Christian Robles-Baez

Christian Robles-Baez is a PhD Candidate in History at Stanford University, where he is studying the transformation of coffee from a luxury item to a staple commodity in the early nineteenth century. His research centers on Brazilian coffee production and its consumption in the United States. His doctoral dissertation, tentatively titled “The Making of an Improbable Global Market: Coffee (1808-1850)”, explores how coffee emerged as one of the world’s most valuable commodity markets despite the pervasive risks and adversities of its early years. Robles-Baez’s interdisciplinary research aims at bridging fields such as Business History, History of Capitalism, Environmental History, Transnational History, and Latin American Studies. His dissertation has received financial support from the King Center for Global Development, the Stanford Institute for Economic Research Policy, 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.