Coffeeland: One Man's Dark Empire and the Making of Our Favorite Drug by Augustine Sedgewick Paperback Book

Details

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

Author: Augustine Sedgewick

Format: Quality Paperback

Publisher: Penguin Books

Published: Apr 2021

Genre: History - Latin America

Retail Price: $19.00

Pages: 448

Synopsis

A New York Times Book ReviewEditors’ 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.

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