How much do you know about the little secrets of coffee?

Coffee starts our day, keeps our work breaks organized, and prepares our three meals a day for a delicious meal.

As the world's second largest commodity, coffee has become an indispensable part of modern life. It is unimaginable to live in a world without coffee.

But it took coffee five hundred years to become your delicious breakfast beverage, and along the way it traveled across four continents and was given many different roles.

Next you will see:

● Coffee was once considered a panacea from God

● Can coffee cure diseases or make men impotent?

● In Europe, coffee shops have a lot of uses

● In the United States, coffee finally became a popular drink

[US] Pomeranz, Steven Topik

Translator: Huang Zhongxian and Wu Liwei

This article is excerpted from "The World Created by Trade"

Authorization has been obtained, the content has been deleted

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Coffee was once considered a panacea from heaven

Legend has it that an Ethiopian shepherd was so surprised to see his sheep become excited and disorderly after chewing bitter berries that he started to jump around in excitement himself, picking up the berries and putting them in his mouth.

He discovered the secret effect of coffee, and it was this secret effect that eventually led to the establishment of coffee in Yemen.

Become a local crop.

The Arabs who transported the berries from Ethiopia to the other side of the Red Sea were probably slave traders who captured and sold black people, making it seem that the drink was inseparable from slavery from the beginning (the tragic combination of coffee and slavery did not end until four hundred years later).

In the middle of the 15th century, Sufis on the Arabian Peninsula discovered that coffee helped them stay awake when thinking about Allah, so coffee was first favored by Islamic sects. However, conservative Islamic theologians worried that its addictive properties would lead people astray from the path of exploring the highest realm, so coffee was soon denounced by these theologians.

In 1511, they burned bags of coffee beans in the streets of Mecca.

Later, the Turkish Grand Vizier (Prime Minister) issued an edict that anyone who ran a coffee house would be punished with a beating; if the offender committed the same offense again, he would be sewn into a leather bag and thrown into the Strait of Istanbul .

These rulers certainly had to worry about coffee's ability to serve as a medium for human interaction.

The coffee houses in Cairo, Istanbul, Damascus, and Algiers became hotbeds of political intrigue and venues for debauchery and immorality .

From stimulant to addictive to subversive, coffee’s development trajectory will be repeated again and again in other countries and other continents.

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Can coffee cure diseases or make men impotent?

In Europe, coffee became popular in the 17th century, coinciding with the rise of commercial capitalism.

This medieval Middle Eastern bean was transformed into a Western capitalist commodity.

Fortunately, it was first introduced to Europe by Venetian traders . Thank goodness! Otherwise, we probably wouldn't have espresso and cappuccino.

But those who first dealt in coffee viewed it as medicine , believing it could cure eye pain, edema, gout, and scurvy.

Soon, London traders began to discuss business over coffee in coffee houses, and coffee houses doubled in number as commercial centers .

Jonathan's and Garraway's Coffee Houses served as the main stock exchanges in England for seventy-five years; the Virginia and Baltic Coffee Houses served as commercial and shipping exchanges for one hundred and fifty years; and Lloyd's Café became the world's largest insurance company.

Coffee houses also served as office buildings, "penny universities" for disseminating the latest news, and the earliest men's clubs.

Coffee promoted business development, but angered wives, who hated their husbands for indulging in dark and noisy coffee shops and unanimously criticized "this inferior, black, thick, dirty, bitter, smelly, disgusting quagmire water" , claiming that coffee made men impotent.

What King Charles II of England was more worried about was not that going to coffee houses might interfere with men's family responsibilities, but that people who went there would discuss political affairs. So he set out to close coffee houses, but failed .

It was not until the rise of the East India Company and the establishment of India as a British colony that Britain changed its ways and became a country that only loves drinking tea.

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In Europe, coffee houses have a lot of uses

In Europe, coffee houses gradually became a symbol of those who had become wealthy due to the capitalist economy and a place to serve such people, who constituted the emerging leisure class, which was later called the coffee house society.

But coffee’s journey to mainstream popularity has not been smooth sailing.

There is a lot of debate about the medical value of coffee .

