Maybe much more prosaic. The British were gin-soaked do-nothings running under an obsolete feudal system. Then coffee got introduced to London. Result: caffeine-fueled economic, military and scientific explosion.
This could also explain how Finland went from famine-stricken illiterate backwater in the late 19th century to a sophisticated social-democratic market economy a hundred years later. Finns drink the most coffee per capita in the world — it was just a question of getting a steady coffee supply.
That's backwards. Coffee was introduced into England before 1600. The first coffee house opened in Oxford in 1650. The explosion in the consumption of distilled spirits was half a century later, fuelled by the governments encouragement of the distilling industry and banning of French imports of spirrits. Hogarth's gin lane is from 1751.
But distilled liquors were a product of the Industrial Revolution. Of course it is perfectly possible to go about in an alcoholic haze on fermented drinks--Samuel Johnson said that the people in his hometown were soberer on wine than they had been on beer. But the scientific explosion preceded the gin.
