In this detailed eye-opening study, Sidney Mintz shows how Europeans and Americans transformed sugar from a rare foreign luxury to a commonplace necessity of modern life, and how it changed the history of capitalism and industry. He discusseds the production and consumption of sugar, and reveals how closely interwoven are sugar's origins as a "slave" crop grown in Europe's tropical colonies with its use first as an extravagant luxury for the aristocracy, then as a staple of the diet of the new industrial proletariat. Finally, he considers how sugar has altered work patterns, eating habits, and our diet in modern times.
By no later than 1800, sugar had become a necessity - albeit a costly one - in the diet of every English person; by 1900, it was supplying nearly one-fifth of the calories in the English diet.
9th century: And wherever they went, the Arabs brought with them sugar, the product and the technology of its production; sugar, we are told, followed the Koran.
And many new crops - rice, sorghum, hard wheat, cotton, eggplant, citrus fruits, plantains, mangoes, and sugar cane - were diffused by the spread of Islam. But it was not the so much, or exclusively, new crops that amttered; with the Arab conquerors there also traveled phalanxes of subordinate administrators (predominantly non-Arab), policies of administration and taxation, technologies of irrigation, production, and processing, and the impulse to expand production.
Everywhere, the Arabs showed a lively interest in irrigation, water use, and water conservation.
The Crusades gave many Europeans the opportunity to familiarize themselves with many new products, sugar among them.
But as sugar production in the Mediterranean waned, knowledge of sugar and the desire for it waxed in Europe.
From the thirteenth century onward, the refining center for European sugar was Antwerp, followed alter by other great port cities such as Bristol, Bordeaux, and even London.
Control of the final product moved into European hands - but not, it bears noting, into thoses of the same Europeans ( in this instance the Portuguese) who pioneered the production of sugar overseas.
British Empire: The most important product of that system was sugar.
As English sugar became price-competitive with Portuguese sugar, England was able to drive Portugal out of the north European trade. From the resulting monopoly came monopoly prices, however, and then stiff competition from the French.
In this instance, million of human beings were treated as commodities. To obtain them products were shipped to Africa; by their labor power, wealth was created in the Americas. The wealth they created mostly returned to Britain; the products they made were consumed in Britain; and the products made by Britons - cloth, tools, torture instruments - were consumed by slaves who were themselves consumed in the creation of weatlh.
A mass market for sugar emerged rather tardily. Until the eighteenth century, sugar was really the monopoly of a privileged minority, and its uses were still primarily as a medicine, as a spice, or as a decorative (display) substance.
Mercantilism was finally dealt its quietus in the mid-nineteenth century, and the sugar market and its potential played a part. By then, sugar and consumer items like it had become too important to permit an archaic protectionsim to jeopardize future metropolitan supplies. Sugar surrendered its place as luxury and rarity and becaome the first mass-produced exotic necessity of a proletarian working class.
There were at least two other regards in which these plantation enterprises were industrial: the separation of production from consumption, and the separation of the worker from his tools.
The shift to sugar production required substantial capital, which was supplied by Dutch investors.
Sugar as a sweetener seems glaringly obvious to us; but the shift from spice to sweetener was historically important, and sugar use in Britain changed qualitatively when this became economically possible.
19th century: the single most important nutritional datum on the British people was their fivefold increase in sugar consumption.
Tobacco, sugar and tea were the first objects within capitalism taht conveyed with their use the complex idea that one could become different by consuming differently.