Coffeeland: A History

by Augustine Sedgewick

*Winner of the 2022 Cherasco International Prize*

'Thoroughly engrossing' Michael Pollan, The Atlantic

'Wonderful, energising' Kathryn Hughes, The Guardian

Coffee is one of the most valuable commodities in the history of the global economy and the world's most popular drug. The very word 'coffee' is one of the most widespread on the planet. Augustine Sedgewick's brilliant new history tells the hidden and surprising story of how this came to be, tracing coffee's 400-year transformation into an everyday necessity.

The story is one that few coffee drinkers know. Coffeeland centres on the volcanic highlands of El Salvador, where James Hill, born in the slums of nineteenth-century Manchester, founded one of the world's great coffee dynasties. Adapting the innovations of the industrial revolution to plantation agriculture, Hill helped to turn El Salvador into perhaps the most intensive monoculture in modern history, a place of extraordinary productivity, inequality and violence.

The book follows coffee from the Hill family plantations into the United States, through the San Francisco roasting plants into supermarkets, kitchens and work places, and finally into today's omnipresent cafes. Sedgewick reveals the unexpected consequences of the rise of coffee, which reshaped large areas of the tropics, transformed understandings of energy, and ultimately made us dependent on a drug served in a cup.

'Gripping' The Spectator

'An eye-opening, stimulating brew' The Economist

• ISBN10: 0141991909
• ISBN13: 9780141991900
• Publish Date: 1 April 2021 (first published 7 April 2020)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: GB
• Imprint: Penguin Books Ltd
• Format: Paperback (B-Format (198x129 mm))
• Pages: 448
• Language: English

Reviews

[Heather]

This book tells the story of coffee production in the 1800s and 1900s through the story of a family of plantation owners - the Hills.

James Hill moved from England to El Salvador in order to sell textiles. He married into a plantation family. Over the course of his life, he changed the way coffee was grown in El Salvador. In the process he changed El Salvador from a relatively peaceful country with a wide variety of agriculture to a violent country almost entirely planted in a monoculture of coffee.

The author of this books goes off on a lot of tangents from this story. He spends a huge amount of time talking about energy. People in the 1800s were trying to figure out how to get the most work out of people with the minimal cost to employers. Planters in El Salvador had a very cruel system. They forbid their workers to pick any food crops that they might find on the plantations. They also destroyed as many sources of food as they could so workers would be dependent on the plantation owners giving them food. If they didn't work, they didn't eat. People who missed a day's work went hungry, even on scheduled days off. The plantations were big enough and they worked long enough hours that it was almost impossible to get to a town for food. I'm not surprised that eventually people violently rebelled.

My problem with this book is that it tried to cover too many topics.

 

• The history of coffee
• History of Central America
• Discovery of energy
• How people learned to ship coffee
• How coffee was graded
• How coffee became a loss leader in grocery stores
• Why free trade doesn't work very well
• and on and on.....

Honestly, I would have probably stopped listening to this audiobook if I didn't need a book about El Salvador for my Around the World Challenge but I pushed through.