'Thoroughly engrossing ... his literary gifts and prodigious research make for a deeply satisfying reading experience studded with narrative surprise, hopping back and forth between El Salvador and the wider world' Michael Pollan, The Atlantic
Augustine Sedgewick earned his doctorate at Harvard University and teaches History and American studies at the City University of New York. His research on the global history of work, food, and capitalism has won fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Jackman Humanities Institute of the University of Toronto, and the Project on Justice, Welfare, and Economics at Harvard. Originally from Maine, he lives in New York City.
Wonderful, energising ... Coffeeland is a data-rich piece of
original research that shows in compelling detail how coffee
capitalism has delivered both profit and pain, comfort and terror
to different people at different times over the past 200 years ...
Sedgwick's great achievement is to clothe macroeconomics in warm,
breathing flesh.
*The Guardian*
Thoroughly engrossing ... his literary gifts and prodigious
research make for a deeply satisfying reading experience studded
with narrative surprise. Sedgewick has a knack for the sparkling
digression and arresting jump cut, hopping back and forth between
El Salvador and the wider world.
*The Atlantic*
Both a curio-shop of forgotten snippets of history and quirky facts
- who knew mocha was so called because it was shipped out of a
Yemeni port of the same name? - as well as a theory of the modern
world ... there is much here to entertain, educate and - dare one
say it of a book about coffee - stimulate.
*Financial Times*
Sedgewick's gripping book exposes the dark heart of what goes into
making a ubiquitous commodity, cherished every morning, enshrined
in the workplace and appreciated after a meal. It provides a
devastating answer to the question: 'What does it mean to be
connected to faraway people and places through everyday
things?'
*The Spectator*
An erudite and engrossing socioeconomic history ... With a forensic
grasp of detail, Sedgewick charts the rise of mass-marketing and
modern retail strategies through the story of the humble coffee
bean ... Yet Coffeeland's poignant message runs wider still.
Ultimately, the story of coffee, today's 'unrivaled work drug', is
also the story of globalisation.
*Literary Review*
Many fascinating details... Mr Sedgewick's book is a parable of how
a commodity can link producers, consumers, markets and politics in
unexpected ways. Like the drink it describes, it is an eye-opening,
stimulating brew.
*The Economist*
[A] beautifully written, engaging and sprawling portrait of how
coffee made modern El Salvador, while it also helped to remake
consumer habits worldwide.
*New York Times*
It's a rich and complex story and the book is full of glances at
the history of the times ... This is a staggeringly well-researched
piece of work.
*Daily Mail*
Impressive ... People and food as much as coffee itself are the
focus of Sedgewick's concern and the nexus of some of the most
surprising connections in Coffeeland ... A powerful indictment of
labour relations in El Salvador and capitalism in general.
*Times Literary Supplement*
Epic, illuminating ... Coffeeland functions not just as the story
of one country's relationship to coffee, but as a pocket history of
globalisation itself ... It is a story very worth telling - and one
that reaches out far beyond so-called "Coffeeland" itself.
*Daily Telegraph*
Informed and entertaining ... Coffeeland is thoroughly researched
and Sedgewick is a stylish writer.
*i newspaper*
Extremely wide-ranging and well researched, Sedgewick's story
reaches out into American political history ... The originality and
ambition of Sedgewick's work is that he insistently sees the
dynamic between producer and consumer-Central American peasant and
North American proletarian-not merely as one of exploited and
exploiter but as a manufactured co-dependence between two groups
both exploited by capitalism.
*New Yorker*
Meticulously researched, vivid in its scene-setting, fine-toothed
in its sociopolitical analysis . . . Coffeeland lays bare the
history and reality behind that cup of joe you're drinking.
*Boston Globe*
How did a cup of coffee become the everyday addiction of millions?
In this impressively wide-ranging, personality-filled history,
Augustine Sedgewick untangles the routes that carried coffee from
the slopes of El Salvador's volcanoes ... To enter Coffeeland is to
visit a realm of ruthless entrepreneurs, hard-working laborers,
laboratory chemists, and guerrilla fighters.
*Maya Jasanoff, author of THE DAWN WATCH*
Capitalism has remade the global countryside in radical ways.
Coffeeland brilliantly chronicles this most consequential
revolution by telling the global history of one family. After
reading Augustine Sedgewick's fast-paced book you will never be
able to think about your morning coffee in quite the same way.
*Sven Beckert, author of EMPIRE OF COTTON*
Coffeeland will set a new standard ... an innovative study of work,
of the work involved to produce a drink needed by workers to keep
working. Sedgewick treats coffee not so much as a material
commodity but rather more like intangible energy ... provocative
and convincing.
*Greg Grandin, author of THE END OF THE MYTH*
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