Augustine Sedgewick Coffeeland : A History Paperback Book

Winner of the 2022 Cherasco International PrizeThoroughly engrossing Michael Pollan, The AtlanticWonderful, energising Kathryn Hughes, The GuardianCoffee is one of the most valuable commodities in the history of the global economy and the worlds most popular drug. The very word coffee is one of the most widespread on the planet. Augustine Sedgewicks brilliant new history tells the hidden and surprising story of how this came to be, tracing coffees 400year transformation into an everyday necessity. The story is one that few coffee drinkers know. Coffeeland centres on the volcanic highlands of El Salvador, where James Hill, born in the slums of nineteenthcentury Manchester, founded one of the worlds great coffee dynasties. 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. The book follows coffee from the Hill family plantations into the United States, through the San Francisco roasting plants into supermarkets, kitchens and work places, and finally into todays omnipresent cafs. Sedgewick reveals the unexpected consequences of the rise of coffee, which reshaped large areas of the tropics, transformed understandings of energy, and ultimately made us dependent on a drug served in a cup. Gripping The SpectatorAn eyeopening, stimulating brew The Economist | Augustine Sedgewick Coffeeland : A History Paperback Book