Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History

by Sidney W. Mintz

Traces the history of sugar production and consumption, examines its relationship with slavery, class ambitions, and industrialization, and describes sugar's impact on modern diet and eating habits.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Anthropology, Food, Economics, Food History, Academic

304 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1985

About the author

Sidney W. Mintz was Research Professor and William L. Straus, Jr., Professor, Emeritus, in the Department of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. He was the author of Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History and Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom: Excursions into Eating, Power, and the Past, among others.

Reviews

[unperspicacious · Rating 3 out of 5]

As a commodity history this is somewhat dated, and as other GR reviewers have noted, in need of tighter editing, both stylistically and structurally. Remarkably uneven in quality. The last two chapters are problematic, IMO - far too much space has been devoted to theory, defending the earlier historical materialist approach against disciplinary battles with social anthropology, while the prior historical approach is ultimately jettisoned in favour of abstract speculation about contemporary food meanings. Very much a work of its time, in terms of the 'transition' in academic history from materialism to 'cultural studies'. History and anthropology in some ways are admittedly very difficult bedfellows to reconcile, and this book shows both the problems and some possible solutions to doing so, if one is one inclined.

The best bits were perhaps the detailed discussions in Chapters 2 & 3 on the details of production and consumption. If only more space had been devoted to these. The thesis about non-European aspects of industrialization and capital accumulation might have gained more depth and explanatory power that way.

Again this perhaps is indicative of the strengths and weaknesses inherent in commodity histories - too broad in some ways (in terms of disciplines, geographical coverage, topical material), too narrow in others.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

There was a dish of oysters sprinkled with sugar that was known as “Oyster in gravy Bastard”. Isn’t that the best name for a meal?

“Hi Mum! What’s for dinner?”
“Oyster in gravy Bastard.”
“My favourite!”

“And for you, sir?”
“I’ll have the oyster in gravy Bastard. With a green salad.”
“Very good sir.”


This was an interesting read … but I’m not sure that the structure’s quite right. Lots of jumping around and repetition. It’s like you’re only supposed to read one of the chapters.


Bits:
“holidays often preserve what the everyday loses.”

“Mixing sugar, pearls, and gold leaf to produce a powder in order to blow it into one’s ailing eye may seem bizarre in the extreme.”

On Tea and the British:
“'Tea, which refreshes and quietens, is the natural beverage of a taciturn people, and being easy to prepare, it came as a godsend to the world’s worst cooks.'”

“A rarity in 1650, a luxury in 1750, sugar had been transformed into a virtual necessity by 1850.”

“Maldistribution of food within poor families may constitute a kind of culturally legitimized population control, since it systematically deprives the children of protein.”

“Tobacco, sugar, and tea were the first objects within capitalism that conveyed with their use the complex idea that one could become different by consuming differently.”

“The food technologist’s lexicon for the uses of sugar and fat pays special attention to sugar’s way of making foods more palatable. Baked products are judged by their quality of ‘go-away’. Proper proportions of sugar and fat result in good ‘go-away’ – which means that the mouthful of food can be swallowed without leaving the inside of the mouth coated in fat particles. The help of sugar in achieving good go-away is vital. It is now permissible to add up to 10 percent sugar to manufactured peanut butters in the US. No other food, they say, has such poor go-away as peanut butter; sugar improves its go-away marvelously.”

[Betawolf · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a gift that I initially expected to be a popular pop-history similar to Kurlansky's Salt. It turns out I misjudged it -- this is an older and more academic book, a quality that comes with both positives and negatives. Speaking positively, Mintz (who sadly seems never to have written specifically about mints) has a solid command of his subject, references his material and draws in a number of illustrative quotations from older sources. While it can't be said to be his core focus, you do end up learning a reasonable amount about sugar production and various uses of sugar throughout history.

The negatives are that this is an academic book, so Mintz harries his reader with some awkward terminology (like "extensification") to describe processes that an ordinary reader would consider neither important nor complex enough to require naming, and fumbles several times over explanations of how his subject could be said to create, assign or exercise 'meaning' in some grander sense. This scholarly pomposity makes parts of the book a bit dreary, and builds to a climax in the ending, where Mintz suggests that English workers adding sugar to their tea caused a fundamental shift in reality such that "what persons are, and what being a person means, changed accordingly".

Though it can thus be said to overreach, the analysis in the book is not all scholarly turf-marking, and where Mintz turns his attention to more grounded questions of social organisation around sugar consumption he can be quite insightful. One of the areas I appreciated was his discussion of how the rise of sugar consumption meets with an industrialised society's increasing desire for food that can be pre-packaged and eaten outside of the home, and on how the industrial uses of sugar as a preservative fits with an atomised society's abandonment of the family meal, in favour of prepared meals that need to be preserved for each person to eat when they desire. In a prescient view of what is to come, Mintz also eyed warily the rise of the high-fructose corn syrup industry, and how it may exacerbate many of the issues he had diagnosed as resulting from (or being entwined with) sugar consumption.

[Jessica · Rating 3 out of 5]

A great history book in the wonderful myopic vein Ginnie mentioned. I am also planning to read Rats at some point, which seems like one too.

