My work on coffee began with a study on the origin and diffusion of ‘Italian-style coffee beverages’ around the world which I dubbed the ‘cappuccino conquests’. It soon became apparent that text-based sources were inadequate for my purposes. I worked closely with industry itself, gathering insights and understandings that led me to pursue oral and material histories, alongside visual and cultural representations. I acquired fluency in a new language of coffee, which enabled me to function in this space, but also placed me in a position where I had to police my interactions, associations, and preparedness to engage with public debates, not least surrounding the ‘cultural ownership’ of coffee.
That has become even more necessary as I have exploited that deeper understanding by pivoting into the global history of coffee, analysing the complex interactions between consumption and production, mediated through the evolution of an international trade that transformed coffee from the ‘wine of Islam’ into a global commodity that nonetheless serves as a marker of collective or individual identity. Coffee’s symbolic value generates interest levels that provide historians with a public platform from which to introduce such contentious topics as colonialism, slavery and epistemicide while explaining how the historian’s rigorous approach to evidence and contextualisation can replace a mythologised history of coffee with a more nuanced narrative that can better serve the needs of the global coffee community of today.