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Christian Robles-Baez

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Graduate Student Research Funding | 2023 - 2024 Academic Year

The Making of an Improbable Global Market: Coffee 1808-1850

We are proposing to create an unprecedented and consistent database on the commercial exchange between Brazil and the United States during the first half of the nineteenth century, particularly regarding coffee. In this database, it would be possible to track, from a detailed-micro perspective, the evolution of the merchandise traded from and to the main ports of Brazil and the United States. This project would allow researches to observe the evolution of trade between the two largest countries in the Americas, and would be a central piece to understand the transformation of coffee into a quotidian product and a million-dollar business.


Christian Robles-Baez, Department of History

christian robles baez

Robles-Baez is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History. In his doctoral dissertation, tentatively titled "The Making of an Improbable Global Market: Coffee 1808-1850", he is studying, from a micro historical perspective,  the actors, events, complexities and particularities that made coffee one of the most valuable international markets and how it became an article consumed daily by the masses. His academic interests relate to transnational and economic history, business history, and history of capitalism, with a particular focus on the commercial exchange between the United States and Brazil during the early nineteenth century. He is also co-author (with Miguel Urrutia) of the book "Política Social para la Equidad en Colombia", published in 2021 by Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá--a project meant to assess, from a historical perspective, the social programs in Colombia and their impact on inequality.  Robles-Baez has Masters degree in History from Stanford University, a masters degree in Economics, and a major in Political Science from Universidad de los Andes in Colombia.

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