Coffeeland - BookWyrm

Hardcover, 448 pages

Published April 7, 2020 by Penguin Press.

ISBN:: 978-1-59420-615-3

(2 reviews)

Coffee is an indispensable part of daily life for billions of people around the world--one of the most valuable commodities in the history of global capitalism, the leading source of the world's most popular drug, and perhaps the most widespread word on the planet. Augustine Sedgewick's Coffeeland tells the hidden and surprising story of how this came to be, tracing coffee's five-hundred-year transformation from a mysterious Muslim ritual into an everyday necessity.

This story is one that few coffee drinkers know. 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 to turn El Salvador into perhaps the most intensive monoculture in modern history, a place of extraordinary productivity, inequality, and violence.

Following coffee …

Coffee is an indispensable part of daily life for billions of people around the world--one of the most valuable commodities in the history of global capitalism, the leading source of the world's most popular drug, and perhaps the most widespread word on the planet. Augustine Sedgewick's Coffeeland tells the hidden and surprising story of how this came to be, tracing coffee's five-hundred-year transformation from a mysterious Muslim ritual into an everyday necessity.

This story is one that few coffee drinkers know. 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 to turn El Salvador into perhaps the most intensive monoculture in modern history, a place of extraordinary productivity, inequality, and violence.

Following coffee from Hill family plantations into supermarkets, kitchens, and workplaces across the United States, and finally into today's ubiquitous cafes, Sedgewick reveals how coffee bred vast wealth and hard poverty, at once connecting and dividing the modern world. 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. This extraordinary history of coffee opens up a new perspective on how the globalized world works, ultimately provoking a reconsideration of what it means to be connected to faraway people and places through the familiar things that make up our day-to-day lives.

7 editions

bwaber reviewed Coffeeland by Augustine Sedgewick

An Incredible Combination of History, Economics, and Agriculture

5 stars

Using the development of El Salvador's coffee industry as a jumping off point, Sedgewick convincingly demonstrates how coffee production is inextricably linked to colonialism, technological development, and accidents of history. Sedgewick brings deep research and a holistic approach to this instructive topic, and his extremely engaging writing style makes the entire book that much more enjoyable.

The importance of scientific advances in the mid-1800s was particularly interesting to me, with the discovery of the law of thermodynamics and the fascination with measurement spilling over to the workplace and society more broadly. The examination of its role in facilitating the expansion of scientific management and caloric expenditure measurement, first in the lab and then put in practice on plantations through an elaborate cafeteria and food production system, echoes even today in free corporate lunches. The importance of the human choices made during this period that dramatically shaped working conditions for plantation …

Using the development of El Salvador's coffee industry as a jumping off point, Sedgewick convincingly demonstrates how coffee production is inextricably linked to colonialism, technological development, and accidents of history. Sedgewick brings deep research and a holistic approach to this instructive topic, and his extremely engaging writing style makes the entire book that much more enjoyable.

The importance of scientific advances in the mid-1800s was particularly interesting to me, with the discovery of the law of thermodynamics and the fascination with measurement spilling over to the workplace and society more broadly. The examination of its role in facilitating the expansion of scientific management and caloric expenditure measurement, first in the lab and then put in practice on plantations through an elaborate cafeteria and food production system, echoes even today in free corporate lunches. The importance of the human choices made during this period that dramatically shaped working conditions for plantation workers and the growth of the coffee industry was shocking and incredible.

Overall, this book not only highlights the genesis of the industry that produces a staple of the global diet. It also underlines how economic demand and concern for profit alone can create horrible societal outcomes that are hidden from consumer markets. There is so much more covered in this essential book, I can't highly recommend it enough.

Heather reviewed Coffeeland by Augustine Sedgewick

Review of 'Coffeeland' on 'Goodreads'

No rating

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 book 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 …

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 book 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.
This review was originally posted on Based On A True Story

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