Coffee has its history as far back as the 9th century. It is thought to have originated in the highlands of Ethiopia and spread to the rest of the world via Egypt and Europe.[5] The word coffee is derived from the Arabic word Qah'wa over Ottoman Turkish Kahve, which originally meant wine or other intoxicating liquors. Partly due to the Islamic prohibition on drinking wine, preparing and drinking coffee became an important social ritual. The effects of coffee were such that it became forbidden among orthodox and conservative imams in Mecca at 1511 and at Cairo in 1532 by a theological court. In Egypt, coffeehouses and warehouses containing coffee berries were sacked. But the product's popularity, particularly among intellectuals, led to the reversal of this decision in 1524 by an order of the Ottoman Turkish Sultan Selim I.[6] In the 15th century, Muslims introduced coffee in Persia, Egypt, northern Africa and Turkey, where the first cafeteria, Kiva Han, opened in 1475 in Constantinople.

From the Muslim world, coffee spread to Europe, where it became popular in the 17th century. Dutch traders were the first to start large scale import of coffee into Europe. In 1538, Léonard Rauwolf, a German physician, having come back from a ten-year trip in the Near East, was the first westerner to describe the brew: "A beverage as black as ink, useful against numerous illnesses, particularly those of the stomach. Its consumers take it in the morning, quite frankly, in a porcelain cup that is passed around and from which each one drinks a cupful. It is composed of water and the fruit from a bush called bunnu."[7] These remarks were noted by merchants, who were sensitive to this kind of information through experience in the commerce of spices. English coffeehouses were centers of intellectual and commercial activity. Lloyds of London, the famous insurance firm, was originally a coffeehouse