and their skins are exceedingly clear and white. Now, what? There you go. Those are all the advantages, drinking coffee.

JAMES HARPER: I mean, I believed him in that first snippet you delivered, but now he's just talking quackery. Now he's bona fide snake oil salesman.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Well, indeed, but you know, they didn't have much in the way of advertising standards in those days. Ok.

JAMES HARPER: So Mr Rose here, he's got his shack outside of a church. His coffee business is going pretty well. I'm imagining he's very good at marketing. So what happens next?

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: What happens is that, yeah, I mean, this is successful enough that Rose is able to move from his coffee stall and he basically takes on a suite of rooms in pretty much in that same square and creates a Coffee House.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: And famously, this Coffee House has a silhouette of Rose outside in his Turkish headdress. Oh, really? And we assume that he probably wore that kind of stuff when he was serving quite often that he would have worn, you know, costume, the fitting of an Ottoman.

JAMES HARPER: We want to go into a Coffee House. What are we going to see?

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Come in, we're gonna sit down, we'll probably be asked. Do we have any news? Do we have anything to discuss? We will look around us, we will see a fire in the corner with a relatively large brewing pot on it. That's where the coffee itself will be being made. Coffee is ground to the powder. It's boiled up with spring water and about half a pint of it is then drunk as hot as possibly can be endured.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: So, bring your, asbestos tongue with you. Ok? And we'll have a way to come over and he'll give us what will be called our dish. Each of coffee and now a dish was the word of the time. It's really a small bowl. It's very small, like espresso size cup. Not that much bigger. Yeah, the price of our coffee is gonna be a Penny bargain.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Absolute bargain. So these coffee houses became known as Penny universities. Penny for the coffee. Learn all the stuff that you can see. Now, what will we see going on? We'll see a lot of debate going on. We may see some sort of quite organized debates going on. There were coffee houses, I think it was called the ROTA, which was the first to introduce something very strange called the ballot box.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: They would arrange their tables in a sort of a kind of semi circular fashion so that you can have a debate around the tables. So if nobody favored and then you could have a motion and you could ask who was in favor and you could pass around this box and you put your vote in the ballot box.

JAMES HARPER: It sounds like democracy to me.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Yeah, we could perhaps start looking for some kind of pamphlets or for want of a better word newspapers that eventually we would find coffee houses that produce newspapers. So the spectator, the magazine that I imagine you're still aware of. It begins production in the 17 hundreds in a Coffee House to use a great academic turn James.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: This is co production because the key to the success of the Coffee House if you think about it, even today is the Coffee House is co-produced by the people who consume that. Oh, I mean, you build the theater, you build the stage, you start the environment, but actually those people who come there create the experience, they core it with you.

JAMES HARPER: I mean, not dissimilar to the business model of, you know, a social media company, you spend time on the app to see what other people are talking about. Yeah. So what kind of creator is there? Influencers, content creators that we have in the 16 fifties.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Well, there's one absolutely key piece of content and that is news, news, news. Now, news takes many forms. So let's call it news and information. It's really an information exchange, right?

JAMES HARPER: So it seems like Pasco Rose having his Coffee House near the Royal Exchange, which is the place where things are bought and sold in like kind of wholesale quantities, talk about.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Location and that's the way really that this whole business takes off. Yeah, because Coffee House has become associated almost with their clientele. Now I'm very fond of Coffee House called Jonathan's for fairly obvious reasons. But Jonathan's is the place where the London Stock Exchange is effectively born.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Do you know why Jonathan's exists? It exists because the stock jobbers of the time were too rude and noisy to be allowed in the Royal Exchange. Basically, they were considered, you know, ill mannered people. Hold on. What is a stock jobber? A stock jobber is somebody who trades stocks, but this is about civilized behavior and these people are not very civilized.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Ok. So the point is, you know, these guys reconvene in Jonathan's Coffee House. So after a while, of course, you have to go to Jonathan's Coffee House because if you want to be trading, you've got to be in the right place to do the trade.

