2-10-25 *INTERVIEW* Author Augustine Sedgewick on His Book 'Coffeeland'

Episode Transcript

Speaker 2 (00:00):
All right, unbelievable.

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Okay, So listeners know that I am constantly getting pitched books.
I probably have publishers emailing me about three or four
book suggestions every day, and I say no to the
vast majority of them. I'm very, very picky about what
I read, partly because I don't want to recommend anything

(00:22):
bad to you, and partly because my time is valuable.
Because I am pitched a new books so often. I
rarely read a book that's not new. But my wife
read a book called Coffee Land, and the subtitle of
the book One Man's Dark Empire and the Making of

(00:43):
our Favorite Drug.

Speaker 2 (00:44):
And my wife knows what I like and what I
don't like.

Speaker 1 (00:46):
And my wife recommends a book to me maybe once,
maybe twice a year, very very selective. She said, you
got to read Coffee Land, and so I did, and
it is just a remarkable book. And joining us to
talk about his book is Augustine Sedgwick. And you get

(01:07):
another book coming out soon. We're going to talk about
this one first and then that one. Thanks so much
for being here, Augustine. I appreciate it.

Speaker 3 (01:14):
Russ, thanks for having me, And it sounds like thanks
to you, especially to your wife, I mean credit credit
where credits do.

Speaker 2 (01:20):
Indeed, And she just loved it. And she's a big
coffee drinker. I'm not.

Speaker 1 (01:24):
But the whole the history, the business, that everything of
it is fascinating. And I'm going to ask you a
question that I usually don't ask because it's a little
bit trite.

Speaker 2 (01:33):
Sometimes, but what made you.

Speaker 1 (01:36):
Think to write about the history of coffee in the
Western Hemisphere?

Speaker 3 (01:41):
A great question. I mean you're asking where the book started.
And the book started with me wanting to write about
the history of migration. Actually, I wanted to write something
about why we hate the people we depend on economically
is one version of the question that I was interested
in investigating. And as soon as as I started to
write about the deep history of migration, like when did

(02:04):
people start to move from Central and South America into
the United States, it became clear to me that the
story wasn't fully about migration. It wasn't only about migration,
but also about the other things that had moved across
those territories over time, especially commodities. And when you're writing
about Central America and the deep history of the connections

(02:24):
between Central America and the United States, you have to
write about coffee. Coffee is the big one that shaped
the relationship between the United States and Central America, going
all the way back to the beginning of those very
nation states.

Speaker 2 (02:39):
I don't think many people know that I write.

Speaker 1 (02:41):
I think everybody knows coffee is an enormous commodity, and
everybody knows you get this coffee and that coffee in
the Brazilian thing. And I was just in Columbia in
the Wan Valdez shop and all this stuff. But I
don't think I didn't know, and I'll project I didn't know,
and therefore I suspect not very many people knew. Very
egotistical of me, not thing that sound just just what

(03:05):
a big deal coffee was. Can you talk about them
the economic and then we'll get to culture. But let's
talk about the economic importance of coffee in the nineteen
twenties and thirties and maybe forties.

Speaker 3 (03:16):
Well, you're absolutely right. I think it's not a story.
It's not a story that most people know. But if
you want to understand why people leave their homes in
rural Central America, rural Salvador, Guatemala, in places like that
and come to the United States, you have to understand
the economic history of those places, and the economic history
of those places going back to the very beginning of
those nations is coffee. When they those places began to

(03:39):
be their own countries, when they gained independence from Spain,
they were desperate for a way to make money and
build their states and governments and societies. The way that
they did that was to adopt the production of export
commodities for the wider world market. The experiment with different commodities.
Some die, like indigo, die, sugar, all these other commodities

(04:03):
that could be produced readily in those places. But the
one that they landed on and the one that worked
most of all, was coffee. And the reason coffee worked
more than the others is is a story about how
the world was changing in the nineteenth twentieth century, how
the world was very much becoming what it is today.
And the truth is, if you want to understand the
contemporary history of the America, Central America, the United States,

(04:24):
even the most recent agreement for you know, L. Salvator's
offer to house prisoners from the United States, if you
want to understand that, you have to understand the history
of the coffee trade and the way that those countries
have always turned themselves out to be in the favor
of richer ones.

