A further large-scale contribution to the standard 'History of Parliament' series, covering 1690 1715."

This is the second of three volumes of Members' biographical studies in the five-volume set, The House of Commons 1690 1715, in 'The History of Parliament' series. The volumes provide essential information about the 1980 members of the house of Commons elected between 1690 and 1715. In addition to the 'political giants', much interest will be focused upon the less well-known Members, many of whose biographies have not previously appeared in print."

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.