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.