On shaky grounds

Augustine Sedgewick is the author of Coffeeland: One Man’s Dark Empire and the Making of Our Favorite Drug. His latest book is Fatherhood: A History of Love and Power.

Of all the explosive tax revolts in history, none has been as consequential as the one that saw chests full of tea tipped into the Atlantic, and sparked the founding of the United States.

The American colonists loved tea; by all accounts, they drank prodigious quantities of the stuff. Yet in the fall and winter of 1773, the colonists increasingly began to see tea as a “plague,” and the steps they took to defend themselves united them as never before.

The issue wasn’t exactly the infamous tax on tea itself; in fact, the hated Tea Act of 1773 actually proposed to lower tea prices by granting a monopoly on sales to the struggling East India Company, which had become a crucial source of revenue for the British government and Crown.

The problem, instead, was the tyranny. Tea quickly came to symbolize the dangers of government based on a “system of the favourite,” as the colonists put it – one that they believed was run to suit the needs of a distant corporation and its stakeholders.

If tea could be so manipulated, what new forms of corruption and flights of authoritarian whim would be next?

Up and down the Atlantic seaboard, colonists of diverse birthplaces, backgrounds and beliefs decided to fight. When they dumped tons of tea into harbours in Boston and beyond, they were met with escalating force that seemed to prove their fears and instincts right: military occupation, constraints on local assemblies, abuses of police power and indemnities for British colonial officials. The result, 250 years ago, was revolution.

Are we now at another point when caffeinated beverages might lead to political revolt yet again?

In the past year, more than half of goods imported into the U.S. have been hit with President Donald Trump’s unilateral tariffs – including coffee, a commodity that had been imported duty-free for more than 150 years and is consumed daily by as many as two-thirds of American adults.

As a result, the price of coffee has spiked by more than 40 per cent since last year, according to the government’s own data. American consumers, who together drink more coffee than any other people in the world, have been asked to bear the costs of those tariffs, along with our allies and trading partners.

And while the Trump administration announced last week that it would remove reciprocal tariffs on coffee beans from nearly all producing countries – an acknowledgment that its tariffs hurt Americans, too – Brazil, the world’s largest producer for nearly two centuries, was still being taxed at a staggering 40 per cent up until late Thursday. The reversal may not be enough to roll back the price surge.

The legality of these tariffs is now before a skeptical-seeming Supreme Court; the Constitution, the result of America’s long-ago, tea-inspired revolution, says that the legislature, rather than the executive, is in charge of raising revenue through taxation. But the question stands: Could tariffs’ impact on the price of the most popular drink in the U.S. stimulate a new mass protest against the government? Could the duties heighten larger fears of a new “system of the favourite”?

A Boston Coffee Party on the part of modern-day Americans seems unlikely. But the tariffs are a reminder that in decisive historical moments across nearly two-and-a-half centuries, American economic policy has taken shape around the coffee trade. And if the U.S.-made postwar global order based on trade and diplomacy is now being overturned, it makes all the sense in the world that coffee would be, too. After all, coffee is where it started.

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Coffee’s importance in the history of American capitalism and life derives precisely from the fact that it is not tea.

Following “the destruction of tea” in 1773 – the protest was not described as a “party” until roughly 50 years later, by which time American independence was assured – the drink was widely decried. “Tea must be universally renounced,” future president John Adams wrote to his wife Abigail in 1774. Giving up tea meant resistance to tyranny. The town of Falmouth, Mass., even outlawed tea drinking.

But it wasn’t obvious that coffee would take its place. Adams, for one, had a vision of national self-sufficiency, which left no room for coffee, either, since it could not be grown on the American mainland. “I hope the females will leave off their attachment to coffee,” he wrote to Abigail after the Declaration of Independence. “We must bring ourselves to live upon the produce of our own country” – like cider, as Adams proposed.

Fortunately for American cuisine, economic nationalism wasn’t practical for the fledgling nation. Immediately after the revolution, the United States were poor, weak and badly in need of alliances with European empires and their Caribbean colonies. A new coffee commerce with French Saint-Domingue (now Haiti), then the richest colony in the world thanks to its half-million enslaved workers, proved especially important. “It will be a strong link of connection,” wrote Thomas Jefferson, “with the only nation on earth on whom we can solidly rely for assistance till we stand on our own legs.”

By 1799, coffee consumption had increased to more than seven times what it had been in 1772, the year before the Tea Act. Especially in American port cities and wealthy districts, where coffee house culture mirrored European fashions, coffee drinking became perhaps even more common than in France itself. “We are perfectly reconciled to this American custom of drinking coffee,” wrote a French traveller to the United States in 1787.

Yet early-adopting coastal elites weren’t enough to make it a genuinely “American custom.” Over the next century, coffee would become a mass beverage for the first time in its history for two key reasons: slavery and U.S. dominance in Latin America.

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In deference to Napoleon, as well as to the anxieties of American slaveowners, the U.S. cut ties with Haiti after a revolution won freedom and nationhood for those who had been enslaved on the colony’s plantations in 1804. The resulting gap in the coffee market was filled by increased commerce with Brazil; there, the rise of vast coffee plantations meant the importation of millions of enslaved Africans, many of whom were illegally sold and transported by American slave traders. Brazil has been far-and-away the world’s leading coffee producer ever since, in some years exporting more than 75 per cent of the global supply.

The rise of coffee in Brazil and across Latin America more broadly helped the U.S. carve out an advantageous place in the world economy. Unable to compete with powerful European empires for access to markets and resources in Asia and Africa, the U.S. found advantages closer to home, in the Western Hemisphere. Not long after many Latin American nations gained independence from Spain and Portugal in the 1820s, the U.S. became the first world power to import coffee duty-free.

