<story><title>Coffee may have hastened the Ottoman Empire’s demise</title><url>https://www.1843magazine.com/food-drink/world-in-a-dish/how-turkish-coffee-destroyed-an-empire</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>t_mann</author><text>The article doesn’t seem to deliver on its headline. It seems plausible that urbanisation, economic growth and the emergence of a wealthy class with sufficient leisure time to hang out and discuss might also have had something to do with the spread of ideas about political freedoms. The article doesn’t touch on these at all, and doesn’t provide a compelling reason why the mentioned historic events wouldn’t have occurred without coffee. It seems more like a spurious correlation.</text></comment>
<story><title>Coffee may have hastened the Ottoman Empire’s demise</title><url>https://www.1843magazine.com/food-drink/world-in-a-dish/how-turkish-coffee-destroyed-an-empire</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>coldtea</author><text>&amp;gt;&lt;i&gt;Ethnic groups in European regions of the empire with an Eastern Orthodox Christian majority started agitating for independence. Nationalist leaders planned their tactics and cemented alliances in the coffee houses of Thessaloniki, Sofia and Belgrade. Their caffeine-fuelled efforts succeeded with the establishment of an independent Greece in 1821, Serbia in 1835, and Bulgaria in 1878. The reign of kahve was over.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Those things (the rise of nation states) would have happened with, or without the coffee, as they happened all around central and western Europe as well even earlier, and in the 20th century, all around the world.&lt;p&gt;There were several factors for that, including the rise of national awareness, easier promotion of such causes through typography, the decline of the Ottoman empire itself (the &amp;quot;Sick man of Europe&amp;quot; as it was called at the time), and the plain old fact that many regional majorities, especially Christians, were ruled over as second class citizens...</text></comment>