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.