Coffeeland: ONE MAN'S DARK EMPIRE AND THE MAKING OF OUR FAVORITE DRUG by Augustine Sedgewick - 2020

 

An autodidactic corner selection 

 

Coffeeland:ONE MAN'S DARK EMPIRE AND THE MAKING OF OUR FAVORITE DRUG by Augustine Sedgewick - 2020

There are three related but distinct aspects to Coffeeland

ONE MAN'S DARK EMPIRE AND THE MAKING OF OUR FAVORITE DRUG.  In part it is a history of the development of coffee into the world’s most popular beverage.  Sedgewick traces e coffee from Yemen, to Java, then to South and Central America.  He shows us how coffee’s spread followed the path of western colonial expansion and its partnership with slavery into Brazil and elsewhere.  Coffee growing was a very labor intensive enterprise and was initially, like sugar, cotton, and other crops profitable only with very inexpensive labor. Sedgewick goes into a lot of detail on Brazilian slavery, ending in 1888, and the immigration of Italians to Brazil.  

The one man in the title is James Hill, who emigrated to El Salvador from the slums of Manchester in 1889 at the age of 18.  He would end up running a coffee empire much like the industrial lords of Manchester ran their satanic mills.  The story of how James Hill rose to great wealth on the backs of thousands of often near starving indigenous El Salvadorians is fascinating.  In Industrial Age Manchester mills, a workers productivity was strictly measured.  Hill forced this on his employees through a cruel methodology of not providing enough food to employees who did not dig enough holes to plant trees, pick enough beans and such.  He kept workers hungry and made sure they kept to rigid guidelines.  He employed overseers who could use physical punishment.  Many of the workers were women who were subject to sexual exploitation.  They also used sex with overseeing men to gain advantages.  Coffee growing turned El Salvador into a one crop economy.  History teaches us this can lead to disaster.  Sedgewick traces the up and downs of the international coffee market.

Hill was very enterprising, he studied the works of other growers, he married into an affluent elite family of Spanish speaking planters.  He was a very fast learner, soon expanding his sales into San Francisco.  He developed vacuum sealed cans which preserved coffee for a long time.

We learn a lot about how coffee is  grown.  It takes five years for a tree to become productive.  Coffee is not an easy crop to raise.  

There is a third aspect to the book.   Sedgewick digresses into ruminating on world history and events.  

I enjoyed learning about coffee in El Salvador and the life of James Hill.

Have a nice hot cup of coffee as you read Coffeeland:ONE MAN'S DARK EMPIRE AND THE MAKING OF OUR FAVORITE DRUG by Augustine Sedgewick.

Of course Hill’s Coffee, very much still big in the coffee business after 110 years, has their own side of the story

“James Hill

Born in England, arrived in El Salvador in the 19th centuary. From a very young age he realized that by introducing new techniques to the cultivation and processing of coffee, he could export coffee beans that met the highest international standards.

He began exporting coffee on his own account at the end of the 19th centuary and, shortly after, won a silver medal at the Pan-American Exposition in New York, 1901.

James Hill founded Las Tres Puertas in 1896, in Santa Ana town, located close Santa Ana’s Volcano whose slopes produce coffee beans of the highest quality. His vision in promoting new ideas and methods to coffee production in our country included the introduction of the Bourbon variety of Arabica coffee.

So great was his contribution to the art of growing, processing, and exporting coffee that, in May 1948 he was awarded with Diploma al merito Agricola cafetalero by the federacion cafetalera de centro America y mexico.”  from https://www.jhillcoffee.com/

From Random House

“ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Augustine Sedgewick earned his doctorate at Harvard University and teaches at the City University of New York. His research on the global history of food, work, and capitalism has received fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Project on Justice, Welfare, and Economics at Harvard, and has been published in History of the Present, International Labor and Working-Class History, and Labor. Originally from Maine, Sedgewick lives in New York City.”

