It’s more accurate to say that the “modern era” (1600s and onwards, the Enlightenment , etc.) was boosted by coffee, because the Renaissance was larger over by the time the bean arrived from Arabia.

Definitely a lot of modern ideas and institutions had their origins in coffee shops, though.

> I have a theory that the renaissance and perhaps more critically the industrial revolution that followed was in a large part driven by coffee.

Don't forget the concentrated wealth created during the Trans-Atlantic slave trade through the use and selling of slaves by the Portuguese between Africa and South America

There is some truth to this (https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1f111dq/til_...)

You’re in good company. Tom Standage makes the same argument in his book A History of the World in Six Glasses.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3872.A_History_of_the_Wo...

Erdos famously took amphetamines his whole life, and they made him fabulously productive:

> In 1979, Graham bet Erdös $500 that he couldn't stop taking amphetamines for a month. Erdös accepted the challenge, and went cold turkey for thirty days. After Graham paid up--and wrote the $500 off as a business expense--Erdös said, "You've showed me I'm not an addict. But I didn't get any work done. I'd get up in the morning and stare at a blank piece of paper. I'd have no ideas, just like an ordinary person. You've set mathematics back a month." He promptly resumed taking pills, and mathematics was the better for it.

I think about this a lot. I drink a lot of coffee and I feel reasonably productive. But hey, maybe I should try something a bit stronger... :

Now the curious thing will be if people attribute the rapid pace of technological development in this new century to the advent of widespread amphetamine. A large number of Stanford students are on it, and likely many other top universities have similar properties.

Yes, I've been thinking this as well. Although, earlier civilisations probably also consumed lots of stimulants; mayas, incas, probably countless more.

I had wondered about the same for nicotine, being a neurostimulant.

To get the coffee and other things european men had to be sent out on ships to rape the world, and they would only do that if they were drunk. The Renaissance and the Industrial revolution were built on the spoils of exploitation, of which coffee was one.

It gets you up and going until you build resistance then it becomes a need.

nah coffee really didn’t do much for me, i started drinking daily at 30