Born in the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Islamic world — above all Istanbul — and reaching London and other European cities by the mid-1600s, the coffeehouse sold a stimulant rather than a depressant, keeping its customers awake, sober, and talking. Out of London's coffeehouses came Lloyd's insurance market, the trading floors that seeded the stock market, and early newspapers. Jürgen Habermas called the coffeehouse the classic site of the bourgeois public sphere; historians since have qualified how open and egalitarian it actually was, and how thoroughly it excluded women.
For the price of one cup of coffee, you could walk into a London coffeehouse around 1700 and join a room of strangers reading the latest news aloud, arguing over it, and striking deals across the tables. Contemporaries called these places 'penny universities,' because a penny bought entry and an education in the day's affairs. Out of that smoky, caffeinated talk grew things that still run the world: the insurance market of Lloyd's of London began in Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, traders barred from the Royal Exchange did business in Jonathan's and Garraway's and seeded the stock market, and newspapers found their first readers. The coffeehouse was the room where the modern public learned to gather, and the institutions it hatched outlived the room itself.