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About
The global coffee industry, which fuels the livelihoods of farmers, entrepreneurs, and consumers around the world, rests on fragile ecological foundations. In Coffee Is Not Forever, Stuart McCook explores the transnational story of this essential crop through a history of one of its most devastating diseases, the coffee leaf rust. He deftly synthesizes agricultural, social, and economic histories with plant genetics and plant pathology to investigate the increasing interdependence of the world's coffee-producing zones. In the process, he illuminates the progress and prognosis of the challenges-especially climate change-that pose an existential threat to a crop that global consumers often take for granted. And finally, in putting a tropical plant disease at the forefront, he has crafted the first truly global environmental history of coffee, pushing its study and the discipline in bold new directions.
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Reviews
"Exhaustively researched and accessibly written, McCook offers a timely contribution with this forward-looking book, which asks us to consider what social and ecological resilience look like as we advance into an uncertain future. Though formally a work of agricultural history, it will be of use as a detailed reference for researchers outside the discipline, as well as to the particularly curious
Sabine Parrish
"McCook makes crucial contributions to a number of related fields that usually don't intersect: history of science, global history, and commodity studies. His decision to focus on the science of plant disease and the politics and institutions related results in a welcome challenge to the anthropocentrism that too often dominates the study of history. With stunning breadth of research and inquiry,
Steven C. Topik, author (with Allen Wells) of Global Markets Transformed: 1870–1945