This book has received well deserved rave reviews in the main stream press.  There are links on the author’s website.

https://www.augustinesedgewick.work/

Coffeeland:ONE MAN'S DARK EMPIRE AND THE MAKING OF OUR FAVORITE DRUG by Augustine Sedgewick is a first rate work of narrative Non-fiction.

The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of the Empire by Andrew Jackson O'Shaughnessy - 2013 - 720 pages

 The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of the Empire by Andrew Jackson O'Shaughnessy - 2013 - 720 pages

An Autodidactic Corner Selection.

A few months ago, i began another permanent Reading Life Project,Revolutionary Readings devoted to works of non-fiction on the order shattering revolutions of the late 18th and early 19th century in South America, Haiti, France and the United States.  

There are hundreds, probably 1000s of books just on the American Revolution.  In school in the long ago pre-internet days I was taught the standard hagiographical account of the American Revolution.  In this  no mention was made of the British military and political leaders other than to denigrate them.  Of course no mention was ever made of slavery or the role of native Americans in the revolution.  No factual account of why slaves were to be counted as 3/5ths of a person was given or why the now ridiculous electoral College system was adapted.   Of course the teachers did not themselves have any real knowledge. 

One of, probably the best, sources of books on The American Revolution is The Journal of The American Revolutions list of 100 Best Books on The American Revolution and their annual book awards list.  About half of The books are availables as Kindle Editions, my preferred teading format.  I added these books to my Amazon Wish List and monitor them for flash sales, often at 80 percent discount.  I was glad to see The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of the Empire priced at $2.95, now back up to $10.95.

The book is structured as a series of ten interlocking biographies.  Starting with King George III the common view of him as laughably incompetent and later insane is corrected.  Before the onset of his dementia as depicted in the movie, The Madness of King George, he was very knowledgeable about public affairs.  King George was very much against American independence.

Among the other men featured are the Howe Brothers, Lord George Germain,Henry Clinton, General Burgoyne, George Rodney, Charles Earl of Cornwallis, and Jeremey Twitcher the Earl of Sandwich.  Top military positions were relegated to nobility.  Often second sons from noble families had positions  as officers purchased for them.  This was totally the case in the British Navy.  The leaders knew each other socially, often had kinship ties and even married each other’s sisters.

Enough space is devoted to each person to give us a real sense of them.  

Many in England, including some of the British leaders, felt the war could not be won.  The supply lines were way to long, England was also fighting against the French in the Caribbean and with other colonial powers in India. The English generals were used to wars fought on open battle fields, not wars of skirmish and in deep woods.  The British lost almost all loyalty in America by the brutal tactics they used in capturing towns.  Also they enlisted Indian tribes who sometimes scalped women and children to turn the scalps in for rewards.  The British did in some very bad decisions fail to follow up on early victories which might have ended the revolution.  They did not anticipate the massive help America would get from the French.  The French navy’s actions in the Caribbean and Indian Oceans nullified the naval advantage of the British.  The author lets us see how the American Revolution was really a world war fought in Europe, India, Gibraltar, Canada as well as in America.  

After the war, O'Shaughnessy follows the leaders up until their deaths.  The Generals remained active in the military, they were not shamed or condemned.  Some fought with distinction against Napoleon.

This book will fascinate anyone into the American Revolution.  All teachers of American history should read this book.  

Andrew O’Shaughnessy is Vice President of Monticello, the Saunders Director of the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies at the Thomas Jefferson Foundation and Professor of History at the University of Virginia.  He is the author of An Empire Divided: The American Revolution and the British Caribbean (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000).  His most recent book The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution and the Fate of the Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013) received eight national awards including the New York Historical Society American History Book Prize, the George Washington Book Prize, and the Society of Military History Book Prize.  He is a co-editor of Old World, New World. America and Europe in the Age of Jefferson (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010) and a co-editor of the Jeffersonian America series published by the University of Virginia Press.  A Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, he is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of American History.  From https://www.monticello.org/

His  An Empire Divided: The American Revolution and the British Caribbean is on my Amazon Waiting List