ABSTRACT
Precise figures for European consumption of tobacco, coffee, chocolate and tea during the eighteenth century are lacking but available estimates provide evidence of a remarkable phenomenon. The consumption of these commodities grew as follows: tobacco, from 50 million to 125 million pounds; coffee from 2 million to 120 million pounds; chocolate from 2 million to 13 million pounds; and tea from 1 million to 40 million pounds.4 Europe’s population grew by more than 50 per cent but there was much more to this consumer revolution in soft drugs than demographic change alone.5 The Age of the Enlightenment embraced a new lifestyle in which tea, coffee, chocolate and tobacco together with sugar, the fruits of overseas expansion and commercial capitalism, played a critical cultural role.6 It was not, as might first be supposed, embraced by only the ruling or even the middle classes: all of these commodities were being mass consumed by the 1720s or 1730s in large parts of Europe.7
