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Almost every empire in history has feared the same thing. It isn’t an army; it’s a room full of caffeinated people with contrarian opinions.

The story of coffee begins with goats.

The goats belonged to an Ethiopian goatherd named Kaldi, sometime around the ninth century (or so the story goes). Kaldi noticed his animals were behaving oddly – and by oddly I mean manically jumping all over the hillside – after nibbling the bright red berries from a certain shrub. Curious, Kaldi had a taste, felt the same jolt of energy, and immediately carried a handful of berries off to the nearby monastery to inform them of his miracle find.

A disapproving monk flung them into the fire in disgust, only for the characteristic roasting aroma to fill the room. The world’s first cup of coffee was brewed shortly thereafter. Our mornings have never been the same again.

It’s a wonderful story. It’s also almost certainly complete nonsense.

For one thing, the miraculous tale of Kaldi the caffeinated goatherd doesn’t appear anywhere in writing until 1671, some eight centuries after it supposedly happened, when a Roman scholar named Antoine Faustus Nairon worked it into a treatise. By then it had acquired all the hallmarks of a legend: the cavorting goats, the skeptical monk and the fortuitous fire. The only thing it was missing was evidence that it actually happened.

The truth is duller by comparison. Coffee cultivation and the practice of brewing the roasted beans emerged in Yemen around the fifteenth century, when Sufi monks drank it to stay awake through their night prayers. The true origin is less goat-inspired hillside epiphany, and more practical clergy looking for a way to keep their eyes open. 

The tired monks are less fun to imagine than the goats, but they do remind us that coffee has served a very particular purpose from the very beginning. It kept people awake, alert, and – crucially – talking.

Ban the bean

One thing about a substance that both sharpens the mind and loosens the tongue: people in charge tend not to like it.

In 1511, the governor of Mecca, a man named Khair Beg, banned coffee outright. His reasoning was that coffee was being consumed in coffeehouses, and coffeehouses were where people gathered. Where people gathered and drank coffee, they talked, and when they talked, they occasionally decided that the governor was doing a poor job.

Coffee, according to Khair Beg, stimulated the kind of radical, unsupervised thinking that a governor who wants to keep his job needs to nip in the bud.

Sadly for him, his ban didn’t last; the Sultan overruled him, declared coffee sacred, and (according to legend) had Khair Beg executed. This set the pendulum swinging. For the next two centuries, coffee would be banned, unbanned, exalted and re-banned across the Ottoman empire.

Sultan Murad IV of Istanbul took the anti-coffee stance further than anyone. In the 1630s, he banned coffeehouses across the empire, claiming that they were breeding grounds for political dissent and idle plotting. Enforcement was famously brutal, and Murad is said to have prowled the streets of Constantinople himself in disguise, carrying a giant broadsword that he used to behead anyone caught drinking or roasting coffee.

Even under the threat of (rumoured) broadsword-induced death, the bans never really stuck. People just moved their coffee drinking underground.

An ocean away, the tea-loving English caught the same fever. When coffeehouses spread through seventeenth-century London, they earned the nickname “penny universities”. For the price of a single penny, anyone could buy a cup of coffee, sit in a coffeehouse and argue for hours about politics, science and business with whichever academic or philosopher wandered in.

Lloyd’s of London, which is now one of the largest insurance markets on earth, began as Edward Lloyd’s coffeehouse, a cosy spot where ship-owners and merchants would gather to gossip about which vessels had sunk. The London Stock Exchange has similarly caffeinated roots in Jonathan’s Coffee House.

King Charles II saw all this chatter and drew the same conclusion as the departed Khair Beg. In 1675, he issued a proclamation shutting down the coffeehouses, condemning them as places where “idle and disaffected persons” spread scandalous reports about his government. It was a thinly-veiled admission that the king was afraid of what his subjects were saying about him over coffee.

The public – no doubt jonesing for their caffeine fix – made it clear that they were having none of it. Within 11 days, the king was forced to back down and the coffeehouses reopened. Baristas: 1, Royalty: 0.

Perhaps you can outlaw a bean, behead a coffee roaster, brick up a coffeehouse or draft a proclamation in your most threatening royal font. What you cannot do is ban a conversation – and coffee, inconveniently for the people in charge, has always been just the excuse for people to sit down and have one.

Victory, served piping hot

Three centuries later, the once-seditious beverage has completed its journey from feared contraband to the most respectable drug on the planet.

The world now drinks over 2.25 billion cups of coffee every single day, according to the International Coffee Organization. The global coffee market is valued around $250 billion (estimates vary, but all of them are enormous), a figure that would have made every governor, sultan or king who ever tried to ban it weep tears of lost tax revenue. In the United States, 67% of American adults now drink coffee each day, with consumption at a 20-year high – an average of three cups per person, per day.

The world’s most devoted drinkers, though, are the Finns: Finland consistently tops global per-capita consumption at around 12 kilograms of coffee per person per year (an average of over 4 cups per day).

And the market is still climbing, with projections that it will reach nearly $380 billion by 2033, driven by the twin engines of specialty coffee and the fast-growing markets of Asia, where China’s coffee consumption is expanding rapidly among a burgeoning urban middle class. 

There is a certain poetry in it, isn’t there?

It was never really the taste. It was caffeine and an excuse to sit down together, stay awake, and talk. Every ruler who tried to stamp it out understood that instinctively. Every one of them lost.

Khair Beg lost. Charles II lost. Sultan Murad IV lost. The berries won.

This is worth remembering the next time you’re in one of coffee’s modern temples. It could be your local gossip venue with familiar faces, or a garagiste roastery, or one of the recognisable brands.

It looks so domesticated now, as a place to answer emails and queue for flat whites. But you’re sitting in the direct descendant of what was once the most feared room in the world – the penny university, the den of dissidents, the place governors executed men to shut down.

The censors were right to be afraid, in the end. They just couldn’t have imagined that the revolution they were trying to prevent would win so completely that we’d stop noticing it was ever dangerous at all. And since I believe that all goats are inherently anarchists, I think Kaldi’s goats, if they were ever real, would be delighted.

Forward this to your boss the next time your coffee break is denied. And if you are that boss, give it careful thought – do you rank your job security above kings and sultans?

About the author: Dominique Olivier

Dominique Olivier uses her love of storytelling and ideation to help brands solve problems.

Her first book, Lessons from Loss, has been published by Penguin Random House.

She is a weekly columnist in Ghost Mail and collaborates with The Finance Ghost on Ghost Mail Weekender, a Sunday publication designed to help you be more interesting.

You can learn more about her work at dominiqueolivier.com and she can be reached on LinkedIn here.