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THE RISE OF THE COFFEEHOUSE RECONSIDERED

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 March 2004

BRIAN COWAN
Affiliation:
Yale University

Abstract

This article offers a history of British seventeenth-century coffeehouse licensing which integrates an understanding of the micro-politics of coffeehouse regulation at the local level with an analysis of the high political debates about coffeehouses at the national level. The first section details the norms and practices of coffeehouse licensing and regulation by local magistrates at the county, city, and parish levels of government. The second section provides a detailed narrative of attempts by agents of the Restoration monarchy to regulate or indeed suppress the coffeehouses at the national level. The political survival of the new institution is attributed to the ways in which public house licensing both regulated and also legitimated the coffeehouse. The rise of the coffeehouse should not be understood as a simple triumph of a modern public sphere over absolutist state authority; it offers instead an example of the ways in which the early modern norms and practices of licensed privilege could frustrate the policy goals of the Restored monarchy.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
2004 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

Along with the editors and referees of this journal, the author would like to thank David Harris Sacks, Tim Harris, and Keith Wrightson for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this article. Whitney Griswold fellowships from the Whitney Humanities Center, Yale University, supported research for this article.