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

By Augustine Sedgewick

Book Overview

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.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1594206155
• ISBN13: 9781594206153
• Release Date: April 2020
• Publisher: Penguin Press
• Length: 448 Pages
• Weight: 1.62 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.6" x 6.4" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Rambling mess

I love coffee, and really wanted to like this book, but it's all over the place in scope. Skip the book, perk yourself some java, and research companies to buy coffee from that are eco friendly.