A Review of Coffee Nation: How One Commodity Transformed the Early United States

Coffee Nation: How One Commodity Transformed the Early United States by Michelle Craig McDonald (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025)

As something of an old hand in the history of coffee enterprise, I don’t very often discover a new work that so effectively answers questions I’ve had for decades. Michelle Craig McDonald accomplishes this and much more in her multifaceted study of the coffee trade and consumption from the early 18th to late 19th centuries in what became the United States. Beyond this, however, she managed to produce an accessible, engaging text based on deep archival research, a gem for both general readers and scholars in her own field.

In addition to an introduction and an epilogue, Coffee Nation contains six chapters covering the two-century period while shifting focus between production, trade patterns, politics and imperial warfare, on the one hand, and the ways in which consumption and marketing strategies are socially anchored/embedded on the other. She begins at the beginning with “Coffee Comes to the Caribbean,” dealing not only with remote origins but with how the British Caribbean (Jamaica primarily), with its enslaved labor force, dominated the production and trade with the mainland colonies prior to the late 18th century.

“Coffee’s Many Shops” offers the first pathway into the social history of consumption, using evidence from many sources, but most effectively from Philadelphia and its hinterland, by far the largest import hub for a century or more. “Building a Culture of Coffee Consumption” continues this line of analysis by expanding not only geographically, but by exploring in detail the “proper table setting” for both elite and commoner coffee consumption. I have never paid all that much attention to the objects required to serve coffee in proper society, much to my mother’s chagrin, no doubt, given her own collection of such items. McDonald offers some extraordinary visuals of silver and porcelain coffee services, including a very famous one realized by no less a historical figure than the silversmith turned patriot, iconic owing to Longfellow’s poem about the late-night ride of Paul Revere.

“Coffee and Conflict During the American Revolution” returns to the economic and political history side of things, as does the next chapter, “Coffee’s Creole Economy.” The final substantive chapter, “The Americanization of Coffee,” moves forward in time but by recircling back to the socialization mechanisms and meanings developed around a commodity that was, in fact, profoundly, indeed universally un-American, if anything but in marketers’ and consumers’ remarkably effective fancies and fantasies.

So, beyond the author’s lending support to my mother’s perspective and values, what were those questions McDonald so effectively answered for this reviewer? As a Latin American historian with a strong research bias in favor of the 19th and 20th centuries, it will come as no surprise that chapters 4-6 intrigued me most. However, the author provides answers to my questions about earlier times nearly as frequently.

McDonald debunks the idea that there was something like a tea versus coffee dividing line, roughly separating parts of New England and New York from the South and West up until some point in the early 19th century if not later. She clearly shows that the protests over prices and access to coffee, not tea, reflected its far broader consumption everywhere in the colonies by the time of Independence; Boston included, if we are to believe both accounts of female leadership of coffee riots there and the opinion of none other than Abigail Adams during the decade of the Revolutionary War. Likewise, her focus on Philadelphia and its coffee merchants proves doubly rewarding:, her documenting, surprising for some, how it was far and away the leading port of entry for coffee from all sources of production abroad from very early on, and how its local/national sources provide detailed information on not only its hinterland distribution network but the outsized importance of its coastal “reexport” of coffee and, even more surprisingly, to foreign ports beyond.

Time and again the author documents how coffee sooner or later came to rival or exceed the area dedicated to sugar and its revenue stream throughout the Caribbean, Jamaica initially, soon thereafter Haiti (Saint Domingue), and eventually replicating that experience on a truly colossal scale in Brazil, becoming the Coffee Nation of production for the United States, the Coffee Nation of consumption by the 1830s. This is a history that highlights exceptionally well the innovative, burgeoning history of U.S. shipping from Independence to the Civil War period. U.S. shippers replaced British Caribbean suppliers first with French Caribbean ones, especially Haiti. Then, after the revolt of 1791-1804, they just as quickly replaced nearly all Caribbean ones with Brazil.

The author provides detailed quantitative evidence alongside her strategy of using portraits of individual experiences, high and low, to anchor many of her chapters. Individual life experiences are both welcome and de rigueur in recent social histories. However, the author occasionally strays into an earlier biographical or novelistic tradition, drawing portraits that seem alternately, if not omniscient, then at least stretching the limits of knowability, or on the other hand, stretching credulity. In the former case, we are told that when Sir Nicholas Lawes, then Governor of Jamaica, left office, “He was tired and more than ready to leave public service” (p.19). In the latter, the French Caribbean émigré Peter Stephen (ne Pierre Etienne) Chazotte’s detailed project for a Congressional land grant to produce coffee in Florida is first described as having “perplexingly failed to account for altitude.” (p. 185). While Governor Lawes’ state of mind upon departing office was both unknowable and hardly central to his subsequent ventures, the only plausible motive for Chazotte’s memory lapse, from a veteran of decades in the coffee trade, surely merits a more straightforward characterization than the tongue-in-cheek satire that eventually emerges.