I am baffled by some changes since the last time I was on here. "Private notes??" What the heck is that supposed to be for??? I honestly can't even begin to imagine. I'm just baffled in general by the concept of writing something that's just for your own private information on the Internet. Shouldn't you keep that written in a real life notebook stuffed to the back of your sock drawer, or better yet, not write it down at all?

"This slender volume slipped to me by gardener, after our third tryst behind the gazebo that languid sensuous summer, while my husband was away at War."

"Did not actually manage to read past p 38 but Wikipedia notes main character struck by train towards end, so can prob scrape by with droll ref."

"Likely read at some point, see most reviewers do not like so grant five stars to be contrary."

"Dirty bits marked pp 37, 178, 259, 512."

"Gift given by Bookster X two years ago at xmas, so must act as if read."

"Book written by Bookster Z so must rate highly and pretend to have finished."

"Assigned chapter from soph year of college, likely did not read but possibly did skim and do still own, so counts."

"Will crib sex scene, major plot points, and desc of heroine/Bklyn Bridge/muggy August morning for own novel, currently in 2nd draft."

"Cannot attempt own review as Bookster Z's simultaneously more amusing and erudite than own capacity allows."

"Am running out of vodka, must remember to buy more at store along with pregnancy test and US Weekly, plus Moby Dick comic book/NYT book review if they have so as to keep up appearances.

[Krishna · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an excellent example of what might be called a micro history, in this case that of a single commodity, sugar, and its impact on historical developments over the last five hundred years. In the process of telling the story of sugar, Sidney Mintz masterfully draws in the biology and cultivation of sugarcane, the economics of plantation agriculture, the anthropological analysis of dietary practices, the institution of slavery and the slave trade, the drive to colonialism, mercantilism and trade policy, the rise of industrialism, and even the mass marketing of fast food in 20th century America. The book is told mostly from a European, and even more specifically a British, perspective.

Mintz's book is divided into roughly three sections, dealing with the production, consumption and the power relations surrounding sugar. In terms of production, sugarcane has been grown in tropical Asia for millennia (there are references in Hindu and Buddhist scriptures to sugar). But it is a finicky crop requiring very specific conditions for growth - it needs strong sunshine, plenty of water, but well-drained land. It is labor-intensive to plant, harvest and process. The extraction of the juice and its refining into sugar too requires the execution of a series of precise steps that have to be executed in a tight time frame. Because of this, sugar until the age of exploration was mostly grown in tropical Asia, and imported into Europe as a luxury commodity. The Arabs may have picked up the details of growing sugar cane from Indian or other sources, and they popularized its cultivation in the lands which they conquered - including many islands in the Mediterranean, as well as the coastal areas of Morocco and Egypt. Also, due to the labor-intensive nature of sugar production, it involved from the very beginning some form of slave labor.

Europeans at this time did not produce sugar themselves, but avidly imported and traded it as a luxury commodity. But once the age of exploration began in the 16th century, lands suitable for sugarcane production came into European hands, and cultivation spread farther afield -- first to the Atlantic islands of the Azores and the Canaries. During this time too, production was not high enough for sugar to be anything other than a luxury commodity consumed in small quantities. But this began to change with the discovery of the new world. First the Caribbean islands such as Santo Domingo, and later Cuba, Puerto Rico and Jamaica, and the smaller islands such as Martinique and Barbados. Meanwhile, Brazil too was emerging as a major source.

Mintz argues that it was in the plantations that the first experiments in the capitalist mode of production were attempted -- a controversial position, since the plantations were also based on a captive labor market (slaves) who were considered no more than capital investment. But in every other respect, the nascent elements of capitalism were evident in the plantation economy: the reliance on investments raised from the capital markets, systematization of production, close attention to profit margins, specialization and division of labor, and vertical integration between raw material production, processing and distribution.

Turning to consumption, Mintz begins by cataloging the different uses to which sugar was put: as medicine, spice-condiment, decorative material, sweetener and preservative. As medicine, sugar seems to have benefited from the supposed curative properties attributed to many things that are rare or exotic, and it has also been used in small quantities as a spice, just as we do black pepper or basil today. It was also used for conspicuous consumption by the rich to commission elaborate sculptures and confections, precisely because it was rare and expensive. But somewhere around the time sugar started to reach Europe from the Atlantic colonies in larger quantities, its use began to percolate down the social ladder. Through the imitation of their "social betters," the middle and lower classes too began to use more sugar -- but it was still not a mass commodity.

But in the 19th century, as the industrial revolution gathered steam, sugar finally made the transition from a luxury or leisure good, to a consumption essential. Mintz discusses how the new demands of industrial labor -- shorter break times, the need for cheap and quick calories, more food consumed outside the home, the absence of parents at home as more women began to work in factories -- created demand for a variety of sugared foods: jams, treacle, biscuits. Sugar also benefited because its use was coupled with that of other tropical stimulants such as tea, coffee and cocoa, that were also becoming popular at that time. The plantation class could no longer keep protectionist policies in place, and duties on imported sugar fell, and further reduced prices, and stimulated even more demand. If sugar consumption by the poor was once condemned as an example of profligacy (the poor spending on the expensive luxuries of their betters, instead of saving for a rainy day), it now came to be seen as a necessary stimulant that keeps the industrial proletariat alert and energetic at work.

