Michelle Craig McDonald’s Coffee Nation is a richly sourced, highly readable account of coffee’s economic and social role in the early United States. Its archival breadth and narrative clarity make a genuine contribution to the literature on commodities. McDonald seeks to distinguish the book by arguing that the extent of coffee imports renders the prevailing narrative of early U.S. self-sufficiency an “illusion,” but the book does not fully engage with other canonical examples of early American dependence on trade or demonstrate how coffee imports contrast with these examples. Read as an enrichment rather than a refutation of the standard narrative, however, McDonald’s study shines.
McDonald draws on a broad range of primary sources, including newspapers, diaries, correspondence, probate records, business inventories, account books, cookbooks, import records, and patents. This scope is purposeful, as the comparatively small size of coffee operations meant fewer records were created or archived, so a wider array of sources is needed to reconstruct the story. By weaving empirical detail with firsthand voices, McDonald turns a sparse archive into a narrative that is rigorous yet accessible. This book will engage general readers, but its scholarly rigor also lends it to a special-topics economic history course centered around food, beverages, or trade.
The book spans 1720–1840, with four chapters on economic history and two on social history. The economic history traces the rise of West Indian coffee under mercantilist policy and enslaved labor; the smuggling that circumscribed these imperial restrictions and made Philadelphia a coffee entrepôt; the damping effects of the Revolution’s embargoes, price controls, and hoarding; and the postwar consolidation of smuggling networks into legitimate routes, so that coffee became one of the highest-valued imports into the United States. The social history covers who could afford coffee, when and how it was consumed, and why they drank it, ranging from a teetotaling alternative to a widely touted hangover cure. It also investigates how the patriotic marketing of coffee both appealed to and reinforced a burgeoning sense of American nationalism.
Although the book is a great addition to the commodity literature, McDonald’s attempts to differentiate it from the rest of the literature need sharper focus. McDonald argues that the extent of coffee imports challenges a narrative of early U.S. autonomy, but the book does not contrast its contribution to existing textbook themes of the young nation’s reliance on foreign trade: federal revenues relied chiefly on tariffs; southern agriculture relied heavily on enslaved people trafficked from overseas; and disputes over commerce helped ignite the Revolutionary War, the Barbary Wars, the Quasi-War, Jefferson’s embargoes, and the War of 1812. McDonald’s attempts at differentiation would be clearer if the role of coffee were contrasted against these established narratives.
The dust jacket also claims that the book “challenges traditional interpretations of the American Revolution,” by asserting that the importation of coffee was “the antithesis of independence.” This leads McDonald to reject “postrevolutionary ideas about American freedom and independence as measured by the material and economic state of the nation” (p. 15). These arguments set a demanding standard for independence that no modern nation could meet and implies the United States could only be “independent” by re-adopting the same mercantilist policies it rejected in the Revolution.
Nonetheless, the book does many other things well. It explores topics that are commonly overlooked in historical narratives, such as the importance of the West Indies trade to the United States, as well as the role of women, free Blacks, and enslaved people in the coffee economy. It also highlights the patriotic role that coffee played as an alternative to tea and how coffeehouses acted as hubs of resistance leading up to the Revolution.
Read on its own terms, as a richly documented history of how coffee was an integral part of life in early the United States, Coffee Nation succeeds brilliantly. Even if its thesis about “independence” needs sharpening, the book’s archival range and narrative verve earn it a place on syllabi and shelves alike.