JAMES HARPER: I mean, it's just like, you know, the Facebook page for whatever community you want to be a part of, that's the place to be, but it happens to be serving coffee at the same time.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: I mean, there are loads of things like that. The Baltic Exchange is another one, you know, hiring of ships and then of course, I've got to insure those ships. So where am I gonna go? I'm gonna go to Lloyd's Coffee House opens in I think 16 88 this is the way that the Coffee House becomes, not just much more than about drinking coffee.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: It's the way it becomes a business model for the exchange and coro that I'm talking about, you know, Jonathan's works because of the people who go to Jonathan's. Right.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: I think what we should also say is these coffee houses as they develop. It's not just about mercantile stuff as they spread, they become the centers of many other things. So you have a whole second group of people who have become known in the literature as the virtuosi virtuosi.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: People who are to be bunt cultured, I mean, culture and science and stuff are all very blended at this point. They want really to learn about stuff and exchange their knowledge and their information and put forward their thoughts and theorems of many of which are completely Bonkers. But nonetheless, you know, everyone gets a shot.

JAMES HARPER: I was about to say just like anybody listening to podcasts today, would you say they're virtuosi?

JAMES HARPER: Maybe not with the Bonkers.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Bit, actually entirely with the Bonkers bit. But yeah, in a way, I think so I think people who listen a lot to podcasts. Absolutely. So namely some virtuosi, I might recognize you're thinking about people like Francis Bacon, this Coffee House in Oxford where they would have had Isaac Newton, Edmund Haley of Haley's Comic Sloan collect guy who ends up founding the British Museum. These people are all Coffee House aficionados.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: You have places like the Grecian Coffee House which turns into the Royal Society and the Royal Society was like an early scientific institution. Well, that's right, the Royal Society still is a scientific institution. My point is that the Grecian Coffee House is the forerunner of the Royal Society. It's where the Royal Society as a society meets before the Royal Society acquires its own premises and buildings.

JAMES HARPER: Wow.

JAMES HARPER: So if I were to zoom out and look at the impact of coffee, it created essentially a sober environment, a caffeinated environment where people could do commerce and exchange ideas and that permitted like a flourishing of ideas and institutions which resonate through to today.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Yeah, in essence, the Coffee House is trading in far more than coffee. And actually the key thing that is consumed is the Coffee House itself, not the coffee.

JAMES HARPER: So Jonathan, you've shown me how the Coffee House really fueled commerce and intellectual thought in England. But what about the political side because as coffee shops became more popular in the Ottoman Empire, you know, some rulers saw them as a threat to their power. Was that also the case in England?

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Actually? Yes, coffee houses did play a significant role in English politics. But I think to understand that we need to think about the English Civil War. Now, James, you did a history degree. What do you know about the English Civil War.

JAMES HARPER: It wasn't on the English Civil War.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: How convenient. Right. Quick lesson about the Civil War in the 16 thirties, King Charles the first basically suspends parliament for a long time. He rules by decree one of the reasons that he does that perhaps the main one is to impose a particular form of religion upon the country.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: He is opposed by parliament which eventually rises up against the king and this leads to a Civil War which lasts until eventually parliament triumphs. The king is captured and in 16 49 he is executed, right? Why does this matter? Because when Pascal Rose and others opened their first coffee houses in London, we have no king, the king is dead beheaded. There is no monarchy.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: The country is being led by a guy called Oliver Cromwell with the support of parliament. However, in 16 60 after the death of Cromwell and the falling apart of Cromwell's regime, the monarchy is restored with Charles the second put on the throne. Charles the second being the son of Charles, the.

JAMES HARPER: First hold the phone, hold the phone.

JAMES HARPER: So a king does a religious inspired power grab the quote unquote laypeople, parliamentarians rebel fight a bloody war, kill the guy. The guy they install Oliver Cromwell does fine. That passes away and then they go back. Well, ok. Was the king really that bad? Let's bring another king back in.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Very roughly. Yes. Now the interesting thing is after the king comes back to power in 16 66. The Earl Of Clarendon is leading minister, let's call him says, well, you know, there are lots of people who are still talking about you who want to get rid of you because of course, it's not like he comes back and everyone says it's wonderful.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Ok, Clarendon therefore advises why not close the coffee houses because let's face it. You know, there's a lot of gossip about you et cetera. And Clarendon has to be reminded that first of all, lots of royalists also used coffee houses, particularly during the Civil War. It's like.

