Nineteenth- and twentieth-century coffeehouses in Cairo functioned as a hub for politicians, revolutionaries, intellectuals, writers, middle- and upper-class men and women, workers, immigrants, and people from different ethnic, racial, and religious communities. Indeed, coffeehouses were more than just a meeting place, they were a social, political, and cultural institution in Egypt, that bore the impact of sweeping processes of change occurring within Egyptian society, including Westernization, economic globalization, modernization, and reform. For example, new, European-style, coffeehouses were part and parcel of the immense urban development projects that, starting in the 1860s, created new neighborhoods in Cairo, modeled after European capitals, especially Paris. Drawing on an array of archival sources, such as Egyptian secret police reports and informants reports from the 1890s and 1910s, British intelligence reports from 1919, photographs, travel guides, maps, and statistical yearbooks, this presentation will trace the history of Cairo’s coffeehouses, roughly between the 1860s and the 1960s, as an urban space in the intersection of leisure culture, public norms, and engagement with the state. It will describe how the European-style, “modern” coffeehouses, established by European immigrants, brought in new forms of sociability that changed gender dynamic in the public sphere, as well as new foodways, new leisure practices, and new urban design. It will discuss how these new practices marked elite social class, and contrasted with those coffeehouses that became “traditional” ones. This presentation will show how those places and practices were received by different groups of Egyptians, who both participated in them, and used them as sites for developing new national and anti-colonial sentiment. In this context, it will examine how Cairo’s coffeehouses turned from a site for discussing government policy to a site of political activism, inducing the Egyptian state, and later the British colonial one, to put them under strict surveillance and policing. It is surprising how scholarly attention devoted solely to the institution of the coffeehouse in the Middle East has remained relatively meager, certainly in comparison with the volume of scholarship on coffeehouses in Western Europe. This presentation will fill in some of that gap. At a time when many historians are constantly searching for “sites,” sometimes imagined or abstract ones, to investigate, coffeehouses provide an opportunity to study real, concrete places that shaped and were shaped by the historical forces of their age.