On power, Mintz shows how closely sugar production relied on state power -- the colonization of land, the execution of land management and irrigation practices, the acquisition of labor through the slave trade, the policing of plantations to prevent slave rebellions, the protection of home markets against foreign competition -- all of this required the active connivance and support of the state. Plantation owners and investors spent heavily to influence legislators back home, and were a power to reckon with until the 19th century, when the increasing demands of consumption and the new spirit of laissez faire economics broke their protectionist coalition. But even then, the plantation lobby did have enough power to make sugar products a part of government procurement -- for example, through a rum allowance for sailors, and a state-subsidized treacle quota for every poorhouse resident. Mintz argues that though power was not directly exerted to get people to consume more sugar, the hegemonic power of elite example was a factor encouraging the poor to consume more sugar, and to substitute industrially produced refined sugar for traditional sweeteners that were now considered contaminated, unhygienic, or uncultured (for example, Indians replacing jaggery or palm sugar in coffee with store-bought white sugar).

A final chapter discusses contemporary concerns (the book was written in 1985). The major trend of the 20th century has been first, the replacement of home-cooked meals by commoditized, pre-packaged food and meals eaten outside the home, and second, the extension of the consumption window from set meal times at home, to encompass "snacking" throughout the day, and anywhere. This is advocated aggressively through marketing and advertising as a convenience and an opportunity to meet consumer preferences. For example, at family meals, a common denominator meal may be chosen that will satisfy all family members; but commoditized meals allow each family member to choose the precise food they prefer, and to eat it wherever they choose: in their bedroom or in front of the TV. But packaged food is often too heavy in sugar and fat -- by design, since our hunter-gatherer brains were primed to choose these.

A few more interesting insights -- Mintz argues that current levels of sugar production and consumption, while clearly the outcome of historical processes, might make sense from an agricultural viewpoint -- his data show that sugarcane produces more calories per acre of land, than other products such as potatoes or wheat. In addition, the byproducts of sugar production such as bagasse (the crushed cane) can be used for paper production and the manufacture of industrial solvents.

In short, this is a very informative and entertaining book, and demonstrates clearly why nothing in the modern world can truly be studied in isolation. Every history is essentially a global history.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sidney Mintz's "Sweetness and Power" is a global history by an anthropologist, so lay readers may find parts of it a little hard to get into, and even historians may have some issues with the way he structures his argument. Adopting a global approach was a necessity - there is no way to tell the story of production and consumption of sugar, even just within the British Empire, without the global perspective.
According to Mintz, in the world of sugar "production and consumption were so closely bound together that each may be said partly to have determined the other." Sugar was not common all around the world from an early date. In Europe, prior to the seventeenth century, it was barely consumed at all. The consumption of sugar exploded in Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, at basically the same time that sugar production expanded in Britain's tropical colonies. Basically, Mintz uses this production and consumption to tie various parts of the world together and tell a global history of British industrialization. Though most people do not identify the growth of the Caribbean plantation economy with the Industrial Revolution, Mintz argues that it was clearly part of the story. Sugar plantations were a "synthesis of field and factory" - sugar production involved interchangeable workers, operating in a time-conscious atmosphere. Plantations also produced a lot of capital, in addition to sugar, to send back to Britain. The ever increasing quantities of sugar then changed the very meanings of sugar consumption in Britain. Sugar had been an expensive luxury, but it became a cheap source of calories at the exact moment that British workers were being thrown into an industrial economy. Sugar from the West Indies combined with tea from East Asia to become a calorie rich stimulant that workers could afford on the lowest of wages. Exploited labor on sugar plantations thus "sharply reduced the overall cost of creating and reproducing the metropolitan proletariat."
So, labor and class, and tea and sugar, and the changing meanings of consumables. All very interesting. Made me want tea and scones, and I made do with tea and girl scout cookies.

[Dr. Tobias Christian Fischer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sugar has grown from a luxury item to one of the largest modern industries in just a few centuries. He played a central role both in the slave trade and in the transition of the British economic system from mercantilism to free trade. The lobbying work of the American and British profiteers in the sugar trade is an example of how political and economic interests influence and permanently change the lives of the population (Blinkist, 2020).

[J.M. Hushour · Rating 2 out of 5]

Mintz dives into an endlessly fascinating theme: how and why we came to value a thing (sugar) and how did it change the way people behave and eat? However, the end result, while probably intoxicatingly and almost sexually fulfilling to lovers of "theory", is patchwork and stilted. The main reason why is that a perfectly fine historical (and even science-y) narrative is continually interrupted for large swathes of the book by pushy academic theory and paeans to all kinds of dumb social and historical theory. Whatever. I used to be in academia, so I understand the fan-wank. You have to do it; but an otherwise awesome foray into the importance of a single condiment/commodity largely falls flat because of it.
That said, the actual bits on sugar, its manifestations, its role in labor history, slavery, and shifts in production are really great. The best parts are the sections on desserts and how ideas of taste and eating changed.

[Hubert · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mintz's classic text on the history of sugar represents a classic approach to interdisciplinary work in anthropology, history, and economics, through one of the most-used foods in the modern world. Mintz traces the development of sugar from a primarily noble-class condiment to one used by all classes, including that of a caloric additive by members of working classes. The work focuses on England, particularly 17th and 18th centuries, with an emphasis on the role of Carribean colonialism.

