How did coffee become a central part of everyday life in the United States? Robles-Baez’s paper traces how coffee’s unique combination of affordability and social prestige transformed it into a mass staple—even among enslaved populations in the American South. While falling prices reflected an unprecedented production boom in Brazil, coffee’s growing moral and cultural appeal stemmed from its association with sobriety, productivity, and discipline—values that resonated deeply within the new social and economic order of the early nineteenth century. Drawing on theoretical frameworks from economics, anthropology, and sociology, and supported by new empirical evidence—including an original database of more than 50,000 coffee price observations (1808–1850) and a wide range of primary sources such as newspapers, plantation and merchant records, and domestic manuals—the paper explores how coffee evolved from a luxury to a staple in the United States. It demonstrates that coffee became significantly more affordable than tea during this critical period while maintaining its high social value—a distinction that cheaper alternatives like yerba mate failed to achieve.

This event is sponsored by the History of Capitalism Research Workshop, co-sponsored by Stanford Global Studies and the Stanford Humanities Center. 

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