The effects of caffeine mesh with the needs of capitalism in myriad ways. Before the arrival of coffee and tea in the West in the 1600s, alcohol—which was more sanitary than water—was the drug that dominated, and fogged, human minds. This might have been acceptable, even welcome, when work meant physical labor performed out of doors (beer breaks were common), but alcohol’s effects became a problem when work involved machines or numbers, as more and more of it did.

From April 2020: Maya MacGuineas on capitalism’s addiction problem

Enter coffee, a drink that not only was safer than beer and wine (among other things, the water it was made with had to be boiled) but turned out to improve performance and stamina. In 1660, only a few years after coffee became available in England, one observer noted:

’Tis found already, that this coffee drink hath caused a greater sobriety among the Nations. Whereas formerly Apprentices and clerks with others used to take their morning’s draught of Ale, Beer, or Wine, which, by the dizziness they Cause in the Brain, made many unfit for business, they use now to play the Good-fellows in this wakeful and civil drink.

“This wakeful and civil drink” also freed us from the circadian rhythms of our body, helping to stem the natural tides of exhaustion so that we might work longer and later hours; along with the advent of artificial light, caffeine abetted capitalism’s conquest of night. It’s probably no coincidence that the minute hand on clocks arrived at roughly the same historical moment as coffee and tea did, when work was moving indoors and being reorganized on the principle of the clock.

The intricate synergies of coffee and capitalism form the subtext of the historian Augustine Sedgewick’s thoroughly engrossing first book, Coffeeland: One Man’s Dark Empire and the Making of Our Favorite Drug. At the center of Sedgewick’s narrative is James Hill, an Englishman born in the slums of industrial Manchester in 1871 who, at 18, sailed for Central America to make his fortune. There, he built a coffee dynasty by refashioning the Salvadoran countryside in the image of a Manchester factory. Hill became the head of one of the “Fourteen Families” who controlled the economy and politics of El Salvador for much of the 20th century; at the time of his death, in 1951, his 18 plantations employed some 5,000 people and produced more than 2,000 tons of export-ready coffee beans from more than 2,500 acres of rich soil on the slopes of the Santa Ana volcano. For many years, much of what Hill (or rather his workers) produced ended up in the familiar red tins of Hills Brothers coffee.

“What does it mean to be connected to faraway people and places through everyday things?” Sedgewick asks in his early pages. Coffeeland offers a fascinating meditation on that question, by rendering once-obscure lines of connection starkly visible.