Abstract

"Bitterness and Power: The Transformation of Coffee into a U.S. Staple"

Christian Robles-Baez, Stanford University (robles-baez@stanford.edu)

One of the most significant transformations in nineteenth-century global trade was the rise of coffee as a staple in the United States. Although Americans had consumed coffee since the colonial period, it was only from the 1820s—when prices entered a sustained decline (over 80%)—that the beverage became widely accessible across social classes and regions. This affordability was driven above all by Brazil’s spectacular expansion of coffee production and exports. Between the 1820s and 1850s, Brazil multiplied its shipments abroad, finding in the United States its most important market. By mid-century, the two countries had become the central poles of the world coffee economy: Brazil as dominant producer, the United States as leading consumer. This paper underscores Brazil’s central role in reshaping U.S. consumption patterns and transforming coffee into a mass commodity. Falling Brazilian prices allowed coffee to reach not only urban elites but also rural populations and even the most marginalized groups in the antebellum South: enslaved plantation workers. Drawing on plantation records and an original database of coffee prices, the paper connects slave plantations in Brazil with those in the U.S. South as sites of both mass production and mass consumption, and as engines of expanding global trade. By foregrounding Brazil’s agency in this process, the paper situates the coffee boom as a global story of production and consumption. It argues that Brazil’s dominance in supply was decisive in embedding coffee within American society and forging one of the most enduring commodity relationships of the modern era.