JAMES HARPER: Saying, hey, let's just shut off the internet because people are saying bad things about us. Like, yeah. Yeah. But we need the internet too.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Exactly.

JAMES HARPER: So, what does the king do? Is he so insecure that decides to, shut it all down?

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: No, he backs off, ah, wise move. Has another, think about it in the 16 seventies and backs off again. Oh, really?

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: This is not doable.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: And that, of course, parallels what we had talked about already, you know, in the Ottoman Empire. All those sultans who, you know, close the coffee houses, but the coffee houses survive.

JAMES HARPER: The genie is out of the bottle. You can't stop it back in.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Exactly that.

JAMES HARPER: So Jonathan, you've shown me how coffee houses of the past were used as meeting places. Many people over the ages didn't like the fact people were talking about their authority and wanted to shut them down. And we also saw how coffee houses were places for great learning and civil society discourse. Dare I say it, democracy, the future of countries were discussed in coffee houses.

JAMES HARPER: And up until now, this has all been quite old history.

JAMES HARPER: But for once, I would actually like to tell you a story about the role of the coffee houses in more recent history.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: I'm intrigue, James. Tell me, right.

JAMES HARPER: So back in January 2022 I had my first proper holiday since beginning my life as a documentary podcast, audio producer. And I spent two weeks in Egypt right now for a couple of days, I was staying in the center of Cairo.

JAMES HARPER: So you have to imagine where I was, which is, you know, just down the road from Tahrir Square, the center of the city, huge, you know, 15 story high crumbling gray apartment blocks, there were streets choked with traffic.

JAMES HARPER: And as I was exploring Cairo, I came across a lot of cafes on the street, people having coffee on the streets are right, quite a number all around Tahrir Square, right, right in the center where I was staying and these aren't trendy cafes as we understand them.

JAMES HARPER: Actually in Egyptian Arabic, they're known as Awa, which basically just means coffee, literally a very informal place just to have coffee on the street. But for the rest of the story, I'll just refer to them as street cafes.

JAMES HARPER: Now, I want to share a story about the role that these cafes had in a moment in Egyptian history 10 years ago, which was quite momentous. And I was made aware of the story of the street cafes. When I met someone called Sarah, not her real name. I'm gonna hide it for reasons that will become obvious.

SARAH: I write all the time or most of the time.

JAMES HARPER: And we connected over a story that she had written about her journey to try and change her family's attitudes towards women and women's role in society.

JAMES HARPER: So mostly it would be like meditation about life about people in my life, about what I'm looking for and what you got to know about Sara is that back in 2011, she was still a teenager and finishing school in Cairo. And as we know 2011, when Sara finishing school is a pivotal year for.

NEWS PRESENTER: Egypt, we do have breaking news tonight from Cairo where after a day of unprecedented violence, the night gives way to armed chaos.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: 2011, as I recall is the height of the Arab Spring, we actually see spread of a popular movement against the rulers in many of those countries in Egypt, in particular. Of course, it's the long standing Mubarak regime.

JAMES HARPER: Why were people upset with Mubarak, intense corruption, repression, police dictatorship and the guy's in power for a long time, 30 years.

JAMES HARPER: So early 2011 huge demonstrations in Tahrir Square.

JAMES HARPER: And after many, many weeks of these mass protests, the protesters, they received the news that Mubarak is giving up.

NEWS PRESENTER: President Mubarak has decided to step down as president of.

JAMES HARPER: This is shocking news for everybody including Sara.

SARAH: I was as surprised as every other Egyptian in Egypt.

JAMES HARPER: And nobody had any idea what happens next.

SARAH: It was scary. It was exciting.

JAMES HARPER: And so Sarah told me there's just like this explosion of political activity in the country.

SARAH: It was in the universities, it was in the school itself, it was on the coffee shops, it was on a newspaper like everything because people were silent for 30 years. So afterward, everyone wanted to talk.

JAMES HARPER: Now, soon after this, Sarah goes to study at university in Cairo and even in her first year at university, she regularly goes down like many people do to Tahrir Square.

