Description
Temporarily out of stock
Title: Coffeeland: A history
Author: SEDGEWICK AUGUSTINE
Format: PAPERBACK
Publication date: 02/07/2021
Imprint: PENGUIN BOOKS
Price: $23.00
Publishing status: Active
The history of coffee and how it has reshaped the world and ourselves
Coffee is one of the most valuable commodities in the history of the global economy and the world’s most popular drug. The very word ‘coffee’ is one of the most widespread on the planet. Augustine Sedgewick’s brilliant new history tells the hidden and surprising story of how this came to be, tracing coffee’s 400-year transformation into an everyday necessity.The story is one that few coffee drinkers know. It centres on the volcanic highlands of El Salvador, where James Hill, born in the slums of nineteenth-century Manchester, founded one of the world’s great coffee dynasties. In the process, 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 supermarkets, kitchens and work places of the United States, and finally into today’s omnipresent cafes. 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.
ISBN: 9780141991900
Pages: 448
Edition: 01