A must-read for scholars of food and/or anthropology.

[Ram Kaushik · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was recommended to me as one of the classics of anthropology and supposedly used heavily in introductory classes. All I can feel right now is pity for the poor students. The scholarship and lifetime of research of Prof. Mintz is unquestionable. The thesis that sugar was the central commodity that connected the Industrial Revolution in Britain, the colonial enterprise in India, slave ships from Africa and the settling of the New World is solid.

The tortuous writing and academic rigor makes this book virtually unreadable to all but serious scholars and the very determined. I am proud to say that I finished this book but it may have scarred me for life. The organization of the book into chapters of "Production", "Consumption", " Power" etc. may possibly have worked if each chapter followed some sort of time-bound structure. The chapter on Power left me especially baffled, marvelling at the ease with which the author bound me up in knots till life was no longer worth living.

Essentially, this book should be viewed as a collection of academic papers mishmashed together in random fashion. I learned a lot despite the unreadability of the book, so am rating it slightly higher than it deserves. Inflicting this book on an unsuspecting audience is cruel indeed. If you truly dislike someone and like to inflict pain or perhaps you want to get rid of a Costco-size can of Ibuprofen, this book comes highly recommended.

[Gabrielle Blin ( book reviewer) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Un livre fascinant sur cette addiction au sucre que nous avons des notre naissance mais aussi sur la manière dont elle a eu un impact sur le monde à travers les siècles économique ou médical entre autres...À lire absolument

[Josh Maddox · Rating 3 out of 5]

In Sweetness and Power, a 1985 text by anthropologist Sidney W. Mintz, the author sets out to uncover the meaning and place of sugar in the modern world (specifically England) and how it came to be. For this task, Mintz is more qualified than most; he is an anthropologist and has personal experience working in and around Caribbean sugar plantations. Unluckily, Mintz’s communication abilities are not as great as his academic strength. The book is broken into five chapters of greatly varying quality: “Food, Sociality, and Sugar,” “Production,” “Consumption,” “Power” and “Eating and Being.” These chapters are so disparate that they must be analyzed as short, individual books.

The first chapter, Food, Sociality, and Sugar, focuses on the anthropology of food in general. This reveals the anthropological context in which Mintz writes, as well as background essential to understanding this particular work. The chapter is the shortest, and in addition to explaining the anthropological milieu surrounding food history, he notes the rise in English consumption of sugar from the period of 1650 to modernity. In some ways, it is more like an extension to the already overlong introduction than a chapter, and continues to set the stage rather than begin the drama.

Although some economics is involved in the next chapter, Production, the section is mostly historical. The feeling one gets from his explanation of the system under which sugar spread from Asia outward to the rest of the world is rather like a bird’s eye view; readers see all that happens from above. He shows very clearly that sugar moved from central Asia to the Islamic lands, to Europe through the Crusades, from Europe to the African Islands, and from there to the Caribbean. For the most part though, he does not show why landowners, farmers, and governments took the actions they did. With the exception of a discussion about the Atlantic islands which tangentially relates to supply and demand, Mintz ignores the economic forces almost entirely. Still, the map-like understanding of where sugar came from and went is valuable, although not as much as it could have been if coupled with an understanding of why it moved from place to place.

The third chapter, Consumption, is also historical. Here, Mintz centers single-mindedly on the English uses of sugar and dissects them with relish. To begin, he divides the uses of sugar into five types: medicine, spice-condiment, decorative, sweetener, and preservative. He discusses each of these uses in depth, and discourses on how the uses merged with each other, developed, and grew. These portions of the chapter are well organized by their usages, and the insight he gives into the uses of sugar is fascinating. However, the author does also spend a great deal of time discussing meanings and shifting meanings associated with these different uses without ever explaining what those meanings are. This makes the meaning-related discussions, which could be quite valuable and informative, vacuous claptrap. Mintz goes on for pages without conveying any real information to the reader, aside from the fact that he finds his own thoughts and views of sugar very deep and scholastic, and is completely unable to communicate those views to others.

The fourth chapter is even worse. Since it is titled Power, the chapter is ostensibly about control, influence, and authority. In reality, it is mostly Mintz talking about meaning without plainly defining it. It is quite possible to read and re-read this section multiple times without grasping Mintz’s meaning, much less sugar’s meaning for the book’s subjects. Maddeningly, he makes many claims such as “it (sugar) is closely connected to England’s fundamental transformation from a hierarchical, status-based, medieval society to a social-democratic, capitalist, and industrial society” while entirely neglecting to explain how it is connected to the transformation (185).
The fifth and final chapter, Eating and Being, leaves the realm of relevance almost entirely. Mintz waxes philosophical and fills most of the chapter’s pages with lines such as these:

“Maximum enjoyment in minimum time has come to mean both divided (simultaneous) consumption – one eats while walking or working, drinks while driving or watching entertainment – and higher frequency of occasions for consumption. Watching the Cowboys play the Steelers while eating Fritos and drinking Coca-Cola, while smoking a joint, while one’s girl sits on one’s lap, can pack a great deal of experience into a short time and thereby maximizing enjoyment. Or it can be experienced quite differently, depending on the values one holds (203).”

