How Coffee Changed the World

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Coffee was once put on trial. In 1511, the governor of Mecca brought it before the city's religious scholars to settle a single question: Is this drink dangerous? They let it go, and coffee spent the next five centuries changing where people gathered, what they talked about, and how they traded. This episode of 1440 Explores follows it from a wild Ethiopian shrub to the 2 billion cups the world drinks every day, by way of Sufi prayer halls in Yemen, the coffeehouses of the Ottoman Empire, the London coffee shop that became the London Stock Exchange, and the Brazilian plantations that ran on enslaved labor. Host Sony Kassam is joined by Professor Jonathan Morris of the University of…