Dorothee Wierling: Coffee Worlds: Global Players and Local Actors in 20th-Century Germany

Gerda Henkel Visiting Professorship Lecture. Coffee, one of the
most important global commodities since the late 19th century, has
connected very different physical, social and symbolic worlds. The
project Dorothee Wierling will present and discuss in her talk,
focuses on one group of actors, those engaged in the overseas trade
of the unfinished product: the coffee merchants as agents of
globalisation. The talk will explore the economic, social and
political frameworks in which those merchants acted and, in doing
so, hopes to come up not only with a case study on the interaction
of the global and the local, but also with the social and cultural
history of an elite, which went through significant changes during
the "age of extremes". The lecture was given on 22 October 2013 at
the German Historical Institute London.