Christian Robles-Baez

Christian Robles-Baez is an environmental and economic historian specializing in the history of global commodity markets. His doctoral dissertation, “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, with particular attention to Brazilian coffee production and its consumption in the United States. Robles-Baez’s work bridges fields such as Economic History, Business History, the History of Capitalism, Environmental History, and Transnational History.

His dissertation has received financial support from the Mellon Foundation, the Tinker Foundation, the University of Illinois Foundation, the King Center on Global Development, the Stanford Institute for Economic Research Policy, the Harvard Business Initiative, and the Historic New Orleans Collection, among others.

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 article “The Political Economy of Commodity Cartel Formation: The Case of Coffee, 1930-1940”, co-authored with M. Bucheli and L.F. Medina, and published in Journal of Economic History.