Weinberg and Bealer 2001 also follow coffee around the world, though their study ends by the early 20th century, and alternating chapters compare coffee and tea and focus more specifically on ideas about health and medicine. This is an important collection of essays on Africa, the Indian Ocean, and Latin America the one geographic region that could use more emphasis is the Caribbean. Smith and Topik 2006 are more interested in tying coffee to ideas about labor conditions, European imperialism, and political economy. De Graaff 1986 work is highly statistical, providing extensive tables on production cycles, distribution patterns, and consumption rates. Smith and Topik 2006 and de Graaff 1986 both explore coffee’s economy from a comparative perspective, though with different emphases. Ukers 2007 (originally published in 1922 by the Tea and Coffee Trade Journal Company) is an early standard in the field, beautifully illustrated with sketches and paintings taken from earlier 17th- and 18th-century authors.

Both include comparative analyses of coffee production in different regions around the world, as well as statistics about trade patterns for the late 18th and 19th centuries. Two are late-19th-century histories of coffee, Thurber 1883 and Laërne 1885, which were written when Brazil and Latin America’s coffee economies dominated the world market.

The following works explore coffee’s history from its African origins to its move across the Atlantic. But because of their historically subservient position to sugar, these goods have collectively come to be called the “secondary commodities.” Of all of them, coffee offers the best opportunity to move beyond sugar in reexamining Caribbean production and its position in the international Atlantic marketplace of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. Coffee, indigo, allspice, and ginger, as well as cotton, tobacco, and a range of woods, traveled as far and wide as sugar, molasses, and rum.

While undoubtedly central to West Indian development, this focus on sugar masks the historical reality of agricultural diversity, and the related experiences of slave owners, laborers, merchants, and consumers that lasted from the 17th century through today. Much of this early regional significance has been overshadowed by scholars’ focus on another topical commodity, sugar, which has dominated discussions of Caribbean agriculture and, by extension, the region’s contributions to colonial British America and the early Atlantic economy. Early production focused on Ethiopia, the Red Sea, and the Indian Ocean, but comparative advantage in coffee production shifted to the Atlantic during the 18th and 19th centuries. Coffee has been one of the top five most heavily traded commodities worldwide for almost a century, and its production and distribution patterns unite all corners of the world.

Uncommon grounds the history of coffee