The rest of the chapter, like this portion excerpted, seems to come very close to relating to the subject of the book, but in reality signifies nothing. Even his discussion of the disappearance method of measuring sugar, possibly the only part of the chapter more than tangentially related to the rest of the book, is unclear and vague.

Ultimately, the book is disappointing. Mintz’s ability as an anthropologist and historian is eclipsed by his inability to communicate his ideas clearly; nearly half the book talks about the shifting meanings of sugar without ever explaining what those meanings are. Had Mintz made visible to the reader the connections in his mind, the book would be excellent, but since those connections are anything but evident, it is mediocre.

[Malcolm · Rating 4 out of 5]

Histories and sociologies of food stuffs have become fashionable in recent years - we've had histories of Cod, of Nutmeg, of Salt, of the Potato and others. But before all of them came this book, Sidney Mintz's excellent (1985) exploration of the place of sugar history. To us today sugar may seem a common-place (and in many case we eat far too much of it) but it has not so for more than a couple of hundred years, and sugar played a major part in shaping the modern world. For instance, is accounts for much of Britsh and French colonisation of the Caribbean and bits of Central and South America and it shapes land use patterns in large areas of Australia and South Africa. Sugar along with the trade in people to work its areas of growth and manufacture reshaped wealth and power in 18th and early 19th century Britain and in the process helped reshape capitalism, wealth, industry and diets.

Mintz is an anthropologist specialising in Caribbean studies, so his work places him at the centre of sugar studies, and with an interest political economy his work seems (in retrospect to lead almost logically to this book). He has, in this case, produced an excellent and accessible serious-popular exploration of modern economics, society and history. It is a great piece of scholarship that puts many of the more recent food and commodity histories to shame.

[Jan D · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was interesting but also dragged a bit in the middle. There are a lot of sections again and again detailing the changes in sugar consumption in England and their [usually terrible] effects on people working on the plantations, but it was sometimes hard to see how the pieces fit in a larger puzzle.
In the first part of the book there are some very interesting analysis of how industrial standardization, mechanization and control were first exploited on plantations rather than factories in England. In the last part there is a great analysis of how sugar fits well into individual-focussed, de-ritualized food consumption that is more compatible with the requirements of capitalist working conditions than older forms.

[Jessica · Rating 1 out of 5]

Once on a dare I ate a tablespoon of cornstarch at a party. The minute that powder hit my tongue it was a relentless battle to create enough saliva to get it down my gullet. I choked and coughed and when I did a plume of powder was emitted. It was all quite entertaining to the party goers. The reason I am relating this story is that after that incident I didn't think I could experience anything as dry as a tablespoon of cornstarch in my mouth. After reading this book I have been proven incorrect. This book is dry, there is no getting around it. Yes, drier than 1 tablespoon of cornstarch eaten straight out of the box, and I found it just as miserable to consume.

[Stefanie · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a great read. Pausing to take notes often it did take me longer than I expected to get through it, but it is a book I would have enjoyed more if I weren't in such a rush to read it due to other time constraints. There were areas that felt lengthy, but to cut short some of the details would not be doing the history of sugar justice. As expected, a great deal of the history of sugar is rather terrible. Before reading the book I imagined Mintz would spend more time - i.e. the majority of the book - discussing slavery and the operations of the plantations themselves. Mintz did discuss that aspect, such as the various forms of labor and how each territory or colony had their own sources. For example, there was a range of labor from slavery to indentured servants, but only the latter received land upon completing their contract. (Systemic racism that extends into contemporary times.) The other part of sugar’s unfortunate history (to say the least) stems from power dynamics across lands and social classes.

As complex carbohydrates (grains) whittled away and simple carbs (sugar) took its place, other things besides ingredients on the dinner table shifted as well. Prepared foods took the place of home-cooked meals, mealtime began to adjust itself around work schedules, and as we got closer to the 20th century more foods were purchased for expediency and ease instead of made. To sum it up, and as Mintz puts it quite well, sugar “transformed an entire society” (214). Sugar became popular because it was structured to be as such. As Mintz states, sugar didn’t become so popular among the English because they were genetically predisposed to becoming addicted to it. We learn that sugar was popular because it was part of a system. A system where slavery and very cheap labor produced it; where the working class bought it and continued doing so because it became more affordable and calorically weighed than previous options; and one that continually funneled money to the kingdom, aristocrats, and other people of power.

In 1985, when the book was published, modified corn syrup (MCS) was just beginning to gain a bad reputation. As Mintz forecasted, the dangers of moderate-to-access use of it is relatively well known, but the politics behind it still have not been exposed to much of the public. MCS, and monocrop corn, is becoming the new sucrose, in a way. I say this because there are a lot of parallels between the two and it is, literally, taking the place of sugar in many ingredient lists. Which reminds me of something else learned from this book. Sugar has a lot of uses! I wondered why it was snuck into already-delicious peanut butter and now I know at least one reason why: sugar is a good “go-away,” meaning it can help prevent the peanut butter (or the many other things it is added to) from getting stuck to the inside of your mouth when consuming it. Like MCS, sugar is unnecessarily added to many products for all sorts of incentives. Quite enlightening.

