What induced the British to adopt foreign coffee-drinking customs in the seventeenth century? Why did an entirely new social institution, the coffeehouse, emerge as the primary place for consumption of this new drink? In this lively book, Brian Cowan locates the answers to these questions in the particularly British combination of curiosity, commerce, and civil society. Cowan provides the definitive account of the origins of coffee drinking and coffeehouse society, and in so doing he reshapes our understanding of the commercial and consumer revolutions in Britain during the long Stuart century. Britain’s virtuosi, gentlemanly patrons of the arts and sciences, were profoundly interested in things strange and exotic. Cowan explores how such virtuosi spurred initial consumer interest in coffee and invented the social template for the first coffeehouses. As the coffeehouse evolved, rising to take a central role in British commercial and civil society, the virtuosi were also transformed by their own invention.

The essays selected for the first part of this volume offer an insight into the development, as distinguished from the history, of international humanitarian law. The focus of the majority of the works reprinted here is on an analysis of the adequacy of the law as it stood at the time of the respective publication and in the light of existing contemporary armed conflicts and military operations. Thus, the reader is afforded an in-depth look at the early roots of international humanitarian law, the continuing relevance of that body of law despite advances in weapons technology and the efforts to progressively develop it. International humanitarian law's development cannot be considered in isolation from its principles. The essays selected for the second part of the volume deal with the two fundamental principles underlying all of international humanitarian law: humanity and military necessity. The articles on the principles of humanity include reflections on the famous Martens Clause, and the analyses of military necessity take no account of 'Kriegsraison'. Moreover, they offer proof of the customary character of the principle of distinction in land, air and naval warfare.