An interesting read that I'm glad to have discovered. I'll definitely be seeking out more by this author.

Way too all over the place and hardly focused, but it has some interesting points on coffee plantation culture, the role of state (up to committing genocide on indigenous people to protect the ruling elite), the role of foreign government (in this case the US) to protect their coffee interest, and last but not least, the consumers' relationship with their coffee. How many of you actually know how much the price the planters paid for their workers?

The history, economy and arts a coffee bean reveals

The reader travels through time and place while reading Coffeeland by Augustine Sedgewick (published by Penguin Books). It is not a history book with arbitrary links to the role of coffee, nor is this a bleak presentation of how coffee was discovered and popularised. Instead, the book dives into history, economy and humanities and reveals the intricate ties coffee had with glorious and disgraceful moments in history, with capitalism, socialism, imperialism, with Goethe, Balzac and Nietzsche.

The book is rich in details and stories, but it is still easy to read and digest. As to ‘digestion’, as we learn from the book, the effect of coffee on the human body was not discovered for a very long time. Who would guess that out of all people it was Goethe who made an attempt at uncovering it? Goethe, once and avid coffee drinker, at the age of 71, gave a box of coffee beans to a young physician, Friedlieb Runge, to identify what was inside the coffee beans and how they worked. Runge, after months of hard work, managed to isolate an alkaloid, a plant base, which he called Kaffeine (which translates to ‘coffee-like’). Runge became a successful commercial chemist, and it was left to other scientists to discover two other ‘active principles’ of coffee, namely, caffeine, its essential oil, which is the source of its aroma and flavour, and caffeic acid, which also contributes to the flavour.

These findings established a new definition - and a new business value - to coffee, and from this time on, coffee that didn’t have all these 3 components wasn’t considered coffee. It took another long twist and turn in history, economy, humanities and life sciences to determine the effect of coffee on the human body - the details of which, and much more, can be followed up in Coffeeland by Augustine Sedgewick (Penguin Books, 2020).

Well written and throughly researched, this book went far deeper into the subject of coffee than I has expected it to, and if you love coffee and are interested in history, then this is a great book for you.
Though, I wouldn't say you need to have a passion for either one particularly to enjoy this book, as its as much a compelling narrative driven book, as it is a history and factual Non-Fiction read.
I enjoyed it a lot.

You don’t need to like coffee to like this book although it might help. Nonfiction is becoming progressively narrative driven like Coffeeland - the story mostly of the Hill family’s dynastic coffee plantation sweeping from Manchester cotton mills to modern day coffee breaks in the office.

Coffee workers rarely drink the coffee consumers do. Sedgewick explains why with history, policy, politics, economics in an engaging way that explains why everything has a global impact (almost like a butterfly flapping its wings...) different chapters move at different speeds to reflect the variation in subject/delivery. A hostage situation may play out differently to the United States import policy after all.

Coffee comes from cherries; read “Coffeeland” to find out why where it comes from is important.