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TLS, May 22, 2020
Food & drink|Book Review
Killing for coffee
The villains behind a hot drink
By Judith Hawley
COFFEELAND
A history
448pp. Allen Lane. £25 (US $30).
Augustine Sedgewick
“Towards the end of his life”, reports Augustine Sedgewick, Goethe
“could see in his mind the invisible connections that bound the world
together.” “In nature”, Goethe observed, “we never see anything
isolated, but everything in connection with something else before it,
beside it, under it, and over it.” That is precisely how Sedgewick sees
coffee, and in the impressive Coffeeland – ostensibly a history of the
rise of one coffee producer, James Hill, who in the late 1800s founded a
huge estate on the slopes of the Santa Ana volcano in El Salvador – he
demonstrates the significance of coffee as an archetypal global
commodity. When Sedgewick was writing, coffee was the world’s most
valuable trading commodity after oil. Like oil, it is a vector for the
transmission of energy. And, like oil, it has been responsible for the
degradation of the environment and the oppression of some people, as
well as the enrichment and pleasure of others. It is, Sedgewick sums up
in the subtitle to the US edition of his book, “our favorite drug”. As
this review goes to press – after a pandemic-induced price war has
slashed the price of crude oil – coffee might yet claim the commodities
crown.
Sedgewick’s story begins and ends in 1979, in the early days of El
Salvador’s thirteen-year civil war, with the kidnap of a
third-generation coffee baron, Jaime Hill Jr. Marxist-Leninist rebel
groups had stepped up their campaign against the American-backed
military dictatorship and were targeting businessmen and government
personnel. The state, meanwhile, was deploying death squads to terrorize
and “disappear” suspects. “The state was built on killing and coffee”,
says Sedgewick. He explains how this dire situation arose, delineating
El Salvador’s increasingly fraught connections with the wider world in
the decades after the arrival of the nineteen-year-old James Hill in
1889. Hill had escaped the Manchester slums and aimed to make his way as
a textile salesman, but marriage to the daughter of a wealthy local
coffee farmer set him on a more lucrative path. He benefited from the
Salvadoran government’s promotion of coffee as a cash crop through
generous subsidies to planters and the forced privatization of communal
land that had been vital to the subsistence of the peasant and
indigenous Pipil population. He continued to profit despite frequent
fluctuations in prices caused by natural disasters, including
earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, and competition from Brazilian
producers. Brazil – which depended on slave labour until 1889 and
thereafter tried to maintain its dominance by growing inferior Santos
beans and employing sharp practice – emerges as a minor villain in
Sedgewick’s tale.
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A more important player is the United States, and Sedgewick does not
oversimplify the country’s role. For much of the nineteenth century, the
US was a useful market to El Salvador. Americans had become major
consumers of coffee after independence (when tea was suddenly harder to
come by because of the rupture with the British Empire), and continued
to rely on the beverage during times of mass mobilization caused by
events such as the Civil War, Gold Rush and First World War. Coffee was
also the drink of the “huddled masses” of European immigrants, who could
barely afford to eat but needed energy to work. When the First World War
disrupted Atlantic trade and limited Brazilian exports, importers and
roasters based in San Francisco were able to open up Pacific trade
routes. Central American coffee producers profited.
The turning point in US–El Salvador relations was the Spanish–American
War of 1898, after which America increasingly exercised imperial
ambitions in Central America. It also gained new coffee-producing
colonies: the Philippines and Puerto Rico. In a description of the
Pan-American Exposition that opened in Buffalo in May 1901 – two years
late, thanks to the war – Sedgewick interweaves several strands of the
narrative. Coffee was central to the exposition – a display of coffee
from “blossom to cup” ran for three-quarters of a mile. “The
‘effectiveness’ of the coffee exhibit,” Sedgewick argues, “was in
depicting the hemisphere as a kind of seamless economic collaboration,
business as nature.” The Republican President William McKinley –
nicknamed “Coffee Bill” for his heroic delivery as a teenaged commissary
sergeant of hot coffee to exhausted Union troops during the battle of
Antietam – seemed likely to protect the coffee trade in the new American
colonies by imposing high tariffs on coffee from elsewhere. Yet he
intended to use the exhibit to announce a major change in policy: an end
to protectionism and thus new opportunities for countries such as El
Salvador. Before he could unveil the plan, however, McKinley was shot
“and mortally wounded by an anarchist who had lost his factory job in
the economic slump the President hoped to remedy through freer trade”.
