Here’s something I already knew.

Some/most of my favourite historical personalities accomplished the things that make them my favourites whilst drunk.

John Adams, for instance, liked to start each day with a couple of pints of cider.

Even up until the 1820s, you wouldn’t be given water in London hospitals, you would be given ale.

Naturally this is because water was much more likely to kill you. The implications of this are, according to Taras Grescoe, up until the seventeenth century if you were awake in Northern Europe you were drunk.

Germans, for example, before beginning their horrible day in the field would breakfast on something possibly much worse: beer soup. (Which is strong beer, heated, with the addition of whisked eggs, bread, salt and some more strong beer poured in once the soup was cooked).

But then one day something else appeared in the ports of Venice. Something black and dangerous. Kahveh.

If the reigning aristocracy in Europe had foreseen all the upheavals coffee would bring, they might have blockaded shipments of beans at major ports. With caffeine’s arrival early in the seventeenth century, first in Venice and Marseille, then in London and Amsterdam, Europe began its slow transformation from an easily managed depressant culture of beer soup, gin and wine, to a significantly more uppity stimulant culture of coffee, cacao, and tea.

The cultural theorist Michel Foucault dated the “rationalization” of Western civilization to the birth of the coffee house: a Lebanese Jew opened Europe’s first coffee shop in Oxford in 1650, and in 1689 a Florentine expatriate founded Paris’s first café, Le Procope, which is still a left bank institution. Caffeine seemed to wake the emerging middle classes from a long, alcoholic torpor. The Puritans in particular were fond of history’s first temperance beverage – suddenly there were alternatives to the inn and the tavern, where the evenings tended to end in incoherent maundering, brawls and the gutter.

That’s from a book called The Devil’s Picnic that I fished out of a discount bin at my local chain bookstore. It’s big fun and there’s only one left on Amazon so if you’re interested you’d better hustle… I won’t wait.

Let’s continue with the story of this rebellious brew.

It may be another case of commodity hyperbole -in which cod, salt or spices are seen as the motor force behind civilization- but caffeine’s presence at the birth of some of the key institutions of modernity seems more than fortuitous. Stock exchanges, insurance companies, and colossal corporations appeared with caffeine: Lloyd’s Coffee House, in Lombard Street, where shipowners and sea captains met with underwriters over a cup, became Lloyd’s of London, eventually the largest insurance company in the world, and across the Atlantic, Wall Street’s Tontine Coffeehouse became the New York Stock Exchange. The Royal Society, one of the world’s leading scientific clubs, was founded in the Oxford Coffee Club, where jittery empiricists were known to clear the tables for public dissections of dolphins.

Caffeine also abetted popular revolt. It was at a café in the Palais Royal that Camille Desmoulins leapt on a table to rouse the rabble against the aristocracy during the French Revolution. At New York’s Merchant Coffee House, the Sons of Liberty plotted against another caffeinated drink: British tea, and all the colonialism it represented. Not surprisingly, the new stimulants provoked widespread suspicion from the authorities… Coffee narrowly escaped condemnation by the Vatican in 1600 when conservative Catholic clerics attacked its black color and use by Moorish heathens as being a sure sign it was a demonic perversion of Eucharist wine; fortunately, Pope Clement VIII had a sip, liked the taste, and sent the prohibitionists packing.

In a 1675 proclamation, two days before Christmas, Charles II banned the retailing of coffee, chocolate, tea, and sherbet, arguing that the establishments where they were served were a fire hazard and attracted tradesmen who misspent time better employed in lawful callings. The real gravaman of the charge was that in such establishments “false, malicious and scandalous reports are devised and spread abroad to the defamation of His Majesty’s Government.” After protests… Charles exercised his “royal compassion”, revoking the ban eight days into the New Year.

But these were all rearguard actions. A newly sober Europe had awakened to the smell of coffee. Gone was the debauchery celebrated by Rabelais, Boccaccio and Villon: The harbinger of the new age was Samuel Johnson, whose dictionary was composed under the influence of up to forty cups a day, and its exemplar was Honoré de Balzac, whose multivolume, broadly stroked social dramas were pure caffeine prose: he even admitted to eating the powdered beans raw.

The next part is where I think the extract lines up perfectly with a Rune Soup readership; the hilarious -yet sobering- implications of an alternate future that could have happened if coffee had successfully been banned at any of the literally dozens of times it had been before the court or crown.

If psychoactive history had gone a little differently -if Kha’ir Beg and Frederick the Great had managed to permanently ban coffeehouses, or Pope Clement VIII had been served a particularly bitter cup of joe that day in 1600 -I might be accompanying my afternoon paper not with espresso, but with a pipe of opium, a bowl of hashish jelly, or a shot of laudanum. I’m not sure I wouldn’t rather live in a society where the approved intoxicants were more conducive to reverie; it would make jaywalking a riskier proposition, certainly, but I might hear more discussion of poetry at [my local cafe], rather than the usual agitated bitching about the performance of… the Montreal Canadiens.

We’d all complain about the aggressive caff-heads, with their telltale trembling hands, who were breaking into our apartments and stealing Velvet Underground CDs to score their next ziploc bag full of crystal caffeine. The emergency rooms would be clogged with victims of overdoses, and at Caffeine Anonymous meetings, recovering addicts would soothe their fried nerves with endless cups of poppy tea.

I like this story. But then I delight in the unintended consequences of small discoveries or long odds. I like it because it is the essence of chaos and probabilistic thinking.

Also I really like coffee.

It interests me that the dominant chemical consumed by mankind is implicated in our trend toward free thinking and independence.

Today, caffeine’s triumph is complete: the four most widespread words in the world, borrowed with small variations into virtually every language on earth, are also the names of the four most important caffeine-bearing plants: coffee, cacao, cola and tea.

So the next time you’re inhaling those rich, potent coffee fumes, say a silent thank you to the little plant spirit that could. Because we wouldn’t be our rebellious, freedom-loving selves without it.

Now, you don’t really need me to tell you how to make some, do you?