Caleb McDaniel on Slavery and Restitution

08/03/20 • 40 min

Who Makes Cents?: A History of Capitalism Podcast

Thanks to the work of activists and intellectuals like Ta-Nehisi Coates and Jamelle Bouie, Black peoples’ demand for reparations have garnered growing attention among politicians, business leaders, university officials, and journalists. For those that argue that reparations are not possible or that too much time has passed, today’s guest has an important story to tell about a formerly enslaved woman named Henrietta Wood who sued for restitution in 1870 and won; paid $2,500, what is likely the largest sum ever awarded by a court in the United States in restitution for slavery. Wood’s story, which crosses multiple boundaries between lower and upper South, the antebellum and postbellum period, blurring the distinctions between, offers us valuable lessons about the history of slavery and freedom, and the lengths that different people went to in order to achieve both. More importantly, Henrietta Wood raises the question once again on people’s lips: what is owed to the formerly enslaved and their descendants? And demonstrates that such restitution is long overdue.

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Episode 68: Augustine Sedgewick on the Dark Empire of Coffee

Many of us are familiar with the negative health effects of coffee, which include insomnia, nervousness, upset stomach, and increased heart rate. Yet, this hasn’t seemed to stop many Americans from reaching for a cup, or two or three, of coffee to help them make it through the day. One estimate puts coffee consumption in the United States at 400 million cups of coffee a day, or more than 140 billion cups a year, making the United States the world’s leading consumer of coffee. Yet, for all the coffee we consumer, we spend little time thinking about how this reliance affects the people who make it.

Augustine Sedgewick seeks to change that with his new book, Coffeeland: One Man’s Dark Empire and the Making of Our Favorite Drug. Starting with coffee’s origins in the Middle East, he reveals how coffee spread to Europe and the New World alongside European imperialism, transforming whole societies in the process. Moving forward in time, he explains how the United States used its status as a consumer of coffee to expand its influence in the hemisphere. All in all, the story told here is about much more than coffee, integrating histories of labor, food, business, and imperialism to reveal how global capitalism creates disconnections, as well as connections.

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Casey Lurtz on Globalization from the Grounds Up

The history of globalization is one that has often been told as a story of elites. There are a number of truths to this narrative. Yet, as Casey Lurtz shows, it also ignores some things. In From the Grounds Up: Building an Export Economy in Southern Mexico, Lurtz tells the history of how a border region, the Soconusco, became Mexico’s leading coffee exporter. She does so not by focusing on the Mexican politicians and foreign capitalists who came to the Soconusco with dreams of grandeur. Rather, as the title suggest, Lurtz digs below the surface of these visions to reveal the role played by local people in the dual projects of economic liberalism and globalization.