Decaffeinated Europe March 26, 2009
Posted by Brian Pfeifer in History.1 comment so far
Like many people in the industrialized world, I begin each morning with a cup of tea. How many internet startups were fueled by coffee and Mountain Dew? Coffee, tea, chocolate, and cola tend to spark the mind and ease our sagging spirits.
But…there was a time when Europe had no caffeine. No, I’m not talking about the shortages during WWII. Rather, there are no major caffeine sources native to Europe. The Roman Empire and its medieval successor states were caffeine free. They had no quick pick me ups in the middle of the afternoon. Their intellectuals couldn’t hang out at a coffee shop hammering out new models for the universe or human interaction.
My question is, did the arrival of caffeine impact the rate of technological and society changes in Europe? To do this, we first need to determine when major sources of caffeine became generally available. It’s not enough to say when the it started to trickle in, but rather when could the average middleclass man or woman enter a shop and buy a cup of coffee, tea, or chocolate?
Surprisingly, the answer is about the same for all three beverages. Since I’m a tea drinker, that’s where I’ll start. The Chinese consumed tea at least since the 10th Century BC. Tea drinking fueled all of the great Chinese empires. Their monks and other intellectual drank the golden liquor and refined its ceremonies. They passed tea drinking on to their Himalayan neighbors to the south, Mongolians to the north, and eventually to the Islamic nations to the west.
The Portuguese established their first Asian trading colony in Macau in 1557, and soon started sending tea samples back home. Czar Michael I of Russia received a gift of tea from China in 1618. This led to the great camel tea caravans connecting Russia and China. By the 17th Century, the Dutch East India Company was making regular tea deliveries to Holland, and coffee houses were popping up in England and on the continent.
The story of coffee is similar. Ethiopians were drinking coffee at least by the 9th Century. From there the beverage spread to their neighbors, making its way to Egypt, Arabia, and eventually Turkey. A lively cross Mediterranean trade sprang up and during the Renaissance small quantities of coffee appeared in Venice. In 1600 Pope Clement VIII paved the way for the further spread by declaring that coffee was an acceptable beverage for a Christian to drink. By the late 17th Century coffee houses were springing up in England.
Chocolate arrived in Europe courtesy of the Spanish conquest of Central and South America. Chocolate drinking was well established in prehistoric Mexico at least by 1100 BC. After the Spanish massacred the Aztecs, they brought cocoa beans back to Spain along with the rest of their loot. In 1585 a regular chocolate trade sprang up between Vera Cruz and Savilla. Like our other two beverages, chocolate drinking houses appeared in England by the middle of the 17th Century.
All three beverages appeared on the European stage at about the same time. Did these accelerate the pace of change on the continent? Can the spread of coffee to Arabia help explain the flowering of Islamic art, medicine, and scientific inquiry? How important were coffee, tea, and chocolate to establishing the modern world?
Chasing the Meme January 4, 2009
Posted by Brian Pfeifer in History, Language.add a comment
How do we trace the spread of ideas around the world? With hard technologies this is relatively straightforward. If you find a bronze mirror in a tomb from 200 BC, then you can be certain they had access to bronze mirrors in that location at that time. What about more abstract concepts like time? Linguistics may point to a method for tracking some of these concepts. For what follows I must acknowledge Professor John McWhorter and his lecture series, “Understanding Linguistics: The Science of Language.”
It has been demonstrated that there is link between the way we speak and the way we think in a several particular examples. I’m not talking about the classic Sapir-Worf hypothesis that grammar and vocabulary channel thought in a fairly gross way. Rather the Neo-Worfians have demonstrated less striking but more concrete links between some concepts and language. The two specific examples I know about are representations of time, and the gender of nouns.
To my knowledge the Neo-Worfians have not proven the causal link between the two. It could be that the thought processes dictate language development, or that the language dictates the thought process. They have, however, proven that there is a strong link between the two. For example, in English we have a tendency to talk about time in terms of length, as if you could measure it on a ruler. Spanish speakers, are more likely use terms of volume as if you could fill up a jar with time.
Daniel Cassanto conducted a series of experiments where he showed subjects a lengthening line or a jar filling with water as representations time measurements. The English speakers were much better at estimating the duration when using the line than the jar. The opposite held true for the Spanish speakers. Cassanto went on to confirm that this also holds true for Greek speakers who use length for time as well.
Our language clearly indicates how we think about this very abstract concept of measuring time. It is a theory that is easily testable for any language in the world, and I’m confident we will see it hold true in almost every case. Of course, we will probably find languages that use other methods for describing time, but that will only make the research richer.
Now, all of that was just background so we can get to the meat of this. A survey of the worlds languages can then be used to create a map of time measurement language, and therefore of thought. Who knows what patterns this exercise will reveal. More interestingly, this could be the start of discovering how these two (or more) concepts spread around the world.
Historical linguistics provides many tools for analyzing and reconstructing elements from our linguistic past, and even from dead languages. These could start to create a map of the movement of this idea through time. Thus leading us on the path to tracking down their origins in both time and space.
If this search yields an origin for these time concepts, and creates a distribution, then it will be valuable to research other words with a positive link between language and thought. What else could we look into? Perhaps the language of harvesting, or moving a boat, or anything we do that is more of a technique than a physical tool. For example, we pick fruit, and mow hay. Do our words indicate where we got these ideas from or how we think about the process? I don’t know, but the research tools exist. All we need to do is reach out and grab them.
