Consumerism, coffee houses and political activism
The Consumer Revolution
Empire transformed everyday life in Britain between 1688 and c.1730. Goods that had been royal luxuries in the early seventeenth century — tea, coffee, sugar, tobacco, chocolate — became widely available and affordable to the middle classes by the early eighteenth century. This was a consumer revolution. It was made possible by the expansion of colonial trade, the growth of the merchant navy, and the increasing use of enslaved African labour on Caribbean and American plantations that kept prices low.
Sugar consumption in England grew dramatically. By the early eighteenth century, England consumed more sugar per head than any other European country. Sugar sweetened tea, preserved jams, and featured in cooking in ways previously impossible. This demand drove the expansion of Caribbean sugar plantations, which in turn required more enslaved labour. The consumer revolution in Britain and the expansion of the slave trade were not separate phenomena: they were structurally connected.
Coffee Houses and Political Debate
Coffee houses were one of the most important social institutions of early eighteenth-century Britain. By 1700, London had over 2,000 coffee houses. They served as meeting points for merchants, politicians, writers and intellectuals. Business was conducted, newspapers were read aloud, and political opinions were formed. Lloyd’s coffee house (founded by Edward Lloyd) became the centre of marine insurance, eventually evolving into Lloyd’s of London — demonstrating how imperial trade and coffee-house culture were inseparable.
By 1700, London had over 2,000 coffee houses. They were centres of political debate, commerce (Lloyd’s marine insurance), and press culture (newspapers read aloud). Coffee itself was an imperial product from the Middle East and later the Caribbean; the houses exemplified how empire shaped domestic British culture.
Slave Ports and Popular Involvement in the Trade
The slave trade was not confined to a small merchant elite. Bristol, Liverpool and London developed as slave ports: cities whose civic wealth, employment, and supply chains were deeply entangled with slave-trading voyages. Shipbuilders, rope-makers, ironmongers, textile merchants, insurance brokers, and dock workers all participated indirectly in the trade. By the early eighteenth century Bristol had temporarily overtaken London as the leading slaving port. Ordinary British people invested in voyages, bought enslaved persons’ labour-produced goods, and worked in industries that supported the trade.
The slave trade required ideological justification. From the late seventeenth century, ideas of racial hierarchy — classifying people by skin colour and assigning them different capacities and rights — became more systematised in British thought. These ideas affected settled Black communities in Britain. A small but visible Black population lived in London and other cities, often as domestic servants, sailors or musicians. Some had been brought to Britain from the colonies. They faced discrimination, legal insecurity (their status in English law was ambiguous until the Somerset Case of 1772), and the pervasive assumption of inferiority promoted by pro-slavery ideology.
The consumer revolution and the slave trade were structurally linked: cheap sugar required enslaved labour on Caribbean plantations; British demand for sugar, tobacco and cotton drove demand for enslaved Africans. Critics including early Quaker abolitionists recognised this connection explicitly.
Opposition to slavery in this period was limited but not absent. Quakers (the Society of Friends) were the earliest organised opponents: their 1727–1731 meetings began formally condemning the slave trade. Some writers also drew attention to slavery: Aphra Behn’s novel Oroonoko (1688) made an enslaved African prince its tragic hero, and the Quaker Thomas Tryon attacked planters’ cruelty in print in the 1680s. Resistance also came from enslaved people themselves: rebellions on plantations were recorded throughout the Caribbean, and some enslaved people in Britain sought freedom through the courts. The abolitionist movement would not gain mass political momentum until the 1780s, but its intellectual roots lie in this period.
Press Culture and Political Activism
Coffee houses were inseparable from the growth of print culture. London’s first daily newspaper, the Daily Courant, appeared in 1702. By the 1710s and 1720s, journals like The Spectator (edited by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele) reached a wide readership through coffee houses, where copies were passed from reader to reader. Jonathan Swift’s political satires circulated in the same networks. This press culture created a new public sphere in which political opinions could be formed and challenged outside Parliament. The coffee house was the physical space where print culture and oral debate combined.
The same coffee-house networks that debated politics and insurance also debated the slave trade. The contradictions were not invisible to contemporaries. Olaudah Equiano — born in what is now Nigeria, enslaved as a child, eventually able to purchase his freedom — lived for periods in London and later became one of the most important voices against the slave trade. Equiano was born around 1745, so he belongs to the generation after this unit and his autobiography of 1789 is far too late to use as evidence for it. For 1688–c.1730 itself, use the settled Black population of London, whose legal status was deeply insecure.