Coffee is enjoyed by billions of people around the world, but its story is known to only a few. At the turn of the 20th century, Englishman James Hill came to the volcanic highlands of El Salvador, founding a coffee dynasty. Adapting the innovations of the Industrial Revolution to plantation agriculture, Hill turned El Salvador into a place of extraordinary productivity, inequality, and violence. Reconsidering what it means to be connected to faraway people and places, Augustine Sedgewick tells the unvarnished tale of one of the most valuable commodities in the history of global capitalism.