What began as an obscure berry from the highlands of Ethiopia is now, five centuries later, a ubiquitous global necessity
as an obscure berry from the highlands of Ethiopia is now, five centuries later, a ubiquitous global necessity. Coffee has changed the world along the way. A “wakefull and civill drink”, its pep as a stimulant awoke Europe from an alcoholic stupor and “improved useful knowledge very much”, as a 17th-century observer put it, helping fuel the ensuing scientific and financial revolutions.
To illuminate this history, and the web of connections between workers on plantations and coffee-sipping consumers, Mr Sedgewick focuses on a single planter in one country: James Hill, a British emigrant who by the 1920s had established himself as “the coffee king of El Salvador”.
A secondary theme is the relationship between food and labour, and the effort to measure human food consumption and energy output. Hill applied ideas from industrial Manchester, the city of his birth, to wring as much work as possible from his team. By paying mostly in food, and removing all other sources of it , he could manipulate the degree of hunger among local workers, and thus the availability of labour.
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