Profs & Pints Richmond: The Rise of the Coffeehouse

Profs and Pints Richmond presents: “The Rise of the Coffeehouse,” on the origins, economics and impact of a centuries-old gathering place, with Byron “Trey” Carson, associate professor of economics and business at Hampden-Sydney College and scholar of coffeehouses’ history.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/profsandpints/rise-of-the-coffeehouse .]

Over the centuries some coffeehouses have pretty much just served coffee. Others, however, have served a much bigger purpose, spurring so much economic, social, and political activity that they arguably deserve part of the credit for “the Great Enrichment,” the conservatively estimated 3000 percent increase in human flourishing since 1800.

How did some coffee houses manage to give humanity such a morning jolt?

Enjoy taking in the fascinating answers to such questions with Professor Byron Carson, who regularly teaches courses about the economic way of thinking and whose research has used the lenses of entrepreneurship and institutional economics to explore the rise of coffeehouses in Istanbul and London.

He’ll talk about the origins of coffee and how a growing coffee trade led to the proliferation of coffeehouses in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century cities. And he'll explore how coffeehouses served different roles in different communities.

In cities like London coffeehouses became much more than places to drink coffee. They were spaces where people from all backgrounds could socialize and gossip. Being themselves driven by entrepreneurial projects and profit opportunities, they became places where people acquired important economic information and nurtured burgeoning stock markets. They sponsored estate auctions and book sales and drew people intent on debating scientific discoveries or fomenting political dissent.

Coffeehouses throughout the Ottoman empire, however, served elite over common interests and ultimately likely were a source of stagnation.
We’ll examine what was percolating in London but not in the Ottoman empire, and we’ll discuss what, if anything, we can learn from history to enhance the perks of coffee culture in an era of baristas, fair trade, and “third spaces.” (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image: An anonymous artist’s painting of an old Viennese coffeehouse, from roughly 1900 (Wikimedia Commons).