Kelley Library

Coffeeland, one man's dark empire and the making of our favorite drug, by Augustine Sedgewick

eng

Includes bibliographical references (pages 593-746)

no index present

non fiction

Coffeeland

bibliography

1143829718

by Augustine Sedgewick

Thorndike Press large print nonfiction

one man's dark empire and the making of our favorite drug

"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 cafés, 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"--, Provided by publisher

Prologue: One hundred years of coffee -- The perfect symbol of Islam -- Cottonopolis -- A state of constant eruption -- Eel -- The Hills brothers -- The sign of Apollo -- A god on the make -- The mill -- Bad luck -- The taster -- Special work -- The history of holes -- The glass cage -- The hunger plantation -- Love in the time of coffee -- The truth about coffee -- The American cure -- The coffee question -- The paradise of eating -- Inside the red circle -- An exceedingly good lunch -- The slaughter -- Pile it high and sell it cheap -- Behind the cup -- The war -- Past lives