Speaker 2 (04:40):
So I'm a bit like a goldfish.

Speaker 1 (04:42):
So I'm just going to kind of wander here and
just do a stream of consciousness thing, rather than flip
through the book where I've marked pages, which probably should
be doing. By the way I did, I did read
the whole thing. I think that was clear already. A
lot of radio hosts have authors on and the hosts
haven't actually read the books.

Speaker 2 (04:58):
But I read the entire thing. So who is James
Hill and why is he so important?

Speaker 3 (05:08):
James Hill is in some ways the main character of
my story. He's the representative character for the history of
the nineteenth century in Central America. James Hill was born
poor as poor can be in Manchester, England, in the
second half of the nineteenth century. His family were mill workers.
They lived in the slums of Manchester, England, which were
arguably the worst slums in all the world at that time. They,

(05:32):
you know, Hill had tan brothers and sisters and barely
enough money for food and cardly afford anything. But what
they did have because of the time and place he
was born in was public school. Public school and England
in the second half of the nineteenth century trained poor
kids to go out into the world and work as
representatives of the British Empire, selling and buying stuff abroad

(05:54):
that could then be sent back profitably to England. James
Hill left home after school. Samshill left home at age
eighteen and went to Central America to sell textiles, to
sell goods that were made in Manchester. In Central America.
He quickly when he got there. He quickly saw that
selling textiles was a bit of a bad deal for him,
but there was another opportunity that could be taken in coffee.

(06:16):
He transformed himself from a poor kid from the slums
of Manchester into arguably the most important coffee producer in
El Salvador, which in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was
the place in the world most dominated by coffee. James
Hill was arguably the most important coffee grower in making
El Salvador into the world's most important coffee economy. And

(06:38):
he was an Englishman.

Speaker 1 (06:40):
We're talking with Augustine Sedgwick. His book is called Coffee Land.
Buy it and read it. Augustine got his PhD at Harvard,
and we won't hold that against him, and he researches
the global history of capitalism, work, food, family, and masculinity,
a big topic in his next book that we will
get to in a minute. So times were very different

(07:04):
nineteenth century, early twentieth century.

Speaker 2 (07:06):
A lot of.

Speaker 1 (07:08):
Sensibilities that exist now didn't exist then.

Speaker 2 (07:13):
And I think it's difficult even for somewhat.

Speaker 1 (07:16):
Experienced readers of history to not apply a modern filter
and modern judgments on what happened in the past. And
we really shouldn't, which doesn't mean we should say everything
was great, but we need to be careful with that.

Speaker 2 (07:30):
And that was going through my mind as I was.

Speaker 1 (07:33):
Reading the parts of the story about how James Hill
and others used hunger.

Speaker 2 (07:41):
Can you talk about that?

Speaker 3 (07:43):
This is a really important point, Ross, Thanks for bringing
it up, because the way that James Hill wereked to
know Salvador, the thing that made him successful as a
coffee grower and made it possible for him to transform
himself from a poor British kid into the most important
coffee grower in all of El Salvador was that he
applied a very specific framework to coffee production. In effect,

(08:06):
he took the logic, the economic logic of Manchester England,
the place he had been born, and transplanted it onto
the side of a volcano in El Salvador to grow coffee.
He made Salvador and volcanoes into coffee factories, just like
there were textile factories in Manchester. And the way that
he did it was to work perfectly within the laws

(08:29):
and norms of modern capitalism. He just said what he
put in place in El Salvador was exactly the system
that was already in place in Manchester. What James Hill
said was if you want to eat, you have to
work right. It's no on my plantations, it's no longer
going to be possible just to take food out of

(08:51):
the forest, just to kill animals and eat them at
your homes that you find around the countryside. He said,
that's no longer going to be possible. It's not only
that land and properties privatized. It's also that the products
of the land and earth are privatized. So there was
no alternative for those who needed to eat, which is

(09:12):
to say everyone, other than to go to work for
James Hill. And that's just how it worked in Manchester.
And that's just what Hill did in Al Salvador. But
in order to do so, he obviously had to go
to much greater lengths than Manchester mill owners did. Manchester
mill owners, it wasn't hard for them to make the
mill workers hungry. There weren't bananas growing on trees everywhere.

