Review: Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World

Uncommon Grounds is a great book, and points to what I think is an overlooked section of history: the history of things. We have lots of books about people. There are cultural histories, like Churchill's history of English speaking folk and there are histories of activists and ideologies, like Zinn's histories. I just finished reading SPQR, which is the history of a city becoming an empire becoming an entirely new way of relating. There are small stories, like any of the biographies from Isaacson, or there are big stories, like Sapiens.

But these stories all involve people, and people sort of blend together after a bit in a fleshy, brown, tan, pink mess.

The histories of stuff -of things and their processes- is, in my opinion, unexplored in popular culture. I've read a few books about things, but I almost always read them as a joke. For example, "Lesser Beasts: A Snout-to-Tail History of the Humble Pig" is the history of the pig. It's very interesting, but a book people give you a weird eye when you tell them you read it. Oink oink.

Perhaps a more defensible history of things is "Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World" which I read because I was feeling a bit engineer-y at the time. That book is an exploration of different materials, but also their history. It's a bit more professionally correct to be reading about the history of carbon nanotubes than it is to be reading about how the Romans like their bacon, but the fact is they're both the same: a thing exists that a human wants, and so the human must do something about it.

The history of things is the history of Societal McGuffins.

Nowhere was that made more clear for me than reading Uncommon Grounds. Coffee seems to be responsible for the best in humanity- the Enlightenment, scientific development, etc- and also the worst in humanity- slavery, imperialism, trade protectionism. The history of coffee captures the strained relationship between Latin America and the West, the Resource Curse, and the complexities that arise when a supply chain spans across the globe before globalism is even a coherent idea. Indeed, it's hard to read about coffee and not think about how its sister plants- the illegal kind- conform to the exact same geographic structure and follow similar economic laws.

Imagine if we went insane and wanted to stop coffee and make it illegal. Our current strategy for dealing with illegal subsistences is to bomb the shit out of peasants in the jungly hills of the Andes, and so we would have to expand that strategy across the trees of Brazil and West Africa. What about the millions of people, like me, who will have a homicidal headache if you take away their coffee? Well, it is just not economic to help those people. Bombing peasants who capture 0% of the value they create, somehow, is.

This is a benefit of the histories of Societal McGuffins: like things have like histories, like economics, and like societies. The parallel histories of foods and industries are not the same and they don't repeat, but they rhyme.

Read a history book about a thing! Things are more real than nations or ideologies. The Brazilian people went from Empire to Republic to dictatorship, but the coffee trees were constant (unless it snowed bad). The American people carried their coffee across the sea and across the Great Plains and over the Rockies more than they carried the racial and religious superstitions of their homelands. It may have taken 60 years for Italian style fascism to reach American shores, but the espresso jumped across the Atlantic as soon as it could.

Read a history book about a thing!