Synopses & Reviews
Linking alchemy, anthropology, politics, and science, Antony Wild uncovers the intrigue that coffee has woven into its 500-year history.
Coffee trader and historian Antony Wild delivers a rollicking history of the most valuable legally traded commodity in the world after oil and an industry that employs one hundred million people throughout the world.
From obscure beginnings in East Africa in the fifteenth century as a stimulant in religious devotion, coffee became an imperial commodity, produced by poor tropical countries and consumed by rich temperate ones. Through the centuries, the influence of coffee on the rise of capitalism and its institutions has been enormous. Revolutions were once hatched in coffeehouses, commercial alliances forged, secret societies formed, and politics and art endlessly debated.
Today, while coffee chains spread like wildfire, coffee-producing countries are in crisis: with prices at a historic low, they are plagued by unprecedented unemployment, abandoned farms, enforced migration, and massive social disruption.
Bridging the gap between coffee's dismal colonial past and its perilous corporate present, Coffee reveals the shocking exploitation that has always lurked at the heart of the industry.
Review
"Tracing coffee's history and spread from sixteenth-century East Africa and Arabia, Wild perceptively connects it with Napoleon's career and with the poet Rimbaud." Booklist
Review
"Wild's explanation of how major corporations have taken over the coffee industry...will inspire readers to comtemplate their contribution to this global situation." Library Journal
Review
"Himself a coffee lover and an expert on the subject...Wild is nonetheless no sentimentalist when it comes to the human and natural toll the bean has extracted." Washington Post
About the Author
Wild is a director of the East India Company and an undisputed authority on its history. In addition, he is a member of the Musicians Union; the Performing Rights Society; the Guild of Food Writers; the British Actors' Equity Association; the Broadcasting, Entertainment, Cinematograph, and Theatre Union; and an honorary member of the Chocolate Society.