SARAH: We would go to the Tahrir Square, we would have the protest.

JAMES HARPER: And then after spending some time on the square, you know, raising placards, assembling, shouting for this demand and that demand.

JAMES HARPER: Many people including Syra herself would disperse from Tahrir Square, which is this very large roundabout near the river Nile and filter their way through all the side streets nearby like near where I was staying and go to the outdoor cafes because that's where people talk. And during this period, she describes like these outdoor cafes became a center of intense political discussion.

SARAH: Everyone was there and everyone wanted to participate and the energy was so high. People were talking very loudly, they were all enthusiastic.

JAMES HARPER: And you really had almost every political persuasion represented.

SARAH: So you had the liberals and you had the lefties and you had the people who were saying that they are Communists and they would debate, debate, debate and people would be like, no, we want this more and this is more important or this is less less important.

JAMES HARPER: And while these debates are going on really about the future of Egypt, you know, the seating in these outdoor cafes was perfectly conducive for this sort of discussion. So in between these tall 10, 15 story apartment buildings, you have an alleyway and it's filled with brightly colored plastic chairs and these small wooden tables and you could form whatever configuration of seating you wanted.

JAMES HARPER: You can make these massive groups or you could split up and form smaller groups, maybe we could be like 20 people and with a very, very small table and the way Sada describes it, it's like the future of Egypt is being debated on the streets in this extremely kind of democratic way where literally the price of admission is your time and a cup of coffee because it was really cheap.

SARAH: You could sit there for a long time every day, James.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: I mean that is the English Coffee House. We were talking about the English Coffee House. Bang same thing, the revolutionary sense of that space. We talked about co producing, didn't we? And it is a co production there. You've got the coffee, but you've got the, the space, you've got the ability to shape that space from the people who are there to use that space in the ways that they want. Yeah, absolutely.

JAMES HARPER: And you know how you mentioned how the English coffee houses were sometimes referred to as Penny universities. Pay a little bit for the coffee and get an education.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: That's right.

JAMES HARPER: There are echoes of that in Cyrus experience.

SARAH: I formed a lot of my beliefs like this. I mean, this is how people learn, this is how people evolve through like talking and trying and being fools and being ridiculous and so on. So, of course, that's how we grow.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: So James, and this is fascinating because we're listening to sort of history as it's made as it were. But I do know this is 10 years ago. So tell us what happened next.

JAMES HARPER: So these protests at Tahrir Square and these really fervent debates are taking place in the cafes. It goes on across 2011, 2012. But over time, these different factions do start getting violent.

SARAH: At that point, we had a huge conflict with the Muslim brotherhood. People were throwing stones at each other. And for me, if you want to harm someone physically, that's my limit. I will not participate in this and once things started getting violent, people stopped debating one another in the street cafes, the more violent it gets the less people talk.

JAMES HARPER: And then soon after there is another thing that has happened at coffee shops historically, that also happens in Egypt, the Constitution, the political details are long and complicated. But the major change is when there is essentially a coup d'etat. The Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi is out, he is no longer the President Egypt becomes a military dictatorship under a guy called Sisi still in power today.

JAMES HARPER: And one thing Sisi does not tolerate is any political opposition. Exactly. Which begins a very sad chapter in Sara's life. Many of her friends were imprisoned, disappeared. I had the impression it was still very fresh, extremely traumatic. So I didn't want to go into the details.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: But, but I don't think you need to James because we know that this is still the case. Sorry. I mean, anyone who's listening to this will know that there are many people who have been imprisoned in Egypt for what are in effect political reasons.

JAMES HARPER: Yeah. And something that I found very chilling about this period immediately, you know, following the coup d'etat, the Sisi regime went on a witch hunt and what did the crush dissenting views. So obviously they went on the internet and scoured social media, but they also went to cafes.

SARAH: Well, because the cafes were a place where people are gathering, talking and assembling. It was also a target place for a crackdown. So the same places that were once a safe place were now a source of danger.

JAMES HARPER: And I heard stories of cafes that I was sitting in, for example, having video cameras installed and they'd identify the people who were in the cafes in those groups, discussing politics and then they would find them later and then imprison them.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: It's almost as if we're retelling that story of Mra the 4th 500 years later. Exactly.

