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76 Books & arts
Coffee and capitalism
The big grind
Coffeeland. By Augustine Sedgewick.
Penguin; 444 pages; $30 and £25
hat began as an obscure berry from
Wthe highlands of Ethiopia is now, five
centuries later, a ubiquitous global neces-
sity. 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. Cof-
feehouses, an idea that travelled with the
Dutch fiction
Cold comfort farm
The Discomfort of Evening. By Marieke
Lucas Rijneveld. Translated by Michele
Hutchison. Faber & Faber; 296 pages;
£12.99. To be published in America by
Graywolf Press in September; $16
he 29-year-old author of this im-
Tpressive Dutch debut, Marieke Lucas
Rijneveld, grew up on a dairy farm in
North Brabant. Cows, in this telling, are
sensitive creatures; sick cows are the
sweetest kind. “You could stroke them
gently without them suddenly kicking
back at you.” The meagre comfort in “The
Discomfort of Evening” comes from
these beasts; the humans in this searing
novel, shortlisted for the International
Booker prize, are too numb with pain to
be able to console anyone.
Ten-year-old Jas, the narrator, and her
devout family live on a small farm in
rural Holland. Theirs is a stern God rather
than a loving one. When the family vet
arrives at the homestead just before
Christmas to report that Jas’s oldest
brother has drowned, having fallen
through the ice on a skating trip, Jas’s
mother believes God is punishing her for
being a bad parent. The Christmas tree is
taken down, the decorations put away.
The adults turn inward; the children face
their grief on their own. “We are growing
up with the Word, but words are lacking
more and more frequently at the farm.”
Jas and her two surviving siblings
embark on a series of rituals to try to hold
the family together. She keeps two toads
refreshment from the Arab world, became
information exchanges and centres of col-
laboration; coffee remains the default
drink of personal networking to this day.
The focus of Augustine Sedgewick’s
book is not coffee’s effect on drinkers but
its role in the story of global capitalism, as a fected conditions for workers on the
commodity that links producers in poor
countries with consumers in rich ones.
Coffee does more than merely reflect this
divide, he argues—it has played a central
role in shaping it. It is, he notes, “the com- his narrative. Contrary to popular belief,
modity we use more than any other to
think about how the world economy works
and what to do about it”.
To illuminate this history, and the web
of connections between workers on plan-
tations 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”. By telling five cups of coffee a day. By the turn of the
in a pail, hoping that if the animals can
somehow be induced to mate, her par-
ents will love one another again. After
the farm is overwhelmed by foot-and-
mouth disease, though, and the family
herd has to be destroyed, the story takes
an even darker turn.
The author, a prizewinning poet, is
deft with words. “Kissing with tongues”,
the narrator reflects, “always makes me
think of those slimy, purplish-red cook-
ing pears that Mum makes.” Out in the
farmyard, “Two forks lie with their teeth
through each other…like hands praying.”
It is the strange, haunting observations
through which the child, Jas, tries to
make sense of the grown-up world that
give this novel of grief its particular
power. A book to read—and to remember.
The Economist April 25th 2020
the story of El Salvador’s emergence as the
world’s most intensive coffee economy,
and following coffee beans from Hill’s
plantation to American consumers’ cups,
Mr Sedgewick painstakingly shows how
shifts in the global coffee market have af-
ground. The result is a portrait of the politi-
cal and economic consequences of the
world’s addiction to coffee.
He tucks many fascinating details into
for example, it was not the Boston Tea Party
that led to tea’s dethronement as America’s
favourite hot drink: it was the abolition of
tariffs on coffee imports in the early 19th
century, as the United States sought to
build trade ties and buy influence across
Latin America. Imports doubled every de-
cade between 1800 and 1850; during the civ-
il war the average Union soldier consumed
20th century consumption per person in
America was roughly double the level in
France and ten times that in Italy. Most of
this coffee came from Latin America.
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 in-
dustrial Manchester, the city of his birth, to
wring as much work as possible from his
team. By paying mostly in food, and re-
moving all other sources of it (such as wild
fruit trees), he could manipulate the degree
of hunger among local workers, and thus
the availability of labour. The resulting cof-
fee was then used to optimise the efficien-
cy of workers in America, as bosses realised
that formal coffee breaks improved pro-
ductivity. Both coffee producers and con-
sumers, Mr Sedgewick scathingly implies,
are mere cogs in the remorseless machin-
ery of global capitalism.
After all this readers might expect his
conclusion to be a ringing endorsement of
the “fair trade” model (coffee is by far the
leading fair-trade product), which adds a
small premium to the price of certified cof-
fees to fund projects to improve workers’
welfare. In fact, Mr Sedgewick thinks the
arguments over fair trade obscure a more
fundamental issue, which is the lack of
other opportunities in places where the lo-
cal economy is dominated by coffee. In El
Salvador’s “dictatorship of coffee”, where
coffee planters enjoyed a virtual monopoly
on politics, the only alternatives were mi-
gration or revolution, leading to decades of
strife during the 20th century that pitted
coffee growers against their overlords.
Artfully blending together all these
strands, and juggling a wide cast of charac-
ters, Mr Sedgewick’s book is a parable of
how a commodity can link producers, con-
sumers, markets and politics in unexpect-
ed ways. Like the drink it describes, it is an
eye-opening, stimulating brew. 7