Would you kill for a cup of coffee?

In the winter of 1939, at the San Francisco Golden Gate trade fair, an advertorial film called Behind the Cup told the story of El Salvadorean coffee, from seed to cup. America was the world’s biggest consumer, drinking nearly 60 billion cups a year. It opened with a picturesque image of local Indians in traditional costume dancing under the Santa Ana volcano. A trade commentator intoned:

Far to the south, high in the mountains of Central America… studded with volcanic peaks, rich in tropical grandeur… Here at the beginning of the coffee season we find gaiety and laughter.

Bankrolled by the coffee planters, it portrayed a Potemkin village of plantation life. Just seven years before the film’s premiere, nearly 30,000 native Salvadoreans, in revolt after decades of toil and exploitation on the coffee plantations, were butchered by the state.

Augustine Sedgewick has written an dark, exhaustive, survey of what one commodity can do to a poor country that has the world’s richest neighbour as a market. His account starts with one of coffee’s founding dynasts, James Hill. From the squalid slums of 19th-century Manchester, Hill escaped via textile trading to El Salvador in 1889. Only independent from Spain in 1821, the country was one of ‘subsistence farmers, with four lawyers and four physicians among its 250,000 citizens’.

Hill married into a local family, inherited some plantations and diligently applied the industrial practices of his homeland to this new Eden. With American and British financial loans and domestic enforcement, land in El Salvador was parcelled up, and traditional farmers growing diverse food crops were thrown off and impoverished. By 1928 coffee had become ubiquitous, and in the second half of the century covered a quarter of all El Salvador’s farmland, employing a fifth of its population and accounting for more than 90 per cent of its exports.