Coffeeland
One Man's Dark Empire and the Making of Our Favorite Drug
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4.7 • 3 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice
“Extremely wide-ranging and well researched . . . In a tradition of protest literature rooted more in William Blake than in Marx.” —Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker
The epic story of how coffee connected and divided the modern world
Coffee is an indispensable part of daily life for billions of people around the world. But few coffee drinkers know this story. It centers on the volcanic highlands of El Salvador, where James Hill, born in the slums of Manchester, England, founded one of the world’s great coffee dynasties at the turn of the twentieth century. Adapting the innovations of the Industrial Revolution to plantation agriculture, Hill helped turn El Salvador into perhaps the most intensive monoculture in modern history—a place of extraordinary productivity, inequality, and violence. In the process, both El Salvador and the United States earned the nickname “Coffeeland,” but for starkly different reasons, and with consequences that reach into the present.
Provoking a reconsideration of what it means to be connected to faraway people and places, Coffeeland tells the hidden and surprising story of one of the most valuable commodities in the history of global capitalism.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this thought-provoking and gracefully written debut, Sedgewick, an American studies professor at City University of New York, chronicles the 20th-century transformation of El Salvador into "one of the most intensive monocultures in modern history" and the concurrent rise in Americans' thirst for coffee. According to Sedgewick, El Salvador's shift from communal subsistence farming to staple crop production was led by James Hill, an Englishman whose plantation empire was staffed by indigenous men ("mozos") who picked the beans and women ("limpiadoras") who cleaned them. Though Hill and his heirs reaped immense riches from coffee production, their employees suffered; an American observer claimed in 1931 that El Salvador's inequality compared to that of pre-Revolutionary France. Meanwhile, thanks to Hill's distribution plans and the invention of vacuum-sealed tin cans that preserved the beans' freshness, the U.S. became the world's biggest coffee market. By the second half of the 20th century, the "coffee break" had become such an important part of the working day that the Supreme Court enshrined it as an employee's right, and coffee made up 90% of El Salvador's exports. The breadth of Sedgewick's analysis of coffee's place in the world economy astonishes, as does his ability to bring historical figures to life. Coffee connoisseurs will relish this eye-opening history.
