From cultivation to cup: Caribbean coffee and the North American economy, 1765--1805.

This study uses coffee as the mechanism for understanding the economic, political, and cultural relationships between the West Indies and North America. It integrates a predominantly economic focus with questions of social, political, and cultural history. The first three chapters focus on pre-Revolutionary America, and locate coffee production, trade, and consumption within the larger context of British imperialism. The latter three chapters determine how these processes changed after U.S. independence. Chapter 1 traces the movement of coffee from the East to the West Indies, the development of its plantation structure, and growing reliance of British West Indian coffee planters on North American markets. Chapter 2 assesses coffee's importance to North American merchants before the American Revolution. Chapter 3 follows the paths coffee took once arriving in North American ports, and analyzes of the politicization of coffee during the embargoes of the 1760s and 1770s. The latter three chapters focus on the dominant forces that reshaped the coffee industry between 1783 and 1812. Chapter 4 argues that U.S. investment in Caribbean commodities shaped its early foreign policies and diplomatic relations, and challenges the claim that the immediate post-Revolutionary period suffered confusion and decline. Chapter 5 explores piracy, privateering, and other quasi-legal methods deployed by U.S. merchants as they tried to maximize post-Revolutionary trade. The final chapter focuses on the slave insurrection in Saint Domingue. The abolition of slavery in Saint Domingue transformed the world's most profitable coffee producer of the late eighteenth century, and paved the way for Jamaica's entry into the field. At the same time, the revolution heightened racial fears that resulted in a reexamination and reinforcement of legal barriers restricting the activities of non-white planters in the British West Indies. This dissertation challenges the centrality of sugar in understanding West Indian agriculture, and argues that slavery continued to be profitable outside of sugar and the British Caribbean well into the nineteenth century. It also argues that the economic importance of the West Indies to North American did not end with American independence. Trade in tropical goods represented a significant proportion of U.S. trade revenue for decades after 1783, and played a pivotal role in shaping early foreign relations and fiscal policies. Finally, the study offers a new methodological paradigm that unites questions of labor, trade, and consumption, highlights a neglected aspect of the histories of North America and West Indies, and documents the development of a commodity that dominates consumer cultures throughout much of the world.Ph.D.American historySocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/124885/2/3163885.pd