Coffeeland

February 2, 2022 10:16 AM

"For while the Union side was fighting to end slavery, the coffee that it gulped down was the product of a South American plantation system as brutal as anything you might find in the cotton fields of Mississippi." "Hill had picked up the Manchester men’s trick of using hunger to lick a workforce into shape... [he] ruthlessly uprooted any other food stuffs that sprung up accidentally among his coffee trees – self-seeding tomatoes, avocados, plantains and figs – to ensure that no one managed to assuage their hunger on the sly." A review of Coffeeland by Augustine Sedgewick. A chat with Augustine Sedgewick.

From the interview: "Most of us drink coffee because our jobs are terrible. And i mean that not in necessarily a bad way... The second reason we drink coffee is basically imperialism... The third reason we drink coffee is because we have a very poor... understanding of the relationship between the first two things."

posted by clawsoon (7 comments total)

Sounds like a good companion to Empire of Cotton. A little dry (lots of statistics) but really brings home how much cotton dominated the global economy, and contributed not just to slavery, but the dislocation and genocide of Native Americans, and terrible land practices in the south.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 11:46 AM on February 2, 2022 [1 favorite]

That whole first paragraph could have used a copy edit. WTF could "marching on its ordinance" possibly mean? And also I quibble that it should be surprising, that the Union Army would be dependent on a slave-grown commodity, as long as the slavery involved was not in the United States. Or even really just not outside the States where slavery was already legal in 1860.

Continuing, TFA says

It’s this conundrum of connectedness that lies at the heart of Coffeeland, Augustine Sedgewick’s energising study of how an everyday commodity has ploughed up the world’s surface and hacked deep into its economic and political design. His analysis goes far beyond those “commodity biographies” that were so popular two decades ago, the ones with one-word titles like Cod, Salt or Paper.

The "commodity biographies" were perhaps inspired by Sweetness and Power, which went over some of the same ground back in the 1980s. And arguably laid the groundwork for books like this one, by noticing that it was cheap sugar that made it possible for there to be mass demand for coffee, tea, and chocolate.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 2:31 PM on February 2, 2022 [3 favorites]

Sweetness and Power! I read that back as an undergrad when the world was young, and it was ground-breaking for me. Really affected how I thought about commodities and colonialism.
posted by suelac at 2:37 PM on February 2, 2022

Also, the last line of TFA:

“What does it mean to be connected to faraway people and places through everyday things?”

I'm morally certain that George Orwell wrote someplace or other words to the effect that it is one of the ironies of life that some people have to live like slaves for others to live decently. In some ways this has gotten less bad over time but remains true today. Can anybody help me with an Orwell cite, assuming I'm not hallucinating the passage?
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 2:39 PM on February 2, 2022

Aardvark Cheeselog—you're almost certainly thinking of The Road To Wigan Pier (1937) in which this idea (inequality of suffering vs. enjoyment of commodities, and the binding of people through markets) is a leitmotif, but from Ch2:

It is so with all types of manual work; it keeps us alive, and we are oblivious of its existence. In a way it is even humiliating to watch coal miners working. It raises in you a momentary doubt about your own status as an 'intellectual' and a superior person generally. For it is brought home to you, at least while you are watching, that it is only because miners sweat their guts out that superior persons can remain superior.

posted by Fiasco da Gama at 6:06 PM on February 2, 2022 [2 favorites]

Also w/r/t commodity biographies, Wolfgang Schivelbusch's 1980 Tastes of Paradise (about the use of, and growth of global markets around, spices and intoxicants and drugs)—his book is about the simultaneous emergence of demand for these kinds of traded goods, of global financial markets, and of [colonial, and other] institutions to produce and distribute them.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 6:12 PM on February 2, 2022

I am reminded of the observation of a speaker during a symposium on the Black experience in Rhode Island maybe 6 years ago. She noted that, when Moses Brown became a Quaker and divested himself from the family slaving business and freed his slaves, the only sensible place to move his resources was into textile production, which relied on Southern cotton. She called slavery the “carbon footprint of the 18th C.”
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:06 AM on February 3, 2022