The role of U.S. shipping, as “neutrals,” has long been recognized during the seemingly endless imperial conflicts of the time. However, the substantial reshipment of coffee abroad by U.S. traders/shippers for much of the pre-Civil War period reveals more than neutrality, a highly competitive and sought-after merchant marine resource in times of peace as well. A deeper reading of the literature on and from Latin America’s coffee-producing countries would have found parallels with these findings as well as important differences. The idea has long been that coffee’s attractiveness accelerated for Latin American producers, given their later Independence, precisely because it emerged following the demise of the mercantilist colonial regime, with a whole new world of potential buyers and sellers. Perhaps more important, higher quality producers in Central America and later Colombia jealously retained preferred trade relations with European buyers who paid higher prices for their coffee, while only turning to the United States as a principal buyer much later. This was Brazil’s market position and strategy from the very beginning given its lower quality product. The data on how significant coffee’s import tax revenues were for the early United States will no doubt come as a surprise to most readers as well.

McDonald’s final chapter wrestles with coffee’s central paradox: how merchants, marketers, and consumers could embrace and reinvent it, against all available evidence to the contrary, as an “American” staple, indeed necessity, over the course of the 19th century. Her bookends for this story involve both Chazotte’s quixotic attempt to secure a Congressional land grant in 1821 to develop Key Largo in Florida as a large-scale domestic production alternative, and a brief but fascinating study of the emergence of the first truly national, vertically integrated coffee behemoth, Arbuckles & Company, founded in Pittsburgh in 1868.

Florida’s sordid history as home to all manner of land-developer scams and profitable bankruptcy schemes more often than not has been recounted with projects far less ambitious and frivolous than the idea of growing massive quantities of coffee at or below sea level. Beyond the comical aspects, the author’s time spent on this ill-fated project actually illuminates both the role of expats who fled the turmoil of the French Caribbean and sought to leverage ties to and nostalgia for Revolutionary-era supporters of the patriot cause, while exploiting the contemporary politics of protectionist self-interest. Unfortunately, that ship had already sailed, as the abandonment of the French Caribbean in favor of a seemingly limitless supply from Brazil doomed the project every bit as much as the absurd promise of productive and profitable sea-level coffee groves. That image will stick with me forever, not so much as a historian of coffee but as an exemplar of just what sorts of projects our esteemed Congress was presented with during the 19th century, not unlike so many of those both more recent and more notorious.

The analysis of Arbuckles & Company opens many avenues for comparison with the recent literature on coffee consumption in our own “Gourmet Era,” following the abandonment in 1989 of the International Coffee Agreements framework, which had established production limits and price support treaties dating from World War II and reaffirmed in 1962 during the Cold War. That era was fatefully predicted and even outlined by Bill Roseberry in his classic essay on “Yuppie Coffees.” McDonald shows just how the Arbuckle brothers “scaled up” their firm, acquiring entire naval fleets for their Brazilian trade, investing in railroad building in São Paulo, and building out warehousing and roasting facilities throughout the East Coast of the United States.

Even more intriguing for this reviewer, McDonald delves into their marketing, imaging and packaging innovations that foreshadow so powerfully our own Coffee Nation experience more recently. Arbuckles shipped their coffee ground, not whole bean, in reusable metal tins (and eventually air-tight paper bags) to protect freshness, and they included what can best be called a “trading card” equivalent of collectibles (one for each of the states and eventually Hawaii, Alaska and Puerto Rico), pitching patriotic pride alongside often fanciful images of what consumers were encouraged to see as Americana itself. Beyond the measurable freshness advantage of Arbuckle coffee, their packaging in reusable metal tins that evoked Manifest Destiny—the predestined march westward—was no small achievement. The parallels with the ways in which the Colombian coffee growers’ advertisement marketing of Juan Valdez defined U.S. consumers from the 1960s through the 1980s, and subsequently Starbucks and its imitators in the Gourmet Era, are far too numerous to mention, even when their core images exploit vastly different myths and identities than those formed in the 19th-century expansion of the U.S. empire.

McDonald also highlights several times another related paradox. U.S. coffee traders never voluntarily abandoned their original, colonial-era pattern of relying on producers whose plantations were based on enslaved labor. Brazil was only its most recent preferred source, even though it was the only major mid-century Latin American coffee exporter reliant upon enslaved labor, clearly offering no obstacle to its embrace for over three decades after abolition in the United States. Arbuckles and its competitors continued to prefer Brazilian coffee based on volume and price and certainly never on quality considerations. As the very last nation in the Americas to abolish slavery, in 1888, its producers clearly exploited a labor cost advantage that U.S. consumers benefited from as well, however well-hidden it may have been in the images generated by the Americanization marketing campaigns pioneered by Arbuckles and its imitators.

Coffee Nation can best be savored with a week’s worth of full coffee pots. My own reading required fewer days and pots. In just over 200 pages of text and just under 50 pages of notes, I found both a pleasurable read and many answers to questions that have lingered for too long. This is a work that historians of the United States will read with obvious profit, but many other readers will be introduced not just to history via commodities but to an elegant rendering of gendered insights from social, political, economic, and imperial history. While perhaps not as ambitious as packaging Manifest Destiny in reusable metal tins, McDonald has successfully resolved a seemingly inexplicable paradox: how coffee, the most irreducibly un-American item of mass consumption, was thoroughly Americanized.

Lowell Gudmundson is Professor Emeritus, Mount Holyoke College. He is the author of Costa Rica Before Coffee; Costa Rica After Coffee; and co-editor of Coffee, Society, and Power in Latin America.

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