Coffee

Your reading response should demonstrate: 1) that you have read all the required materials; 2) carefully thought through them; 3) and thought of the connections, comparisons, relations between them. While you should draw specific examples from the texts, please minimize quotes and obvious summaries and paraphrases, and focus your efforts on your analysis and critical reading. You are free to include images, graphics, links, etc. and you can also write in any style and format (blog-like, essay, wiki post, etc.), but try to remain focused on the texts and not bring in other texts unless specifically asked to do so.

These questions are (non-comprehensive) examples of how to think through and structure your reading response:

How is the history of coffee intertwined with socio-political and economic relations of power, such as slavery, colonialism, imperial trade?

How is the story of coffee the story of the making and remaking of globalization and the modern world? What do these mean? Draw on specific examples from the texts.

While coffee can be analyzed as part of a global system, how have ideologies, (government) policies, or structures of trade resulted in local differences?

What are some of the central arguments Wolfgang Schivelbusch makes about the social, cultural, political and economic importance of coffee, and how are these arguments sustained and/or complicated in the other readings?

Antony Wild’s sub-title (“a dark history”) is obviously a play on words. Explain what you think are the things and processes meant by ‘dark’ based on your analysis of his and other texts.