Studies of coffee too often reify the international market. It is seen as an exogenous force that imposes itself on local producers who are powerless to do anything but obey its dictates. The “law of supply and demand” is seen as a structural dictator. There has been a substantial debate on the extent to which changes have been occasioned by changes in production processes (the creation of surplus) or in demand induced by changing consumption patterns or caused by commercial intermediaries. Who in the commodity chain is in control of prices, and has this changed over the centuries?

A second issue, which may appear only a technical subsidiary of the first two but is in fact central, is the creation of international standards and grades. How homogeneous is the commodity and how uniform internationally are the definitions? Do people mean the same thing when they say “coffee”?

This chapter analyzes the transformation of coffee from Arab monopoly to European colonial product to the sustenance of Latin American national states to, finally, a globally produced multinational commodity by asking the following questions: (1) What was the relative importance of changing patterns of demand and production in transforming the market, or, to put it another way, what were the relative roles of culture and technology in driving change? (2) What were the relative roles of private and public actors in creating the market? (3) What forces drove standardization, grading, and other market conventions?

That cup of coffee you sip at your breakfast table, desk, or café comes from far away. It was grown in Brazil, Colombia, Vietnam, the Ivory Coast, or one of a hundred other coffee-producing lands on five continents. It is a palpable and long-standing manifestation of globalization. For 500 years coffee has been grown in tropical countries for consumption in temperate regions, linking peoples of different lands and continents by trade, investment, immigration, conquest, and cultural and religious diffusion. There is a world of history in your cup.

An increasingly sophisticated study of world history is a means of understanding these processes. We have thus brought together scholars from nine countries, who cover coffee markets and societies over the last five centuries in fourteen countries on four continents and across the Indian and Pacific oceans, with a special emphasis on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We analyze a wide variety of issues, related to economic, political, and cultural development, to see how they have played out over the last centuries in different parts of the globe, under different political arrangements: the creation and function of commodity, labor, and financial markets; the role of race, ethnicity, gender, and class in the formation of coffee societies; the interaction between technology and ecology; and the impact of colonial powers, nationalist regimes, and the forces of the world economy in the forging of economic development and political democracy.