[Simon B · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting account that talks informatively about of the history of sugar production and sugar consumption separately, then ties it all together in a convincing synthesis. It's a fairly old book now, but it's arguments have held up well over the subsequent 40 years. I've not learned so much from a book about food since Raj Patel's Stuffed and Starved: Markets, Power and the Hidden Battle for the World Food System

"The substances transformed by British capitalism from upper-class luxuries into working-class necessities are of a certain type. Like alcohol or tobacco, they provide respite from reality, and deaden hunger pangs. Like coffee or chocolate or tea, they provide stimulus to greater effort without providing nutrition. Like sugar they provide calories, while increasing the attractiveness of these other substances when combined with them. There was no conspiracy at work to wreck the nutrition of the British working class, to turn them into addicts, or to ruin their teeth. But the ever-rising consumption of sugar was an artifact of intraclass struggles for profit — struggles that eventuated in a world-market solution for drug foods, as industrial capitalism cut its protectionist losses and expanded a mass market to satisfy proletarian consumers once regarded as sinful or indolent."

[brunella]

notes for me:

"Most great civilizations have been built on the cultivation of a particular complex carbohydrate -- maize, potatoes, rice, millet, wheat. A preferred starch can be the nutritive anchor of a whole culture"

- Southern Bantu people: Ubwali (tortillas, rice, potatoes, bread, taro, yams, manioc cakes) vs umunani (relish). The centricity of complex carbohydrates is accompanied by its contrastive periphery
- Flavor principle
- They make the essential tastes more interesting
- Supplementary tastes round the diet out
- Liquid or semiliquid, soluble or meltable, often oily
- Sometimes complex carbs disappear from the diet and are replaced by flesh, fats and sugars; see modern USA.

"Meaning arises from the cultural implications of sugar; meaning is the consequence of activity. Culture is not only reductible to behavior, but we must ask how meaning is put into behavior. Culture must be understood as product and as production, as socially constituted but also as socially constituting."

[Cabot · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is relatively famous because it’s one of the first big commodity histories and shows up on a couple syllabi I’ve seen, but it’s age (from the 1970s) shows, and the literature has in many ways passed it by. There are some interesting bits here and there, but it is heavily Anglo-centric and generally dull and a pain to read. On the question of enslavement (what I was hoping to learn about) the book is lacking, which could be due to the fact that the book came out quite a bit before the interesting scholarship on enslavement was produced. I’ll probably have to read this again for class, but I won’t be excited for it.

[Will Wilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was a little bit out of my league. I like history, but I think I am just a casual fan of history and this book is more for hardcore extreme fans of history. It is thoroughly researched and detailed, and I learned a lot about sugar. However, there were many times where I was not sure what the author's point was. I think I just needed it to be a little dumbed down, and this author does not seem like the type to dumb anything down.

If you are really into history, this book may be for you, but it is a bit challenging for amateurs like me. In conclusion, sugar is a land of contrasts.

[Molly O'Leary · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this book for my “Cultural Anthropology” class at Pitt. It was a very interesting take on sugar. It made me think about sugar in such a powerful way, in a way I never thought of before. There were some times when the pages seemed to drone on forever, but I think it was still in interesting concept: connecting sugar to power.

[Reagan Kuennen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Maybe 3?? Read this for my food research class. For a historical text I found it very informative and I find the argument compelling. However, I found it hard to stay engaged with the text throughout. Not bad for a good history though, it’s hard to stay excited about this content so it did its job lol

[Isaac Jensen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not my favorite, I guess that’s what I get for reading a cultural anthropology book when what I was looking for was more of a popular history. I learned some broad outlines of the history of sugar production, but spent more time with my eyes glazing over reading about 15th century desserts.

[Caroline · Rating 2 out of 5]

For school- glad to be done.

[Charlotte]

What was all that about. Anyway





I know everything about sugar now

[Aithy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book years ago and I've been recommending it to anyone who'll listen ever since

[Alexandra · Rating 3 out of 5]

I did not need all that science in here

[Jonna Higgins-Freese · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was glad I had already read _Born in Blackness_ for a intro to the brutal slave trade and the sugar plantations that required it.

This was interesting, though a bit repetitive (how many times can you say that the uses of sugar changed over time as they shifted from exotic spices used by the wealthy to an everyday ingredient used by the poor? how many times can you say that its place in the meal -- or the times and nature of meals themselves -- changed?).

"What forces beyond the nakedly military and economic ones maintained this intimate interdependence [between colony and metropole]; how benefits flowed, relative to the ways power was exercised" (xvi)

"Since sugar seems to satisfy a particular desire (it also seems, in so doing, to awaken that desire yet anew), one needs to understand just what makes demand work: how and why it increases under what conditions. One cannot simply assume that everyone has an infinite desire for sweetness, any more than one can assume the same about a desire for comfort or wealth or power. " (xxv). I found this fascinating. My own sweet tooth is nearly inexhaustible, but why is that? "That human beings like the taste of sweetness does not explain why some eat immense quantities of sweet foods and others hardly any." (6).

