In the Western world, coffee was at first viewed with suspicion; it soon became a luxury item and by the 20th century was the drug of choice of hundreds of millions, “the unrivaled work drug” as Augustine Sedgewick puts it. In Coffeland, Sedgewick focuses on El Salvador, long governed by the “Fourteen Families” of coffee barons, especially the Hill family, a dynasty established by an English expat of modest origin who immigrated to the Central American nation in 1889. Who knew that coffee consumption in the U.S. was promoted in the 1930s by marketing campaigns funded by Latin American governments? Using the Hill family as the through-line, Sedgewick crams much information—on everything from coffee cultivation to labor exploitation—into a lengthy but enjoyably readable account.
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