COFFEELAND
One Man’s Dark Empire and the Making of Our Favorite Drug
By Augustine Sedgewick
In 1889, 18-year-old James Hill disembarked in El Salvador to sell textiles from Manchester, England, and wound up bringing the industrial mentality of his native city to coffee cultivation in his adopted country. A century later, in 1979, on the eve of full-scale revolution in El Salvador, his grandson Jaime Hill was kidnapped by rebels for a ransom they hoped would help finance a revolt against wealthy planters like the Hills, who had economically and politically dominated the country for decades. The intervening nine decades provide a canvas on which Augustine Sedgewick, who teaches at the City University of New York, paints a beautifully written, engaging and sprawling portrait of how coffee made modern El Salvador, while it also helped to remake consumer habits worldwide.
By following several generations of the Hill family, Sedgewick brings agency to the commodity-centric history that historians often pursue to convey the global dimensions of modern capitalism. They track how cotton, sugar, tea and other products leapfrogged across the map, transcending national boundaries. But focusing on global capital flows, supply chains, consumer markets and labor mobility can sometimes minimize what Sedgewick reveals so well: the actual choices made by the producers and importers and advertisers who merchandised the goods, the economic and political alliances they forged in the process and the often harsh local consequences of their actions.
At the heart of “Coffeeland” is a balance sheet demonstrating that the costs of an economy devoted to the monoculture of coffee decidedly outweighed the benefits. As the Hills and their fellow planters put more and more land under coffee cultivation, the Indigenous people who had fed themselves by foraging in forests and farming small plots found themselves increasingly forced to labor on plantations and in mills just to eat. Seasonal employment, low wages, food scarcity and the booms and busts of the international coffee market drove them ever deeper into poverty.
As popular discontent grew, the “Fourteen Families” who controlled El Salvador’s export coffee industry demanded more and more political control to protect their businesses — and the economy of a nation where coffee made up 90 percent of its exports. By the 1930s, a military dictatorship was entrenched. For decades, that government brutally repressed all opposition, until a civil war partly financed through kidnappings like Jaime Hill’s finally exploded in the 1980s. A democratic regime — today troubled and fragile — won out in 1992.
Coffee is no longer the monocrop it once was in El Salvador. Rather, as Brazil has come to dominate coffee production, Salvadoran coffee has become a high-end, boutique product. Sedgewick’s book closes rather optimistically with portraits of a less exploitative and more philanthropic Jaime Hill and another heir to El Salvador’s coffee aristocracy, Aida Batlle, the fair-minded entrepreneur most responsible for marketing Salvadoran coffee as gourmet.
Many other fascinating threads weave through the main story of coffee growing in El Salvador. Aggressive marketing was responsible for making coffee the “favorite drug” of Sedgewick’s subtitle. Rations to soldiers during World War II and the invention of the postwar “coffee break” helped feed America’s growing habit. Particularly interesting is Sedgewick’s account of how the rise of supermarkets helped foster the mass marketing of coffee: Cans, rare as packaging today, lent themselves well to stacking in alluring displays.
As compelling as Sedgewick’s story is, I yearned for him to probe its larger meaning. Was agriculture that struggled to compete abroad doomed to be exploitative locally? What options did the Hills and their compatriots have while still succeeding in world markets? How did first-world consumers contribute to third-world inequity? Sedgewick’s satisfying brew made me thirstier for an even bolder blend.
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How Coffee Ruined a Country - The New York Times
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