1650 - sugar began to be fairly common
1900 - had entered diet of every working family, doubling nearly every decade in between

xxix: points out that production and consumption were intimately intertwined (though he never does really explain how production drove consumption, whether through advertising or other means, other than becoming something people wanted in their tea, and that they sometimes ate biscuits or bread with tea)

He makes broad generalizations, like "meaning arises out of use," but then doesn't really delve much into what the meanings are, except that early uses were for spice (they put it on everything, including vegetables and meat), or construction (think mints or icings), while later ones were more for heavier use in puddings, custards, pies, etc. Some of the wealthy & festival uses do continue (think wedding and birthday cakes, or glazed carrots and sweet potatoes with sugar at Thanksgiving). But to say that is hardly to delve into meanings.

Again, broad generalizations: From 1650 Britain moved away from a starch centered diet, "dietary transformations actively facilitated more fundamental changes in British society." (14) But did they? Did sugar and tea really fuel the industrial revolution? Or the Enlightenment? (I've seen this argument made about coffee shops - that drinking something energizing instead of somnolizing like beer/wine led to more lively thinking. This seems like rubbish to me. If so, why didn't Middle Easterners and Indians start growing large quantities of sugar? They, too, had slaves, though perhaps the argument is that they didn't have chattel slavery in the brutal Caribbean form.

Sugar cane first domesticated in New Guinea around 8000 BC (which is extremely early; wheat was domesticated 10,000 years ago). 2000 years later was taken to Philippines and India, though may also have been domesticated in Indonesia (19).

Had not realized Moors reached Poitiers in 732, where Charles Martel stopped them. That was the 100th anniversary of Mohammed's death. Wherever they went, the Moors took sugar with them. Crusaders began supervising the production of sugar in lands they reconquered like Tawahin A-Sukkar (near Jericho), Acre, Tyre, Crete, and Cyprus. JH Galloway believes "it was the expanded use of slave labor to compensate for plague-connected mortality that initiated the strange and enduring relationship between sugar and slavery: 'The link between sugar cultivation and slavery which was to last until the nineteenth century became firmly forged in Crete, Cyprus, and Morocco." (29).

First efforts at Caribbean sugar production failed, perhaps in part to lack of workers after natives died and before slave importation from Africa began at scale (33). By 1530 Santo Domingo had 34 mills. Initially there was no planter class separate from government administrators. The English and French had much better success in their colonies than the Spanish did in theirs (35).

It was actually hard to find profitable crops: Spanish focused mostly on mining. Cotton, indigo, cacao, and coffee (from Africa) were important. Had to have fish cheapter than Dutch in the Baltic, or cheaper furs than the Russians, or cheaper sugar than the Javanese or Bengalis. Tobacco was first new world crop to gain a market, and by 160os was consumed by ordinary folk (36). By 1700 the value of sugar reaching England and Wales was double that of tobacco.

British began producing sugar in Barbados in 1640, then expanded to Jamaica (30x bigger than Barbados).

1660: England consumed 1000 hogsheads of sugar and exported 2000
1753: England consumed 104,000 hogsheads and exported 6000
elsewhere says consumption increased 2500% 1650-1800 in Britain (73)
1800 total world prodcution: 245,000 tons
1830, 572,000 tons
1860: beet sugar plus cane sugar: 1.373 million tons
1890: 6 million tons (73)
(would need to per capita these for it to make sense)

Use of sugar as a spice declined quickly after 1500s. Survives in "cookies or biscuits associated with the holiday seasons commonly combine sugar and spices (ginger, cinnamon, and pepper, for instance) in ancient ways; holiday fowl with fruit jams, brown sugar, and sweet sauces, hams, commonly prepared with cloves, mustard, brown sugar. "Holidays often preserve what the everyday loses. . . baking and eating gingerbread is a way of reaching back" (87)

Bitter tastes can be appreciated with some cultural support; sweets insinuate themselves much more easily. Bitter tastes are specific: liking watercress does not equate to liking eggplant. But liking sweetness seems to be general.

Excursion into the East India Company and its use of tea; which was a primary place where sugar was used:

1700 20k # legal tea imported to Britain
1750 Chinese green tea flooding market
1760 5M# legally imported (+ equal amount smuggled)
1800 20M pounds

"a treat perhaps -- but a familiar, reliable, and expected treat" 124

candied fruits, or those preserved in syrup, remained luxuries even "after working people had begun to drink heavily sweetened tea, and didn't diffuse downward at the same rate as tea" (125). Urban classes consumed much of their fruit as jam, which is 50% sugar by weight, and became possible after the end of the sugar duties (129).

"food choices were reckoned partly in terms of available time, and not solely in terms of relative cost" (130), "fuel that circumvented [fuel cost] outlay would be more attractive . . a wife's leaving the house to earn a wage had a restrictve effect on the family diet, even though her work might increase the family income." (130)

sugar helps to fill the calorie gap for the laboring poor (149)

There was marketing of sugar (153) to augment demand, and Dutch economic historian Jan DeVries argues that 2 features of economic life from precapitalist economies had to be overcome to enlarge demand
1. more wage-earning people had to enter the market to buy commodities
2. disposition to fulfill pre-existing levels of demand and working only to provide those had to change

Middle class people invested in the kidnap and transport portions of the slave trade, but had no comparable opportunity to invest in plantations (168). Slave trade centered in Liverpool.

