How did coffee, native to Ethiopia, become the global commodity that connects the world today? Augustine Sedgewick digs and uncovers the dark historical roots of the red cherry that caffeinates our world in Coffeeland: One Man’s Dark Empire and the Making of Our Favorite Drug. 

At the center of Sedgewick’s book is the coffee entrepreneur James Hill.  His journey from Manchester’s working class to establishing and owning a coffee empire in El Salvador is a stunning tale with at times unbelievable and fiction-like events. Make no mistake though, as Sedgewick’s research eventually shows, James Hill’s entrepreneurial success and El Salvador’s domination in coffee trading sits in a historical landscape of colonialism and imperialism. Readers of this book learn how history contributes to today’s global inequalities and gain an appreciation for connectedness through everyday objects. 

The book begins in El Salvador before the coffee boom. According to Sedgwick, a visitor to El Salvador in the mid 19th century would have been unlikely to see disparate economic classes. People participated in communal farming and villages were generally self-sufficient. In the late 1800s, a group of politically powerful Salvadorans feared falling behind a world that was undergoing transformations powered by the industrial revolution. They too, wanted combustion engines, telephones, and electric lights. El Salvador’s terrain was filled with rich soil which meant that for these political elite, coffee plantations represented the best way forward

Starting in 1846, through tax breaks, subsidies, and state-led campaigns, El Salvador plunged into coffee production. While production increased significantly, indigenous and peasant farming communities continued farming food crops on the best land for coffee cultivation. Growing impatient, the government ordered these farming communities to construct coffee nurseries and commit to the agricultural transition. Disaster ensued. A century after El Salvador first jumped into coffee production, poverty and famine became more common. El Salvador flourished in an industry it set out to dominate but its working class ended up faring worse after doing so. 

Coffee is not just an important commodity in global capitalism; it embodies the history of global inequality and trade. Coffee’s past in El Salvador exemplifies  the humanitarian issues and social injustices characteristic of  the Global North’s exploitative relationship to the Global South. 

Coffee production is founded on labor, often cheap labor. Coming from Manchester, a booming urban center powered by industrial capitalism, James Hill knew that hunger drives work, even under unfair conditions. In addition to paying money to laborers, compensation also came in the form of tortillas and beans. Coffee monoculture transformed communal farmland into privately held properties as El Salvador pushed to make space for coffee plants at the expense of other food crops. 

Here is the harsh truth that underpinned Hill’s success: these policies gradually made it harder for those who used to occupy that land to be self-sustaining. Hill and the Salvadoran government put coffee exports first and subsistence second. To make matters worse, edible plants that naturally sprung up on the estate were uprooted to ensure that workers could not feed themselves independently of the coffee business. Whether they wanted to or not, farmers found themselves farming for the likes of Hill and global demand for coffee, instead of farming for their families and communities.

Such strategies did much to grow the coffee industry, but little to promote fair economic development. Income differed by two fold in 1880 between industrial economies and the rest of the world. Then it was three fold in 1914. By 1950, the difference exceeded by five fold. This polarization parallels coffee cultivation and global development. El Salvador’s coffee industry was a product of an emerging global economy that commandeered the resources of the Global South to feed the wants and desires of the Global North.

Through the tale of James Hill and Ecuador, Sedgewick raises important and complex issues central to governing modern life: What does it mean to be connected to faraway people and places through everyday things? 

This question made me realize that I, as a daily coffee consumer, knew little of the  humanitarian crises coffee farmers faced in 2019, as coffee prices plummeted. 

Consumers today may have heard of fairtrade and volatile prices, but Sedgewick’s book  explains how specific past events contribute to global inequities that persist today. For instance, Sedgwick introduces key events like the establishment of the New York Coffee Exchange. He then guides the reader to important questions like “why did New York Standards hold such power” against all other exchanges in the world that soon followed. What this means is that the wellbeing of coffee growers in El Salvador increasingly depended as much on what happened on the New York Coffee Exchange as it did what happened on their farms

A foodie understands that food is at the foundation of community and culture. When I purchase a foreign good, I am getting a piece of another place in the world. But Sedgewick demonstrates that there is more beyond food and culture. He insightfully incorporates key historical events and shows how greater themes of each era are embedded in small but relevant details of James Hill’s coffeeland. 

Turn the pages in Sedgewick’s compelling piece of narrative and learn more about the breadth and depth of coffee’s history. We are not connected just by today’s trade but by global dynamics that stretch across time and space. This was known all along, but Sedgewick’s connects the dots between international relations, economics, and agriculture in ways that will likely change how you think about your morning cup of coffee.