The free trade in coffee became the foundation of hemispheric relations, giving substance to the idea of the Americas as comprising the United States’ special sphere of influence. In 1890, while European powers were busy carving up the rest of the world into imperial monopolies, the U.S. doubled down on Latin America. Even as the McKinley Tariff increased protective duties to record levels, coffee remained on the free list – though the president also gained the power to revoke its duty-free status, should coffee-exporting countries ever decide to not favour U.S. products.

The benefits of the free trade were too good to give up for old-fashioned imperialist instincts. After 1898, America acquired its own colonial coffee-producing islands: Puerto Rico and the Philippines following the Spanish-American War, and Hawaii, through annexation. Coffee growers in these new U.S. territories lobbied for protective tariffs to underwrite their crops, like those that boosted other key American industries, but as the leading product of the independent republics of Latin America – in other words, the principal commodity available for sale in exchange for U.S. manufactures – coffee had effectively become too strategically important to allow the U.S. to favour its new colonies. In effect, as soon as coffee became a “domestic” product of the U.S. empire, it also became the first American mass-consumer commodity to be outsourced abroad through free trade. Local economies in U.S. territories paid the price.

Then, in the middle of the Great Depression, with the world economy locked down by retaliatory tariffs and fascist powers in Europe and Asia reaching out rapaciously for raw materials to fuel their core industries, the U.S. again leveraged the free trade in coffee. After 1934, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration began to rebuild America’s international commerce along many of the coffee trade routes to Latin America, for that was “the path of least resistance and most profit” – and precisely where Roosevelt was hoping to stymie Hitler.

Starting with Brazil and Colombia, then moving on to “the mild coffee countries” of Central America, Roosevelt sealed new trade agreements with a renewed promise that the U.S., unlike European powers, would not tax coffee imports. To secure such profitable relationships with Latin America, Roosevelt also disavowed American aspirations to colonial empire, renounced military intervention, and pledged to be, in these respects and others, a “good neighbour.”

After the war, this “good neighbour” doctrine became the model for global reconstruction. The Organization of American States, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the United Nations: The key institutions of the modern world enshrined the U.S. as a global superpower, using the strategies pioneered in Latin America around coffee.

In economic terms, the postwar global order turned more and more commodities into the equivalent of coffee for America. Many commodities became abundantly available for tax-free importation into the United States at low prices and in large quantities, from a growing number of places around the world where everyday life and work had been precisely shaped to fit the enormous American consumer market.

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Until very recently, this was our world. Now it may be coming to an end. But what will follow? Is Donald Trump simply the latest in a long line of American policy makers to use coffee to shape global commerce to the advantage of the United States?

To answer that question, we would need to know more about what the tariffs are for. In the absence of a clear vision, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the American colonists’ despised “system of the favourite” is back.

Yet if coffee is going to play a tea-like role in America’s current politics, it must prove itself as something that tea was not: irreplaceable. This is a tall order, especially since the world of coffee is changing.

Coffee has been a stimulant to American capitalism on the macro and micro levels: a way to win advantageous trade deals, and to boost the work of the individuals making so many tradeable goods. Yet we are now living in a new age of industry and stimulants – call it an “artificial” age – and coffee’s place in our lives is increasingly in doubt for reasons that go well beyond tariffs.

Take Mr. Trump, for instance. The President is not a coffee drinker, though his abstinence is surely more about palate sophistication than caffeine avoidance, considering the famous “Diet Coke button” he had installed in the Oval Office. Coca-Cola, in fact, was arguably the first “energy drink,” in the sense of a mass-market, manufactured product that provides a buzz – a category that’s now larger, more exotically flavoured, incandescently dyed, and diabolically branded than ever.

Today’s energy drinks are well adapted to their time and place. They come not from photosynthesis but from the lab and the factory, where they are laced with synthetic caffeine formulated from urea and other compounds. Manufacturable anywhere and available around the clock from convenience stores, supermarkets and gas stations, they are largely immune to the displacements of climate change and the vagaries of trade policy. Should we so choose, Americans could now at last do as John Adams advised, and live entirely on the produce of our own country.

In this context, with a growing number of coffee competitors and Mr. Trump’s tariffs increasing its price, we have to ask: What is coffee really worth to us now?

As we innovate on artificial intelligence, to the detriment of working people everywhere, we may well require a crop of artificial – and affordable – stimulants to keep up and stay up. Standing before a fluorescent refrigerator case full of energy drinks, I am often reminded that centuries ago, when coffee was first spreading around the Mediterranean world, it was sometimes thought to be the strange, intoxicating work of the devil. From an aesthetic perspective, it would almost be fitting if Donald Trump, who paints his skin in the ureic shade of Red Bull, were to preside over the obsolescence of coffee as our stimulant of choice.

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Of course, coffee is not merely a source of energy. It is also a source of meaning: of experiences, sensations, rituals, stories. In other words, it is a culture, a way of living in and understanding the world, and perhaps the most important thing about the culture of coffee is that it draws us out into the world day after day.

After all, nearly every American coffee drinker is quite literally incapable of getting the coffee they need entirely on our own. We need other people, other countries.

Interdependence is not just a virtue. It’s how the world works. Politics can try to deny or embrace this reality, but it can’t change it. In American life, as in American trade policy, the benefits from coffee have come precisely from the fact that we cannot get it for ourselves.

In life and in trade policy, the loss of coffee would hurt. Every cup now should be a reminder that what we ultimately lose in isolation are the very best parts of our lives: each other.