In Sweden, a pair of twin brothers were sentenced to death for murder. King Gustav III used the fine scientific tradition to conduct an experiment on the two death row prisoners. He spared their lives, but required one of them to drink only tea in prison, while the other could only drink coffee. As a result, the tea drinker died first (at the age of 83), and Sweden has since become the country with the highest per capita coffee consumption in the world .

Frederick the Great of Prussia was less enlightened and more concerned with the political leanings and trade balance of his subjects than their health.

He made coffee a national monopoly .

This was an attempt to discourage civilians from drinking the beverage.

High import taxes meant that only the richer people in the big cities could afford coffee, but he still failed to achieve his goal. The same was true in France and Austria.

But in capitals, coffee houses flourished. According to Thomas Brennan, the popularity of coffee houses in Paris confirmed "the determination of the upper classes to have their own meeting places and not to mix with the lower classes." But these were successful upper classes, upper bourgeois people .

The advantage of coffee is that it can refresh the body and cleanse the soul at the same time. Some coffee houses, such as Procope in Paris (the first coffee house in France), are communication centers for people in the arts and literary circles. People like Voltaire satirized the absurdity of the aristocracy here.

Café Heinrichhof in Vienna brought business inspiration to money-loving businessmen, and also brought creative inspiration to Brahms and other great composers.

● Café Heinrichhof

Other cafés, like my grandmother's Café Mozart in Vienna, offered cards, billiards, and such lighter pastimes.

It was in the relaxed atmosphere of the café that major developments were brewing.

Illegally operated coffee houses are closely linked to the birth of civil society, the emergence of public space, and the disintegration of the semi-feudal aristocracy.

It is not surprising, therefore, that Camille Desmoulins planned the storming of the Bastille (an act that some argue marked the beginning of the modern world) at the Café Foy on July 13, 1789.

During the French Revolution, coffee houses continued to be hotbeds of conspiracy and discontent.

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In America, coffee finally becomes a popular drink

As the industrial age was born from clanging factories, coffee came to represent not only leisure but also labor .

In the United States, coffee has become a popular addictive drink used to help a large number of working people prop up their drooping eyelids and awaken their increasingly distracted vision.

Coffee's primary role, no longer as a drink for religious meditation, business, or leisure, has become an alarm clock that represents the industrial age .

By the late 19th century, coffee houses gave way to cafeterias and coffee social circles gave way to coffee breaks in the workplace.

North American coffee imports expanded nearly ninety times during the 19th century.

At this time, the customers walking slowly in groups of three or five in the factory cafeteria were not seeking inspiration from Allah like the early Muslim customers, nor were they seeking profits like the London merchants, nor were they seeking creative inspiration like the European coffee drinkers. What they sought was to survive.

In certain cafés they plotted the overthrow of bourgeois society.

The promotion of coffee and coffee houses by a prohibitionist society to eliminate drunkenness in taverns is a historical joke. Islamic theologians would be stunned to learn that coffee, derived from the Arabic word qahwah (meaning "wine"), was promoted as a remedy for alcoholism, one of the major social ills of the industrial age.

In the 20th century, coffee was criticized for causing heart disease and ulcers , and its energy-boosting properties were neglected, but its consumption continued to increase.

Coffee is not drunk in meditation or social situations, but is often gulped down while driving or rushing on the road.

Coffee has not only accelerated the frenetic pace of modern industrial life, but has itself become a mass-produced industrial commodity.

Some modern beverages that are processed by mixing multiple ingredients brazenly call themselves coffee, but in fact they were invented by chemists rather than farmers.

Coffee has been domesticated, commercialized, and adulterated with inferior additives, losing its purity; some religions still denounce the evils of coffee, but coffee has lost its subversive edge.

From Ethiopia to Yemen to the coffee plantations of Europe and Latin America, coffee has accompanied the development of the modern world.

From God-given panacea to bourgeois drink to industrial commodity, coffee has become the drink of the workplace .

This article is from Vision TV, authorized by Entrepreneur, slightly edited, copyright belongs to the author, and the content only represents the author's independent views. [Download Entrepreneur APP to understand the 7,000 most profitable businesses in China]