Michelle Craig McDonald Coffee Nation: How One Commodity Transformed the Early United States University of Pennsylvania Press 280 pages, 6 x 9 inches ISBN 978-1512827552
Michelle Craig McDonald
On Coffee Nation: How One Commodity Transformed the Early United States
Interview of
September 26, 2025
In a Nutshell
While Coffee Nation is about the history of one of the world’s most popular commodities, I use it to consider how North America fit into a world governed by empires and transatlantic economies. There had been some industrial growth in North America before 1776, but most people’s furniture, clothes, metalwares, ceramics, and several kinds of food or drinks still came from overseas. Coffee illustrates in a way that few commodities can how much the colonies of British North America, and then the United States, depended on other nations, a pattern that lasted well after the political rift with Britain ended.
This is not the revolutionary legacy we are used to hearing. U.S. citizens have long seen themselves as an independent and industrious people. Indeed, references to independence shape the traditional national narrative about nearly all aspects of North America’s development after 1776—the establishment of new forms of government, rise of domestic economies, exploration west across the continent, creation of urban manufacturing centers, and construction of large-scale transportation networks that connected all these developments together and made possible the waves of migration that linked the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans.
More recently, such celebratory narratives have been tempered by historians who try to calculate the cost of this “progress” on the environment, as well as studies that highlight those who were routinely, systemically, and deliberately left out of the independence project, especially women, enslaved and free African Americans, and Indigenous peoples. Such challenges to ideas about independence, however, often face resistance and efforts to shift deeply held ideas about the nation’s origins move slowly.
Working hand in hand with notions of independence in crafting Americans’ image of themselves is that of self-reliance, another U.S. cultural touchstone. The image of a strong, autonomous new nation has ebbed and flowed over the last two centuries, but never disappeared. The history of coffee challenges this story.
While tea was controlled through a single monopoly charter, coffee had a global network of suppliers by the second half of the eighteenth century. All European empires—the British, French, Portuguese, Spanish, and Dutch—had Atlantic colonies to supply them, and West African nations and East Indian sources expanded the global coffee market further still. But regardless of where North American traders chose to do business, importation remained key. Every cup of coffee enjoyed by any mainland colonist—and later U.S. citizen—had been brewed from beans that came from somewhere else. In this sense, coffee’s spectacular rise in popularity and profitability is the opposite of independence. Each step of the industry’s development relied on outside support and external influences.
The wide angle
Coffee Nation is my effort to demonstrate how everyday goods—things we almost take for granted—can often have long and complicated histories. The book begins with the early coffee trade in Africa and the Middle East, before shifting to Western European interest and, ultimately, to coffee’s importance in the Americas, in the Caribbean and Latin America in terms of production, and British North America (later the United States) in terms of distribution and consumption. It is a complex, global history that unites ideas about plantation economies, enslavement, trade, retailing and advertising, and consumer behavior.
The result is a rich cast of characters, drawn from a wide range of archival, quantitative, and material evidence. The book’s chapters, and the stories they tell, move 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.
The professional path I took that led me to this work was not a straight one. I worked in museums for almost a decade before starting my Ph.D., so material culture has always been a central focus of my research. I’m fascinated by the objects people create, purchase, and use. But this specific book began because of two classes I took in graduate school at the University of Michigan. The first was about early modern Britain, and I wanted to learn more about how people who could not read or write got their news. That brought me to taverns and coffeehouses. The second class was an introduction to Atlantic World history. Tropical goods, and the West Indian plantations and enslaved labor that made them possible, is one of the foundations of this field. But what interested me is that books about coffeehouses rarely discussed where coffee originated. By the same token, studies of plantation systems rarely extended beyond ports of sale. This was my effort to bring production, trade, and consumption together in one study.
A close-up
I hope that readers “just browsing” the book would start on page 1. I deliberately used one of my interesting historical examples to catch readers’ attention. The book’s introduction begins with the story of women gathering in front of a warehouse in Boston early in the morning of July 24, 1777, just a little over a year after North America’s 13 colonies had declared their independence. By the time the building’s owner, local merchant Thomas Boylston, arrived more than 100 women were waiting for him.
I like this story for several reasons. First, it shifts the focus for readers from tea to other goods. It also explores how women behaved in political ways—and too often their stories are left out of revolutionary histories. For years, the city’s residents had complained about the cost of their groceries and not without good reason. Since Boston passed its non-importation agreement in 1768 to protest the Townshend Duties, the price of almost everything had skyrocketed. The situation only got worse after the outbreak of war.
Abigail Adams was in Boston at this time while her husband John was in Philadelphia, and frequently wrote to him about the challenges of living in a city under siege, as well as Bostonians’ growing irritation with importers and shopkeepers. “There is a general cry against the Merchants,” she’d written him earlier that year, “who ‘tis said have created a partial scarcity for “every article not only of Luxury, but even the necessaries of life.”
John Adams, however, from his perspective as a political leader, saw things very differently. Writing back to his wife Abigail, he hoped that “the females will leave off their attachment to coffee” as it created, he argued, an untenable dependence on foreign trade. “I assure you,” he concluded, that “the best families in this place have left off in a great measure the use of West India goods. We must bring ourselves to live upon the produce of our own country.”
That did not happen, of course, and coffee drinking only grew during the years of the war and the decades that followed. Who, when, and how Americans drank coffee are the subjects of the book’s chapters.
Lastly
This was not an easy book to write. There were no big coffee merchants, in the way that there were sugar, wine, or linen merchants until the early nineteenth century. Instead, I wove the history of coffee together from brief notices, that some number of barrels or bags arrived in port, that friends met for coffee in each others’ homes, or went to the coffeehouse for the latest political news. Through glimpses in account books, letters and diaries, newspaper advertisements, and—in the case of smuggling—court records.
But the sheer volume of these references demonstrates coffee’s omnipresence in colonial America and the young United States—it quickly becomes apparent that the drink is everywhere—if you care to look. I hope that Coffee Nation will remind readers that history is all around us. It is not limited to big events or important names. Everyday actions are the result of choices, some made consciously, such as what kind of coffee to buy, but others resulting from years—even decades—of decisions by others, such as where to trade, what to import, and to tax. All of these factors affect what is available for purchasers to select from. We live in an interconnected world—not only before the American Revolution, but also to this day.