(09:34):
There weren't, you know, animals are running around the jungle
that could be killed and eating for dinner. In Manchester,
it was simple to impose this deal of work for
food onto mill workers. In al Salvador, James Hill had
to in effect privatize the entire ecosystem to make it
possible to compel Salvadorans to work for him in order

(09:56):
to meet their most basic needs, for example, eating.

Speaker 1 (09:59):
Yeah, and as you describe in the book, he actively
took out fruit trees and things like that that the
people could eat, so that the only way they would
eat is when they came in for lunch, to get
their tortillas and beans that they earned as part of
their compensation for working. So let me ask you a
question that borders on a philosophical or ethical question. So,

(10:23):
James Hill's workers were not technically slaves, but when you
think about how they worked and how they were managed
and so on, how different was that from slavery.

Speaker 3 (10:41):
Here's the amazing thing about that question, Because the situation
that you and I have been talking about in El Salvador,
the situation that James Hill created in El Salvador, is
the situation that created that had been created in Manchester, England,
is the situation moreover, under which you and I are
currently exist, right, This in its basic foundational norms and principles,

(11:05):
like if you want to eat, you have to work,
This is exactly the situation under which you and I
both live, and and and you know, every day and
and on some days we things are going so well
that we don't even notice that we're engaged in making
that deal, right, But some days things are going so
poorly and work just is so terrible and and unpleasant

(11:27):
that we were really aware that we have no other
option but to keep doing the thing that we're hating
so much.

Speaker 2 (11:33):
All right, let me let me push back on that
a little bit.

Speaker 1 (11:36):
So, there are not very many Americans who are hungry
all the time. They're probably more than there should be, uh,
But we also have these safety nets systems where people
can get food stamps, Medicaid and so on, these safety nets,

(11:58):
and and most people who don't need the safety nets. Yes,
they work to eat, but they also work to go
on vacation, right, and they work to you know, eat
out at a restaurant instead of at home, and save
for retirement and pay for their kids' education and all
this stuff. So I would I would suggest you're going

(12:20):
a little far.

Speaker 3 (12:23):
I would suggest as a father, I absolutely think this
is a fascinating conversation that also definitely leads into my
book about fatherhood and family life, I would suggest that
as a father, a single father of a child, going
on vacation, going out to eat, sending my child to

(12:44):
school and camp and the hospital, these are also basic
basic necessities, right, Like, let's emphasize even especially going on vacation.
I mean this is these are things that if we
had a broader conception of human needs and requirements, I

(13:08):
think we could also fit under the rubric of necessities.
And the truth is that well good, No, I was.

Speaker 1 (13:16):
Going to say, I'd like to have more of this
conversation over a bourbon.

Speaker 2 (13:23):
Because I love this stuff.

Speaker 1 (13:26):
All right, Let's let's do just another minute on coffee land,
and then I want to talk briefly about your next book,
which is coming out a in a few months and
we'll get you back.

Speaker 2 (13:34):
We'll get you back for that. One of the things
that I really enjoyed about this book. There were a
lot but.

Speaker 1 (13:41):
As the references to all of these famous coffee brands.
I'm not a coffee drinker, but I heard of them all,
like Folgers and Hill's Brothers not related to James Hill,
apparently from from El Salvador. But just tell us a
little about like writing about this wacky history of all

(14:02):
these coffee brands that are one hundred years old, but
a lot of people still know them.

