Thayne Andersen's comments about the role played by taverns in the American
Revolution are very helpful, but they do beg another question. On the other
side of the Atlantic - notably in England and the Ottoman Empire in the
mid-seventeenth century and France in the late eighteenth - it was coffee
bars that were perceived as the centres of sedition, whereas taverns were
regarded as relatively harmless places where men let off steam but did not
plot against the government. That was why, for example, in Istanbul in the
1650s, the Grand Vizier Mehmed Koprulu closed down the coffee houses but
left the taverns alone - even though the wine that was drunk in the latter
was forbidden by both secular and religious law. Does this tell us anything
about the differences between American and European society at this period?
Or does it simply tell us that they didn't have the same sort of system of
coffee bars in America? In other words, if Thomas Jefferson did compose one
of his drafts of the Declaration of Independence in a tavern, was that
because Philadelphia did not have any coffee bars?