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Coffeeland: One Man's Dark Empire and the Making of Our Favorite Drug - Paperback | Diverse Reads

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

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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.

ISBN-13: 9780143110743

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group

Publication Date: 04-06-2021

Pages: 448

Product Dimensions: 5.40(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.10(d)

Augustine Sedgewick earned his doctorate at Harvard University and teaches at the City University of New York. His research on the global history of food, work, and capitalism has received fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Project on Justice, Welfare, and Economics at Harvard, and has been published in History of the Present, International Labor and Working-Class History, and Labor. Originally from Maine, Sedgewick lives in New York City.

Table of Contents

Prologue: One Hundred Years of Coffee 1

1 The Perfect Symbol of Islam 15

2 Cottonopolis 21

3 A State of Constant Eruption 32

4 EEL 46

5 The Hills Brothers 58

6 The Sign of Apollo 66

7 A God on the Make 76

8 The Mill 84

9 Bad Luck 93

10 The Taster 101

11 Special Work 116

12 The History of Holes 132

13 The Glass Cage 148

14 The Hunger Plantation 158

15 Love in the Time of Coffee 171

16 The Truth About Coffee 181

17 The American Cure 198

18 The Coffee Question 214

19 The Paradise of Eating 235

20 Inside the Red Circle 254

21 An Exceedingly Good Lunch 273

22 The Slaughter 284

23 Pile It High and sell it Cheap 297

24 Behind the Cup 313

25 The War 327

26 Past Lives 341

Acknowledgments 363

Notes 367

Selected Bibliography 401

Index 421