JAMES HARPER: So for me, one of the sad elements of this is that the cafes which were a place for thriving political discourse and you know, a new Egypt nowadays, the way Sarah describes him to me, you know, they've lost their soul sterile.

JAMES HARPER: Do you think people would ever feel comfortable talking in a coffee shop again?

SARAH: No, no, nope, not here.

JAMES HARPER: Not anywhere but Jonathan, you know, in this story about Egypt, there's one final facet to the history of the coffee shop that still rings true as it has done for centuries on a typical chilly January Cairo evening, I was crisscrossing the streets around Tahir Square and found one of these street cafes and took one of the last seats available.

JAMES HARPER: The entire alleyway side to side was completely filled. Certainly over 100 people. This was literally the same street cafe that Zara would go where all this political discourse took place. You know, a decade ago, Zara told me that she herself would never come back to this cafe because you know, it's associated with so many painful memories. But this coffee shop it lives on and it seemed to me to be doing a thriving trade.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: This is kind of history repeating itself. People are still going to coffee houses to drink coffee. The Sisi regime, it hasn't banned coffee, hasn't banned coffee houses. It knows that would be too unpopular. So in that sense, this is the regime learning to live with the Coffee House.

JAMES HARPER: So Jonathan, we're back in Cafe 1001.

JAMES HARPER: And you know, when we started this episode, I did question whether cafes could play that transformative role that they have played in the past because you know, with social media, with digital ways of communicating, I mean, how does a cafe compete with that?

JAMES HARPER: But it was only after seeing the role of cafes and meeting spaces in Egypt during the revolution that I actually began to change my mind.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: What I would say James is, you know, the coffee shop, you know, still has a function. I mean, when times get tough, when we are trying to think about new ways of acting new behaviors when we're trying to deal with things externally, the coffee shop provides a point of reference for us, provides a place where we can go and meet discuss. Our ideas still has an important role for society today.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: So thanks for listening to the first episode of this new second series of the History Of Coffee Podcast.

JAMES HARPER: So, Jonathan, what's coming up in the next episode?

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Well, James, we're gonna talk about a quite dark story, the dark story of Haiti. The effects of colonialism on Haiti, how it became essentially one of France's wealthiest slave plantations growing coffee, how Haiti fell into revolution and how colonialism racism have kept Haiti poor even up to today.

JAMES HARPER: Now, if you're listening on my filter storage channel that will come out in two weeks. But if you want to hear it right now, head to the History Of Coffee Channel link in the show notes where we had the entire second series out right now.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: So James, I'm sure that people when listening to the episode are trying to imagine things in their head, what things look like? I'm gonna put some illustrations around English Coffee House and of course my fantasy football team hero Mr Rose on my social media Instagram At Coffee History JM.

JAMES HARPER: I'll be doing the same on my Instagram, which is at Filter Stories Podcast and I will share images that I took from Egypt. So you can see what the street cafes look like.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: And of course, folks, if you want to get more into coffee history, please buy a copy of my book Coffee, a Global History link in the show notes.

JAMES HARPER: And if you enjoyed what you heard, tell your friends about it also press subscribe on your podcast player. You can write a review on Apple podcast that really helps the algorithms suggest this to people who like history or coffee and something else.

JAMES HARPER: That's super cool. If you have an Instagram account, take a screen grab of yourself listening to this episode and then post it as a story and I'll repost it so I can give you direct. Thanks. Maybe you will do the same thing, Jonathan.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Of course, I will. Of course, I will. James is an important thanks I want to make and that's to Rancilio who enabled us to create this free educational content about the History Of Coffee and without them, we couldn't put this together.

JAMES HARPER: Absolutely not. So another way to support the show is to support Rancilio. And if you're in the market for a home espresso machine or even a coffee machine for your bar, we have a link in the show notes.

JAMES HARPER: So ah here your coffee was produced by me James Harper and yourself, Jonathan Morris. I edited the series and also write and play the piano music.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: And meanwhile, dear listener, next time you're in a Coffee House, maybe you want to think about fermenting a revolution.

JAMES HARPER: Let’s start a riot!