Sedgewick also focuses on the production history of coffee. He details the story of James Hill, an Englishman who applied industrial methods — sometimes brutal — to the growing of coffee in El Salvador, creating a rigid monoculture of coffee and a pool of native workers driven by hunger — their native food sources having been deliberately destroyed — to work the coffee plantations. "Eventually, he even recoiled at the sound of workers' laughter, because it meant they were squandering time and energy that belonged to him."
