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Read the text on the right and then review the Documents below:
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Stimulants, Sociability, and Coffeehouses As the world’s trading networks expanded, the great merchants of Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas also globalized and popularized many new commodities. None were more enthusiastically received around the world than a group of stimulants-coffee, cocoa, sugar, tobacco, and tea-all of which, except for sugar, were slightly or highly addictive and had the added feature of producing a sense of well-being. Previously, many of these products had been grown in isolated parts of the world. Yemen had been the only location in the fifteenth century for the distribution of the coffee bean. Tobacco and cocoa were New World products, and sugar, while it originated in Bengal, did not become a product with a vast global market until it began to be cultivated on a large scale on American plantations. Yet, by the seventeenth century, in nearly every corner of the world, the well-to-do classes began to congregate in coffeehouses, consuming these new products and engaging in sociable activities. Although sugar was probably consumed in larger amounts than any other product in this group, coffee and coffeehouses gained the greatest notoriety among the well-to-do. Coffeehouses everywhere served as locations for social exchange, political discussions, and business activities. Yet, they also varied from cultural area to cultural area, reflecting the values of the society in which they arose. The coffeehouse first appeared in Islamic lands toward the end of the fifteenth century. As its consumption caught on among the well-to-do and leisured classes in the Arabian peninsula and the Ottoman empire, local growers protected their advantage by monopolizing its cultivation and sale and refusing to allow any seeds or cuttings from the coffee tree to be taken abroad. Despite some religious opposition, coffee spread into Egypt and throughout the Ottoman empire in the sixteenth century. Ottoman bureaucrats, merchants, and artists assembled in coffeehouses to trade stories, to read, to listen to poetry, and to play chess and backgammon. Indeed, so deeply connected were the coffeehouses with the literary and artistic lives of many people that they were referred to as schools of knowledge. From the Ottoman territories, the culture of coffee drinking spread to Western Europe. The first coffeehouse in London opened in 1652, and such establishments soon proliferated. By 1713, there were no fewer than 500 coffeehouses in London. The Fleet Street area of London was filled with so many of these establishments that the English essayist Charles Lamb commented "that the man must have a rare recipe for melancholy who can be dull in Fleet Street." Although the coffeehouses attracted people from all levels of society, they especially appealed to the new mercantile and professional classes as locations where stimulating beverages like coffee, cocoa, and tea easily led to lively conversations. Here, too, there were opponents, some of whom claimed that an excessive drinking of coffee destabilized the thinking processes and even resulted in conversions to Islam. But against such opposition, the pleasures of coffee, tea, and cocoa prevailed. These bitter beverages in turn required liberal doses of the sweetener, sugar. A smoke of tobacco topped off the experience. In this environment of pleasure, patrons of the coffeehouses indulged their addictions, engaged in gossip, conducted business, and talked politics. The most ardent European exponents of coffee even suggested that its consumption would moderate another of the addictions that beset many people-the use of beer, wine, and spirits, often to excess. But this was destined not to be. Samuel Johnson, one of England’s most astute observers, wryly observed that "a man is never happy in the present unless he is drunk."
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