Christian Robles-Baez

Graduate Student Research Funding | 2022 - 2023 Academic Year

Setting-Up the Coffee Empire: The United States and Brazil in the Early 19th Century

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, it was still difficult to predict that coffee would become one of the world largest markets in terms of value. It still was not clear that coffee would become Americans' favorite beverage and that Brazil was going to be able to multiply its coffee production at an unprecedented scale, becoming the world's largest producer since the 1830's, a position that it still holds today. However, by the mid-nineteenth century, these two countries had made coffee a million-dollar business. What were the factors that originated the coffee boom and how did they evolve?¬In asking the question this way, my research focuses on the early decades of the coffee boom. Rather than seeing Brazil's dominance and America's habit as inevitable, it explores the contingencies and experiments, at a micro level, that underwrote the eventual outcome.

Christian Robles-Baez, Department of History

Christian Robles-Baez is a PhD Candidate in History at Stanford, where he is studying the modern economic and political history of Latin America, and its relationship with the U.S. Robles-Baez is particularly interested in examining how coffee became one of the biggest international markets in the early nineteenth century, which has led him to focus mainly on the commercial exchange between Brazil and the American South.

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