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

by Augustine Sedgewick

The division of the world into rich and poor paralleled the division of the world into coffee drinkers, overwhelmingly concentrated in the industrialized global north, and coffee workers, even more concentrated in the predominantly agricultural and perpetually “developing” global south. As the most valuable agricultural product of the world’s poorest regions, coffee has played a central role in shaping this divide.

Coffee is native to Ethiopia, where the first commercial harvests were gathered from wild plants in the fifteenth century.

According to many etymologies, the word “coffee” derives from the Arabic qahwah, meaning wine: coffee was “the wine of Islam,”

The “Turkes berry drinke” became English, and then European, by way of the coffeehouse.

One by-product of steam-powered manufacturing in Manchester was a great population of young people who stood virtually no chance of inheriting property, the children of millworkers who were just scraping by.

Spanning eight decades between 1850 and 1930, the export boom has also been described as “the second conquest of Latin America,” and with reason. In this conquest, the laws of prices, wages, and profits replaced the old principles of gold, God, and glory.

El Salvador’s Izalco in particular was celebrated as perhaps “the most remarkable volcano on earth.”13 It was renowned not only for the frequency and regularity of its eruptions, but also because it had risen from the ground in the same time as Manchester’s chimneys: from a crack in the middle of a cattle estate to a perfectly formed five-thousand-foot cone in a century. Geologists hypothesized that Izalco was born from “a deviation of the subterranean fire which animated the neighboring system of extinct volcanoes clustered around the great peak of Santa Ana,” less than three miles away.

The Dutch finally succeeded in establishing coffee cultivation outside Arab control in 1699, when they introduced coffee into Java,

After losing Haiti, France’s most valuable Caribbean colony, Napoleon refocused his ambitions on Europe, invading Portugal in 1808 with the idea of taking the port of Lisbon. Overmatched, the Portuguese court fled across the Atlantic to Rio de Janeiro.

in 1881 and 1882 the system of communal landownership in El Salvador was abolished altogether by a series of legislative decrees authored by a senator from Santa Ana. Those without a land title in hand were instructed to go to local authorities with proof that they had been cultivating a particular plot, pay a fee, and secure the title. If they did not or could not do so within six months, the land would be put up for auction.

The privatization of land; the militarization of commerce; the strict policing of work and social life: collectively these laws were the “liberal reforms.” They were liberal to the extent that they concealed their core racism behind the principle of equality of opportunity in the marketplace—a principle that applied, of course, only to those who had money.

The coincidence of emancipation in Brazil and the coffee blight in Asia created space in the world coffee market for other Latin American republics.

The imperial aspirations of the young United States pushed the borders of the country across the continent and beyond. Unable to compete with richer and more powerful European empires for access to overseas markets and resources in Asia and Africa, the U.S. found a geographical advantage in the Western Hemisphere. Not long after Latin American nations gained independence from Spain and Portugal in the 1820s, the U.S. became the first world power to import coffee duty-free.

greatest task of any self-described planter: to figure out how to make other people do the planting and everything else.

cleanliness was the most direct determinant of coffee’s market value, and the quality of the inspection was the most direct determinant of cleanliness.

the structure of the exchange was designed primarily to protect people who were trading coffee, not to serve the interests of those who were drinking it. In fact, the grading process in New York made no specific accounting of the positive qualities of coffee beans, only of their imperfections and defects.

Tariffs, he said, had nurtured U.S. industries so much that they had overgrown the domestic market, smothering it under surpluses that had led to a stock market crash and nationwide depression.

Coffee remained on the U.S. duty-free list, and the message Puerto Rican coffee planters received from their new government was clear: as part of the United States, they were on their own economically. In effect, when coffee became a “domestic” American product through the acquisition of colonies in 1898, it also became the first American mass-consumer commodity to be outsourced abroad as a matter of political and economic strategy. This was welcome news in Central America, but it was a disaster in Puerto Rico, where coffee cherries rotted on the trees, and the collapse of the industry caused “widespread suffering” and hunger “in every village and town.”20

In a letter to a friend in 1902, Adams considered what this would mean for society at large in the new century: “We have created and established a new philosophy and a new religion, which I think will endure,” he predicted, “the religion of energy with a very big E, and of man with a very small m.”40 Energy was the great prize, and life itself had been devalued.

In 1894, with the U.S. economy in the grip of a serious depression, Wilson sponsored a controversial tariff bill that lowered duties on imports to spur foreign trade and U.S. exports, while making up for the expected loss in government revenue with the first peacetime income tax.

The “American cure” he prescribed for Latin American governments was based on a three-part formula of debt, discipline, and exports: an injection of borrowed cash paired with top-down reforms that ranged from monetary and commercial policy to penal codes, all directed toward the goal of increasing export production.

The form of capitalism that emerged from the end of chattel slavery was based on both rude and technical ways of forcing people to work voluntarily to meet their basic needs.