Meanwhile, at Buffalo, James Hill’s Santa Ana peaberry coffee was
awarded a Silver Medal. The prize was awarded by one Frederick W.
Taylor, who would later turn up in El Salvador himself.
America’s involvement in El Salvador reads like a classic Mafia
takeover. In the 1920s, a protracted slump in trade and still excessive
export taxes left El Salvador’s government crippled by debt. Fearing the
country might go the way of Russia, the US agreed to back a “controlled
loan” to cover government debt and fund economic development, on
condition that the State Department would appoint advisers and
inspectors to supervise the economy. “The unstated implication”, says
Sedgewick, “was that defaulting on the loan payments would open the door
for U.S. military intervention.” The US government sent over a customs
inspector, chief of agriculture, and a chief of police to ensure its
interests were protected. Taylor, now an agricultural consultant, was
asked to put El Salvador’s agriculture on a scientific footing. His
priority was to diversify export crops – introducing cotton, for example
– so that the loan could be repaid. It was not his concern whether the
people of El Salvador were fed.
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. Stitched into the narrative at various points is a series of
set-pieces on Friedrich Engels in Manchester, the significance of the
god Apollo in Victorian England, experiments in calorific expenditure,
thermodynamic theory, accounts of mealtimes on Hill’s coffee
plantations, and the stopping power of bullets. Together, these
intellectual forays constitute a powerful indictment of labour relations
in El Salvador and capitalism in general. Sedgewick shows how, after
adopting industrialized production, various agencies and institutions in
the nineteenth century set out to extract the maximum amount of labour
with the minimum calorific input. On Hill’s plantation, that amounted to
twice-daily rations of “two thick corn tortillas plus whatever quantity
of beans could be balanced on top of each”. That was all the food the
workers could get, Hill having ripped out all edible plants from his land.
In All About Coffee, published in 1922, William Ukers described the
“food drink” as “the most grateful lubricant of the human machine”.
Because of the boost that caffeine supplies, coffee disrupts the
“calories in = energy out” formula. In a particularly compelling
chapter, Sedgewick describes how employers exploited the effect of
caffeine on productivity by incorporating fixed coffee breaks into the
day. (The coffee break was, then, part of work, not its opposite.)
Coffee’s disruption of the relation between input and output at the
human level also offers an analogy through which to understand the
business as a whole. Growing coffee is, clearly, labour intensive:
according to a United Nations study from 1954, three “man-hours” produce
about 2lbs (or 900g) of roasted coffee. Yet, Sedgewick calculates,
because of caffeine’s productivity-stimulating power, “the work that
went into coffee in El Salvador created twenty times as much work in the
United States”. If the worker is a machine, the machine’s workings are
more complex than first allowed.
Even less human is the man at the heart of the narrative: James Hill.
Although Sedgewick presents ample contextual material and employs
novelistic techniques, Hill is a shadowy figure. He is rarely quoted,
though numerous articles, speeches and letters are cited. Hill’s son
Jaime Snr comes briefly but vividly alive as we see him in 1932, on the
eve of a popular uprising, take up a catalogue of the Winchester
Repeating Arms Company to circle in red “a nine-millimeter soft-tip
hollow-point bullet, which he knew would fit his semi-automatic SIG
Brevett Bergmann rifle”. The brutal suppression of the rebellion
virtually wiped out the native Pipils. It is perhaps with a sense of
justice, then, that Sedgewick does not present Coffeeland as the rags to
riches story of a boy from the Manchester slums. This is a cautionary tale.
There are glimmers of hope. Jamie Hill Jr. – who was held at gunpoint
for five months while his family negotiated a ransom, from $8 million
down to $4 million – has become part of the solution to El Salvador’s
historic inequities and corruption. After the cessation of civil war in
1992, the heir to the Hill dynasty advised former guerrillas on how to
establish legitimate businesses. And raw coffee, which used to make up
around 80 per cent of Salvadoran exports, now constitutes 5 per cent –
economic diversity and biodiversity existing in connection as Goethe
recognized.
Judith Hawley is Professor of eighteenth-century literature at Royal
Holloway, University of London
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