We take coffee shops for granted today. From global chain like Starbucks to classic Parisian cafés and local American diners, coffee shops deliver caffeine to people around the world.

Coffee consumption became global in the seventeenth century, when a coffee craze swept the Mediterranean and Europe.

A NPR food story offers a whimsical look back at attitudes toward coffee as its popularity spread in the early modern period.

Historians of food, consumption, and mercantilism have been studying early modern coffee production and consumption seriously now for several decades.  Students of HIST 458 Mediterranean World, 1450-1750 will be interested in the NPR story and the broader historical literature on coffee in the early modern world.