Coffee Nation is a valuable addition to the literature on the ways that business, international politics, and culture intertwined in the late colonial and early republic period. Michelle McDonald aims to expand the boundaries and our understanding of Atlantic history. She explains why coffee consumption outpaced that of tea even by the time of the Boston Tea Party in 1773. As Abigail Adams remarked, coffee had become a “necessary and convenient article of life,” while tea was considerably more expensive (p. 2). On the same day in that year, the British Parliament voted to continue the tax on tea, while it “radically reduced” import duties on coffee (p. 3).

Coffee enjoyed a “global network of suppliers” by the third quarter of the eighteenth century, while tea came to America through the East India Company and its monopoly on the leaves (p. 5). This background reduces the legendary role of the Tea Party in American patriotism and the supposed switch to coffee here as a result of the Bostonians’ action; the colonials were in fact already drinking more coffee, and men and women of all social classes had their daily cup, or strove to get it.

The brew became a key part of the “performance of consumption” in the United States, as households served coffee in everything from crude stoneware to translucent porcelain. Coffee pots, elaborately decorated or incised when made of silver, became both daily kitchen tools and statements of status. Coffeehouses became centers of information and political discussion, although few women could be found in them. Cooking and etiquette books instructed housewives in sophistication through the presentation and act of coffee drinking.

During the Revolutionary War, British vessels could not fill the gap in the coffee trade that American ships had handled. Meanwhile, paper money became worthless, and coffee shipments to the 13 states fell nearly to zero. But, far from abandoning foreign commerce after the Revolution, Americans traded widely in the Caribbean and beyond. Enterprises along the east coast and later New Orleans developed “reliance on production systems of the larger Atlantic world” (p. 4). American economic autonomy after peace with Britain is a fiction. In 1789, 4 million pounds of beans were imported and, in 1794, 53 million. US traders made more money on coffee than they did on tea, sugar, and wine combined by 1825. The reexport business grew along with imports for domestic use.

McDonald presents the complicated international trade relations for coffee, which, especially in the West Indies, involved much cooperation among colonies and outposts of several countries, outright law breaking, and many cases of looking the other way as ships came and went. This was a “creole economy” beyond or in opposition to international boundaries (p. 15).

Coffee farming, much easier and cheaper to start up than sugar, became an arena for small producers. They tended to appear and to fail at a rapid rate. Sugar plantations were often larger than 1,000 acres of cleared land; coffee farms were far smaller. As with sugar, coffee agriculture in the West Indies relied on enslaved labor until Britain abolished bondage in 1834. Slavery lasted in Cuba into the 1880s and in Brazil to 1888 (and there are still reports of it on the country’s coffee farms). Haiti, or St. Domingue in the French Empire, produced fully half the world’s coffee before 1789, using enslaved labor. The demi-island’s revolution (1791–1804) did not at first end American commerce in coffee there, but continued upheaval in Haiti, coupled with the growth of more stable markets elsewhere, cut interest and imports from the country severely. Then, in the 1830s Brazil expanded coffee farming, becoming the largest producer by 1843. It has never relinquished that position.

The book ends with a series of vignettes called “The Americanization of Coffee” and “Coffee Comes to the Fair,” referring to the Centennial Exhibition of 1876. These sections move from Arbuckles Coffee in 1868 and their ubiquitous trade cards (but without mention of the extensive racism they offered) to Starbucks. American companies tried for a while to obscure the foreign origins of coffee, associating it instead with national gains, patriotism, and symbols such as Uncle Sam. But today Starbucks tries to transport customers to happy scenes in the producing countries, providing a comfortable way of enjoying a product without worrying about its economic and social difficulties.

A few other quibbles bear mentioning: More on the importance of the English coffeehouse experience would have made the international life of coffee fuller. Readers do not quite get a chance to grasp the significance of porcelain, with its wonderful warmth and plasticity in coffee services, as a social marker. A few more vignettes, for instance, the great importance of coffee in the Civil War and foreign conflicts, as well as among Native Americans, could have made the last sections even livelier.

But Coffee Nation succeeds in its key missions, first, of describing American commerce in the late colonial–early republic period; the United States was most certainly an active partner in the Atlantic world. Second, the book delves neatly into domestic consumption and its social life. Third, slavery (along with forced labor in places such as Guatemala), takes on new importance in international commerce, as it enabled the growth of our favorite beverage. In the history of American business, coffee has found the kind of engaging and detailed treatment it deserves from Michelle McDonald.