When I stumbled across this material, as a coffee addict, I thought it was a joke by some fellow coffee fanatic, kept awake at night by a pounding heart from the caffeine. But, no, there really is a book by Michael Pollan entitled: Caffeine: How Caffeine Created the Modern World. While coffee and tea are important to get many people going in the morning, to go through the mincer of the daily grind, the case is made that coffee and tea had profond impacts upon the development of the West: “It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the arrival of caffeine in Europe changed . . . everything.” “Coffee and tea ushered in a shift in the mental weather, sharpening minds that had been fogged by alcohol, freeing people from the natural rhythms of the body and the sun, thus making possible new kinds of work and, arguably, new kinds of thought, too.” These drinks led to coffee and tea houses that were the forums of the day for thought and discussion. Apparently, alcohol was too much of a depressant, while caffeine was a drug that got people thinking and moving.
It is plausible.
 
                    