Speaker 3 (14:08):
Yeah, you know, it was these The interesting thing about
these brands is like Hills Brothers, Folgers, Maxwell House right
right now, to us, to you and me, to these
appear to be outdated. These are dinosaurs, right, These are
all dead institutions that are relics of the past. The
truth is that the relationships that those brands created to

(14:30):
Central America are absolutely the forerunners of today's specialty coffee culture,
not only the Starbucks of the world with its fancy drinks,
but also the coffee shops that have gone one step
beyond Starbucks and celebrating like the origins of things and
the ability to taste, the ecological conditions under which the

(14:52):
coffee itself was produced. Like this idea, which people sometimes
call like a third wave coffee, was exactly what Hill's
brothers and folgers were doing back at the beginning of
the twentieth century. So while it seems new to us,
there's this long history of celebrating certain parts of the world,
Central America in this case, as the source of specific

(15:15):
qualities and properties in coffee and consumer experiences that that
appreciate that are made meant to appreciate those qualities and properties.

Speaker 1 (15:25):
Yeah, if you if you're a coffee drinks first of all,
even if you're not a coffee drinker, and I'm not,
this book Coffee Land is an incredible read. And if
you are a coffee drinker, it'd be even more so.
With all of the Uh, the detail about choosing qualities
of coffee and consumer taste is.

Speaker 2 (15:44):
Just it's really quite remarkable.

Speaker 1 (15:47):
Uh, let's take let's take a minute or so here
on your upcoming book. We won't spend too long because
the book isn't out and I haven't read it yet,
but it'll be out in a few months and and
we'll get you back when it is but it's called Fatherhood,
A History of Love and Power. And before you and
I went on the air, I made a comment to
you off the air about how, through reading Coffee Land,

(16:09):
I could not tell what your politics are, and you said,
thank you, And that's also important for my next book.

Speaker 2 (16:17):
So can you talk about that a little bit.

Speaker 3 (16:20):
Yeah. We hear from from all across the political spectrum
a lot of discussion about the crisis of men and boys.
This is a really kind of powerful topic that can
be approached and interpreted a lot of different ways. I
think that in many cases there's justification for talking about

(16:40):
how men and boys are struggling. I wrote this book
in order to address one way that I was struggling
in my own life at around the time of my son.
My son was born. I also I also had a
changed relationship with my father because he had a stroke
that really changed his personality, and that, plus stuff that

(17:02):
was going on in the world around the Me Too movement,
made me wonder like, well, what does it mean to
be a father now? It felt like the old ideas
of fatherhood I had had collapsed at the very moment
that I had become one myself, And so I wrote
this book not only to try to figure out what's
happening in the world, but also try to figure out
my own relationship with my father and son. And I

(17:24):
wrote this book about the history of fatherhood to try
to understood where it had come from, what it really meant,
how it had changed over time, and why and when
where we are currently with it. It really in order
to address these very personal, intimate questions that are political
but are also so profoundly personal and meaningful to me individually.

(17:48):
And my hope is that you know, in this context
of this kind of high pitched discussion of the crisis
of boys and men and masculinity everything like that, I
hope we can kind of exist exist in the world
of that conversation, while also saying, wouldn't it be nice
to be able to use this book to connect with

(18:09):
the people in your life who you love and are
trying to figure out how to love in a more
rewarding way. That's why I wrote it, and that's my
secret hope for the way people use it.

Speaker 1 (18:21):
Augustine Sedgwick's prior book that I just finished is called
Coffee Land. His upcoming book, which will be released in
about three months, is called Fatherhood, A History of Love
and Power.

Speaker 2 (18:31):
You can pre order it now.

Speaker 1 (18:33):
Links to all of this are on my blog at
Rosskominski dot com. If you go to the guest section
you can find all of this stuff and again the
direct links to the book. Augustine, thanks for making time
as a fabulous conversation. Well let's keep in touch off
the air about maybe seeing if I can host you
for an event here when your next book comes out.

Speaker 2 (18:53):
That would be really cool. Ross.

Speaker 3 (18:55):
It is my pleasure. Thank you so much, and thanks
to the person who for whom you know, who's a
really possible for the souls.

Speaker 2 (19:01):
Yeah, that's right. Well we'll both thank my wife, all right.
See U.