“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.
