Research
Coffee, empire, and environmental change
A dissertation, publications, funded projects, and a next book that follow coffee, and the people who grew it, across the nineteenth-century world.
Dissertation
"Caribbean Ceylon: Coffee Landscapes, Knowledge Networks, and Environmental Transformation in the 19th-Century Global Tropics"
"Caribbean Ceylon" traces how coffee farming, and the enslaved and colonized people who practiced it, moved across the world during the nineteenth century, from Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti) to Jamaica and eventually to Ceylon (present-day Sri Lanka). The dissertation shows how techniques of cultivation, systems of forced labor, and European ideas about tropical environments spread from the Caribbean to South Asia, reshaping economies and landscapes on both sides of the globe. Drawing on agricultural manuals, planters' diaries, poetry, and geospatial data from archives on three continents, the project argues that coffee itself, as a living plant with its own ecological demands, shaped the plantation systems and colonial societies built around it, just as much as those societies shaped the land they occupied.
Publications
- ArticleNovember 2025
Agricultural History
Article drawn from the dissertation research.
- Book chapterForthcoming
Raw Capital: (Un)Natural Histories of Business and the Environment (University of Pennsylvania Press)
Chapter in the forthcoming edited collection.
Selected funding
- American Historical Association
- American Institute of Sri Lankan Studies
- North American Conference on British Studies
Conference papers
"Global Tropics in Motion: The Environmental Reimagining of Eastern Australia Through Coffee"
"Tropical Migrations: The Afterlife of Ceylon's Coffee in Colonial Australia"
Traces the agricultural knowledge diaspora that followed the collapse of Ceylon's coffee industry to coffee leaf rust (Hemileia vastatrix), foregrounding the "plant in plantation" as a theoretical intervention in how historians understand crop migration after colonial crisis.
Next project
The Nature of Quality
Raymond's next monograph project, tentatively titled The Nature of Quality, examines how nineteenth-century coffee producers and merchants constructed ideas of "quality" through both commercial practice and the life sciences.