Coffee drinking spread from its region of origin to Arab lands and then to Europe and elsewhere. Coffeehouses served drinks while also becoming places to talk, read newspapers, and conduct business.
The relationship between coffeehouses and urban culture differed from place to place. Coffee trade also involved expanding cultivation, colonial commerce, and systems of labor.
Ottoman Empire
The first coffeehouses appeared in Damascus. These coffeehouses also made their way to Mecca, in the Arabian Peninsula in the 15th century, then spread to the Ottoman Empire's capital of Istanbul, when two Arab merchants, Hakem of Aleppo and Shems of Damascus, opened the first coffeehouse in the Tahtakale district in the 16th century and to Baghdad.
Coffeehouses became popular meeting places where people gathered to drink coffee, have conversations, play board games such as chess and backgammon, listen to stories and music, and discuss news and politics. They became known as "schools of wisdom" for the type of clientele they attracted, and their free and frank discourse.
Coffeehouses in Mecca became a concern of imams, who viewed them as places for political gatherings and drinking, leading to bans between 1512 and 1524. However, these bans could not be maintained, as coffee became ingrained in daily ritual and culture among Arabs and neighboring peoples.
England
The first coffeehouse in England was opened on the High Street (on the site of the later Grand Café) in Oxford in 1650 or 1651 by "Jacob the Jew". A second, competing coffeehouse was opened across the street (on the site of the later Queen's Lane Coffee House) in 1654, by "Cirques Jobson, the Jew". In London, the earliest coffeehouse was established by Pasqua Rosée (described as Greek, Armenian, or Turkish) in 1652. Anthony Wood observed of the coffeehouses of Oxford in 1674 "The decay of study, and consequently of learning, are coffy houses, to which most scholars retire and spend much of the day in hearing and speaking of news, in speaking vilely of their superiors." Pasqua Rosée was the servant of a trader in goods from the Ottoman Empire named Daniel Edwards, who imported the coffee and assisted Rosée in setting up the establishment there.
From 1670 to 1685, London coffeehouses began to increase in number, and also in political importance due to their popularity as places of debate. For the first several years, London's coffeehouses were the preserve of "a well-educated and commercial elite", but from the 1660s their popularity increased. By 1675, there were more than 3,000 coffeehouses in England; and in London alone there were perhaps 550 at their 18th-century peak. Many men found a coffeehouse a convenient place for doing business, holding consultations there and having mail for them sent there, as well as keeping up with news. The coffeehouses were great social levelers, open to all men and indifferent to social status, and as a result associated with equality and republicanism. Entry gave access to books or print news. The rich intellectual atmosphere of early London coffeehouses was available to anyone who could pay the sometimes one penny entry fee, giving them the name "penny universities".
Though Charles II tried to suppress coffeehouses as places where the "Idle and disaffected persons" met, and where "divers False, Malitious and Scandalous Reports are devised and spread abroad, to the Defamation of His Majesties Government", the public still flocked to them. For several decades following the Restoration, the wits gathered around John Dryden at Will's Coffee House, in Bow Street (although Jonathan Swift was unimpressed). As coffeehouses were believed to be areas where anti-government gossip could easily spread, Queen Mary II and the London City magistrates tried to prosecute people who frequented coffeehouses as they were liable to "spread false and seditious reports". William III's privy council also suppressed Jacobite sympathizers in the 1680s and 1690s in coffeehouses as places that they believed harbored plotters against the regime.