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Illuminates how coffee tied the economic future of the early United States to the wider Atlantic world Coffee is among the most common goods traded and consumed worldwide, and so omnipresent its popularity is often taken for granted. But even everyday habits have a history. When and why coffee become part of North American daily life is at the center of
Coffee Nation. Using a wide range of archival, quantitative, and material evidence, Michelle Craig McDonald follows coffee from the slavery-based plantations of the Caribbean and South America, through the balance sheets of Atlantic world merchants, into the coffeehouses, stores, and homes of colonial North Americans, and ultimately to the growing import/export businesses of the early nineteenth-century United States that rebranded this exotic good as an American staple. The result is a sweeping history that explores how coffee shaped the lives of enslaved laborers and farmers, merchants and retailers, consumers and advertisers.
Coffee Nation also challenges traditional interpretations of the American Revolution, as coffee's spectacular profitability in US markets and popularity on the new nation's tables by the mid-nineteenth century was the antithesis of independence. From its beginnings as a colonial commodity in the early eighteenth century, coffee's popularity soared to become a leading global economy by the 1830s. The United States dominated this growth, by importing ever-increasing amounts of the commodity for drinkers at home and developing a lucrative re-export trade to buyers overseas. But while income generated from coffee sales made up an expanding portion of US trade revenue, the market always depended on reliable access to a commodity that the nation could not grow for itself. By any measure, the coffee industry was a financial success story, but one that runs counter to the dominant narrative of national autonomy. Distribution, not production, lay at the heart of North America's coffee business, and its profitability and expansion relied on securing and maintaining ties first with the Caribbean and then Latin America.
Über den Autor / die Autorin
Michelle Craig McDonald is the Librarian/Director of the Library and Museum at the American Philosophical Society, founded in 1743 and the oldest learned society in North America. The APS has more than 14 million pages of manuscripts and 300,000 printed volumes, with particular strengths in early American history, the history of science, and Native American and Indigenous cultures. Dr. McDonald earned her Ph.D. in History from the University of Michigan where she focused on business relationships and consumer behavior between North America and the Caribbean during the 18th and 19th centuries. She also holds a master's in Liberal Arts from St. John's College, Annapolis, a master's in Museum Studies from George Washington University, and a bachelor's in History from the University of California, Los Angeles, and was the Harvard-Newcomen Postdoctoral Fellow in Business History at the Harvard Business School. She is the co-author of
Public Drinking in the Early Modern World: Voices from the Tavern (Pickering & Chatto/Routledge Press, 2011), and her current monograph,
Coffee Nation: How One Commodity Transformed the Early United States, will be published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in spring 2025.
