Coffeeland: One Man's Dark Empire and the Making of Our Favorite Drug

Written by Augustine Sedgewick

Narrated by Jason Culp

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Penguin Audio
• Release date: Apr 7, 2020
• ISBN: 9780593165195

Augustine Sedgewick

Augustine Sedgewick is the author of Coffeeland: One Man’s Dark Empire and the Making of Our Favorite Drug, a New York Times Editors’ Choice and winner of the Cherasco International Prize. He earned his doctorate at Harvard University, and his writing has appeared in Rolling Stone, Time, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and many other publications. His American Scholar essay “Thoreau’s Pencils”, exploring ties he discovered between Henry David Thoreau and slavery around the Gulf of Mexico, was honored by Best American Essays. Sedgewick lives in New York City with his son.  

Reviews for Coffeeland

[ozzer_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This careful review of the central role coffee played in world events is indeed thorough. Not only does it cover the details of coffee from the plantations to the cup, but also its historical role in international relations, especially between the US and El Salvador. The parts of the book that focus on the fine points of coffee's development as a commodity in world commerce, its preparation, marketing, and uses by industry are particularly informative, especially to anyone who enjoys their "coffee break." Sedgewick avoids a dry accounting, however, by maintaining a focus on El Salvador and especially on James Hill, the most influential Latin American planter. Clearly, Hill was a complex man. He rose from poverty in the UK to become one of the wealthiest men in the Americas. He was intelligent, entrepreneurial, curious, and inventive. However, his main focus was always on profits. His only regard for the workers was how they might benefit his enterprise. Not unlike his peers at the time, his view of labor was as an asset for making profits. His motivations for humane treatment only derived from how such policies might benefit the success of his plantation. Clearly, this played a key role in the social and political unrest that El Salvador experienced throughout its history.