Introduction: Coffee and Global Development

Summary

That cup of coffee you sip at your breakfast table, desk, or café comes from far away. It was grown in Brazil, Colombia, Vietnam, the Ivory Coast, or one of a hundred other coffee-producing lands on five continents. It is a palpable and long-standing manifestation of globalization. For 500 years coffee has been grown in tropical countries for consumption in temperate regions, linking peoples of different lands and continents by trade, investment, immigration, conquest, and cultural and religious diffusion. There is a world of history in your cup.

An increasingly sophisticated study of world history is a means of understanding these processes. We have thus brought together scholars from nine countries, who cover coffee markets and societies over the last five centuries in fourteen countries on four continents and across the Indian and Pacific oceans, with a special emphasis on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We analyze a wide variety of issues, related to economic, political, and cultural development, to see how they have played out over the last centuries in different parts of the globe, under different political arrangements: the creation and function of commodity, labor, and financial markets; the role of race, ethnicity, gender, and class in the formation of coffee societies; the interaction between technology and ecology; and the impact of colonial powers, nationalist regimes, and the forces of the world economy in the forging of economic development and political democracy.