Ancient Coffee Houses Founded Today's Consumerism

Scientists from the University of Exeter, Exeter, UK and Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey have studied the role that coffee houses had in the evolution of the consumer.

Coffee houses are usually full of people, gathered around a good cup of coffee and having an interesting conversation, what is currently called “socializing”.

The study published in the Journal of Consumer Research, says that coffee houses were even more fashionable in the 1550's, within the Ottoman Empire.

The two scientists that focused on this matter are Eminegül Karababa ( University of Exeter, Exeter, UK) and Güliz Ger (Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey).

They went deep into the history of coffee houses in the early modern Ottoman Empire and discovered that these places often meant much more than a cup of Turkish coffee.

According to historical data, coffee house customers engaged in gambling, drug-taking, meeting with “young beautiful boys,” but also performing or watching entertainments such as puppet theaters, storytellers, and dance and musical performances.

The thing is that early coffee houses were very controversial places and thus they were very often banned by the state.

The authors of the study say that “formation, normalization, and legalization of such a site for transgressive pleasures was controversial since formal religious morality of the period (orthodox Islam) considered it as sinful and illegal.”

But as all illegal things, coffee houses flourished, and all Ottomans, regardless of their rank, met to drink coffee. Socialize and have literary discussions, by the sixteenth and seventeenth century.

Also, coffee houses were places where people talked a lot and these challenges of the authority of the state and religion led to many changes within the society.

'Simultaneously, a new Ottoman consumer, resisting the prescriptions of the state and religion, actively constructing self-ethics, and taking part in the formation of the coffeehouse culture, was forming as well,” the authors explain.

“Obviously, the early modern Ottoman context was very different than any modern capitalist system,” they write.

“But the active consumer may not be as recent or even a chronological phenomenon as many consumer researchers think.”