Christian Robles-Baez

Christian Robles-Baez is a PhD Candidate in History at Stanford University, where he studies the emergence and consolidation of the global coffee trade in the early nineteenth century. His research focuses on Brazilian coffee production and its consumption in the United States. His dissertation, tentatively titled "The Making of an Improbable Global Market: Coffee (1808–1850)", examines how coffee became one of the world’s most valuable commodities despite the pervasive risks and uncertainties of its formative years. Robles-Baez’s work bridges Business History, the History of Capitalism, Environmental History, Transnational History, and Latin American Studies.

His dissertation has received financial support from the Mellon Foundation, the King Center on Global Development, the Stanford Institute for Economic Research Policy, the Harvard Business Initiative, the Historic New Orleans Collection, and the Stanford Center for Latin American Studies.

Robles-Baez’s published works include the book Política Social Para la Equidad en Colombia (Social Policy for Equality in Colombia), co-authored with Miguel Urrutia and published by the School of Economics at Universidad de los Andes in 2021; and the forthcoming article “The Political Economy of Commodity Cartel Formation: The Case of Coffee, 1930-1940”, co-authored with M. Bucheli and L.F. Medina, which has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Economic History.