This panel brings together leading scholars of transnational coffee history from every stage of the historical profession to identify common problems, methods, and directions for future research. Building on recent critical interventions—such as Augustine Sedgewick’s question “What is imperial about coffee?” (2015) and Jonathan Morris’s call to decolonize coffee history (2022)—the panel examines coffee not as a national product but as a set of interconnected hubs of agricultural production, commercial circulation, and household consumption.

The four papers focus on overlapping geographic sites, including São Paulo state, Istanbul, Jamaica, and Milan, and analyze these places across different time periods. Rather than isolating plantations from cafés, or colonies from metropoles, the panel traces how coffee linked diverse actors and labor regimes: Japanese migrants to Brazilian coffee plantations; Italian visitors at Ottoman coffee courts; British colonists in the Caribbean, and the global spread of Italian coffee practices in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Methodologically, the panel addresses a shared challenge: how to write coffee histories that are not solely based on the archives of former imperial powers or contemporary corporate elites. Panelists draw on material culture (including culinary objects, like plates and cups; agricultural texts and tools, like farmers’ almanacs and harvesting rakes; and architectural plans, like café designs and décor) as well as oral histories and personal diaries to recover the perspectives of farmers and waitresses as well as plantation owners and coffee wholesalers. At the same time, they confront the ethical constraints of research access. Colonial and postcolonial archives are shaped by contemporary political conditions, including authoritarian governance. Private corporate museums may advance selective historical narratives. The panel explicitly addresses how historians navigate these constraints and how source choices shape the stories told about coffee.

Ultimately, the panel looks outward. Coffee’s popularity with students and the public creates opportunities for historical intervention but also risks oversimplification and myth repetition. Plagiarism is common: Jeffrey Schnapp’s landmark article on the history of Bialetti Moka pots (2001) is a popular lift. An outrage and a backhanded compliment, the frequent imitation of academic work on coffee testifies to the public’s hunger for these histories. Panelists will also discuss strategies for using coffee in the classroom—particularly in food studies, environmental history, and global history—while maintaining analytical rigor. They also consider how historians can communicate nuanced research to broad audiences at a moment when public funding for the humanities is under increasing pressure.