Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War

by Howard W. French

The era of Barbados’s takeoff and of the sugar revolution that it produced was one of fundamental change in the development in Britain of what we now call civil society. The availability of hot, sweetened, stimulating drinks gave birth to the first coffee shop, which opened its doors in Oxford in 1650. From there, coffee shops quickly spread to London, where they proliferated, and this in turn helped rapidly establish a medium only recently invented in Germany: the newspaper. Gathering places like coffee shops and the availability of regularly printed political news in this format are what gave birth to a modern public sphere, to employ the terminology of the German philosopher and sociologist Jürgen Habermas. This is a fancy way of referring to the emergence of a richly enhanced shared sense of public affairs and citizen participation that emerged during the Enlightenment. For Habermas, conversations over caffeinated drink and newspapers in places like the coffee shop marked “the first time in history [that people] came together as equals to reason critically about public affairs.”