Little rags to riches ambiance for planters; instead support from home was often crucial in establishing and maintaining plantations (168)

custom of marking a ritual time unit (week) with distinctive food is widespread (seder, Eucharist, Thanksgiving) (172)

"It was possible even for the relatively poor to consume sugar conspicuously in providing hospitality, meeting ceremonial obligations, and validating social links, for it was wnow an inexpensive good that continued to seem like a luxury, imparting an aura of privilege to those who served it and to whom it was served" (173).

"Like the choice between a McDonald's hamburger and a Gino's chicken leg during a thirty-minute lunch hour, the choice itself is far less important than the constraints under which the choice is made" (182)

A conclusion that's drawn for which little evidence/examples are provided: "Tobacco, sugar, and tea were the first objects within capitalism that conveyed with their use the complex idea that one could become different by consuming differently. This idea has little to do with nutrition or primates or sweet tooths, and less than it appears to have with symbols. But it is closely connected to England's fundamental transformation from a hierarchical, status-based, medieval society to a social-democratic, capitalist, and industrial society" (185)

"Fate of the British West Indies was sealed once it became cheaper for the British masses to have sugar from elsewhere and more profitable for the British bourgeoisie to sell more sugar at lower prices" (185)

US relation to colonies for sugar later and different, but Barbados - Puerto Rico; Jamaica = Cuba; Hawii and Philippines.

Sequence was sugar was first a rarity for medicinal or spice use by wealthy, traded for but not produced; then expensive commodity produced by overseas tropical colonies of power where it was used by disenfranchised wage earners; then less costly commodity produced by whichever country by slave and waged labor; lastly inexpensive everyday commodity, often from sugar beets produced within national boundaries (196-197).

Replacement of complex with simple carbs. England, 1938 250# wheat/person/year to 1969 less than 170. Sugar 70#/person/year in 1942 to 125 pounds/person/year 1975.

Historically there was a social logic and "grammar" to the times/places/manners of eating meals, what was eaten, when, and by whom. Part of what commoditization/modernity has done is seek to reduce/destroy these, largely in the quest of greater sales. "Meals that must be eaten by everyone at teh same time require advancement, postponement, or cancellation of competing events by the participants. Meals consisting of the same items for all eaters must be based on a least common denominator, rather than on each person's greatest preferences. Meals that are eaten in some fixed order may run counter to one or another participant's preference for soup last or dessert later. Ceremonial meals that involve some invariant item (lamb, turkey) may be unpleasant for an individual who dislikes that food. When one is serving oneself from a serving plate, the helpings must be adjusted to the desires of others who are eating. . . . social eating involves communication, give and take, a search for consensus, some common sense about individual needs, compromise through attending to the needs of others. . . leaves some room for the operation of opinion and in-group influence . . . but some might call these constraints upon individual freedom" (201)

"As food availability has been generalized across modern society, the structures of meals and the calendar of diet in daily life have tended to disappear. Coffee and Coca-Cola are now appropriate at any time and with any accompaniement. So, too, are breaded, deep-fried bits of complex carbohydrate and protein (potatoes, corn and wheat bread sticks, chicken, scallops, shrimp, pork, fish pieces). Synthetic juices that split the difference between the food faddists and the Pepsi Generation; fiber rich cereals made calorie-heavy with raisins, figs, dates, honey, nuts, and nut substitutes; crackers, cheeses, dips, pretzels, and munchies -- together these now provide a nutritive medium within which social events occur, rather than the other way round. The meal, which had a clear internal structure, dictated at least to some degree by the one-cook-to-one-family pattern and the consequences of socialization within such a pattern, as well as by "tradition," can now mean different times and different sequences for each consumer. The week's round of food, which once meant chicken or some equivalent on Sunday, or fish on Friday, is no longer so stable, nor viewed as so necessary by the participants And the year's round of food, which brought bock beer, shad, fresh dill, and new potatoes, each in its turn, turkey twice a year, and fruit cake with hard sauce at New Year's, survives only on sufferance, finessed by turkey burgers, year-round bock beer, and other modern wonders." (202)

"Choices to be made about eating -- when, where, what, how much, how quickly - are now meade with less reference to fellow eaters, and within ranges predetermined, on the one hand, by food technology and, on the other, by what are perceived as time constraints.

"The experience of time in modern society is often one of an insoluble shortage, and this perception may be essential to the smooth functioning of an economic system based on the principle of ever-expanded consumption . . . paradox that vastly more productive [modern] technologies result in individuals having (or feeling they have) less time, rather than more. Because of teim pressure, people try to condense their consumption pleasure by consuming different things (movies and popcorn) simultaneously." (203). Thus the proliferation of snack stands, the eating while doing other things, which should be more pleasurable but often isn't. And all within the context where the work day has remained the same length for a century, so most adjustments are for time saving.

Cantor and Cantor, socioeconomic factors in fat and sugar consumption, The chemical senses and nutrition, ed. M. Kare and O. Maller, 429-46

Time and sucrose are closely linked. Edward Thompson - 1967: https://onlinelibrary-wiley-com.proxy...
Harry Braverman, Labor & Monopoly Capital (1974)

[Matt Aukamp · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very informative, with a well-defined thesis. My only problem with this book is - and I don't know if this is the book's fault or my own fault - I'm not sure how much of this I'm going to retain. I guess we'll see!

[Karl · Rating 1 out of 5]

Huh?