Cairo’s cafés, bars, and gaming rooms more than tripled in a decade

Evidence

The number of cafés, bars, and gaming rooms in Cairo increased more than threefold, from 2,316 to 7,475, in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Descriptions of café life are found frequently in the literature of the period, particularly that concerned with describing the country’s state of disorder. They enabled the writer to follow the existence of the crowd into confined, interior spaces. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 374

Categorization

• QUESTION: What drove this tripling — population growth, economic change, or policing that pushed leisure indoors? Worth chasing.