This is an automatically translated description

In the XX century, an English trader James Gill, with his cunning and vigour, managed to establish a whole caviar empire in the Republic of El Salvador. How did he do it? The author of this book, a researcher of the history of food, work and capitalism, a member of the Harvard Scientific «Project for the Study of Justice, Welfare and Economics» Augustin Sedgwick, tells this fantastic and unlikely story. He shows how we drink kava every day and do not even think about the conditions under which it could have been harvested and milled. On James Gill's plantations, conditions were unhumane — kava became almost a symbol of capitalism, and the people who were in the charge of the plantation owner had to work harder and harder.

This history will actually explain to the readers macroeconomic, social and political processes on a very familiar and basic application — the process of growing kava grains.

About the author

Ogastin Sedgwick is a lecturer in American history and culture at the Metropolitan University of New York.

Why this book is good:

• Cava gained popularity and turned into a necessary attribute of modern society in just 200 years. Few people know this history of its formation as an extremely widespread drug. And especially the lovers of kava do not know much about the voraciousness that prevailed on kava plantations, and about James Gill, the founder of one of the first kava dynasties in the XX century.
• The book has so many peripetias that you often forget that you are not reading about drug lords, but about the producers of ordinary, it would seem, kava.