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The World of Sugar
How the Sweet Stuff Transformed Our Politics, Health, and Environment over 2,000 Years
-
Ulbe Bosma
Language:
English
Published/Copyright:
2023
About this book
“An extraordinary achievement.” —David Edgerton, Literary Review
“A remarkably researched, comprehensive, and indispensable book for everyone who wishes to understand how sugar and the sugar industry have shaped the world in which we live.” —Gary Taubes, author of The Case Against Sugar
For most of history, humans did without refined sugar. Then, suddenly, it was everywhere. How did sugar find its way into almost all the food we eat, fostering illness and ecological crisis along the way?
The World of Sugar begins with the earliest evidence of sugar production, tracing its origins in India around the sixth century BC and showing how its introduction to Europe in the Middle Ages spawned a brutal quest for supply. European cravings were satisfied by enslaved labor; two-thirds of the 12.5 million Africans taken across the Atlantic were destined for sugar plantations. By the twentieth century, sugar was a major source of calories in diets across Europe and North America.
Sugar transformed life on every continent, creating and destroying whole cultures through industrialization, labor migration, and changes in diet. Sugar made fortunes, corrupted governments, and shaped the policies of technocrats. And it provoked freedom cries that rang with world-changing consequences. In Ulbe Bosma’s definitive telling, to understand sugar’s past is to glimpse the origins of our own world of corn syrup and ethanol and begin to see the threat that a not-so-simple commodity poses to our bodies, our environment, and our communities.
Reviews
A tour de force of global history…Bosma has turned the humble sugar crystal into a mighty prism for understanding aspects of global history and the world in which we live.
-- Dinyar Patel Los Angeles Review of Books
-- Dinyar Patel Los Angeles Review of Books
The World of Sugar shows the globalized tangle of interests that capitalism creates among consumers, producers, investors, labor, national governments, and transnational organizations…Sugar offers a bitter reminder of the enduring tensions between the complexity of national interests and the interests of capital.
-- Bronwen Everill Foreign Policy
-- Bronwen Everill Foreign Policy
One of the most accomplished longue durée case studies in the history of capitalism that we have, concerned not just with trade and consumption but with production also. At every turn it subverts both critiques and celebrations of capitalism, and our understanding of much else besides. It is an extraordinary achievement.
-- David Edgerton Literary Review
-- David Edgerton Literary Review
Sugar’s societal dominance is a recent development…Its history is both a story of progress and a bittersweet tale of ‘exploitation, racism, obesity, and environmental destruction’…[An] authoritative, highly readable study—the first to be truly global.
-- Andrew Robinson Nature
-- Andrew Robinson Nature
Bosma lucidly depicts how a commodity that is challenging to cultivate and devoid of nutritional value was central to the development of European imperialism, transatlantic slavery, the Industrial Revolution, economic protectionism, and the postcolonial politics and environmental degradation of the Global South. Bosma’s wide-ranging accounting is full of eye-opening insights…This is a comprehensive and alarming look at how one commodity changed the world.
-- Publishers Weekly
-- Publishers Weekly
Bosma revisits the technical innovations, economic arrangements, and pains of a world submitting to the joy and addictiveness of sugar. His insights into the present are all the more resounding.
-- Julien Damon L'Express
-- Julien Damon L'Express
Bosma traces how sugar has fundamentally ‘changed how we feed ourselves’…The ubiquity of sugar, writes Bosma, tells us about progress but also reveals a darker story of human exploitation.
-- Sudipta Datta The Hindu
-- Sudipta Datta The Hindu
Takes you on a journey of discovery—the journey of sugar itself, which has gone from relative obscurity to becoming an indispensable part of modern diet, causing untold harm in the process.
-- BooksFirst
-- BooksFirst
Covers the history of the sweet stuff, first produced in granulated form in the 6th century BC, but not a huge commodity until more than two millennia later. This is…a reckoning with sugar.
-- Sophie Roell Five Books
-- Sophie Roell Five Books
A comprehensive 2,500-year examination of sugar’s history and its profound impact on society and the environment. Ulbe Bosma traces sugar’s journey from a luxury good in ancient India to a ubiquitous ingredient in our diets today, underscoring its role in fostering health issues and environmental crises. Bosma highlights how sugar has altered cultures and shaped political policies, laying bare the significant risks this commonplace commodity poses.
-- Food Tank
-- Food Tank
Ulbe Bosma’s history of sugar is also a case study of global capitalism over the centuries, colonial wars, and the deadly slave trade that made the industry possible…An interesting account of how sugar seeped into the global digestive system.
-- Cameron Woodhead and Steven Carroll Sydney Morning Herald
-- Cameron Woodhead and Steven Carroll Sydney Morning Herald
An important new contribution to the literature on the history of sugar. Many of the shadows of sugar are dark, they spread over the entire world, and they are very, very, long.
-- Robert Ackrill H-Diplo
-- Robert Ackrill H-Diplo
In this well-researched global history of sugar…Bosma skillfully uses primary sources, such as government documents, and synthesized secondary sources in multiple languages…[this] is an important book that increases our understanding of the global history of capitalism.
-- Yiyun Huang H-Net
-- Yiyun Huang H-Net
Moving across a huge swath of time and covering the entire world’s sugar zones…[Bosma’s]
perspective reveals unexpected connections for those of us immersed in studies of commodities
at the regional or even national levels…a worthy and welcome contribution.
-- Thomas D. Rogers California History
Presents a comprehensive and meticulously researched history of sugar, from its origins in India and China two millennia ago to the 21st century…Bosma has offered a balanced world perspective on the history of sugar, making it truly a global one…eloquent, engrossing, and entertaining.
-- Kunal Munjal Economic and Political Weekly
-- Kunal Munjal Economic and Political Weekly
Comprehensive…[a] truly epochal work.
-- Eugene H. Anderson Ethnobiology Letters
-- Eugene H. Anderson Ethnobiology Letters
The world history of sugar and the world history of capitalism are tightly linked to one another. Ulbe Bosma, in this first truly global account of a most crucial commodity, takes us to the fields of Indian peasants, the countinghouses of Chinese merchants, the monopolizing efforts of New York industrialists, and the rebellions of enslaved sugar workers in Cuba to chart how something as mundane as sugar came to play a crucial role in the making of the world we inhabit today. Attentive to local specificities as much as to Earth-spanning connections, to culture and capital, power and poverty, this book is global history at its best.
-- Sven Beckert, author of Empire of Cotton: A Global History
-- Sven Beckert, author of Empire of Cotton: A Global History
Sugar may play a unique role in the slow-motion tragedy that is the worldwide epidemic of obesity and diabetes. The World of Sugar is a remarkably researched, comprehensive, and indispensable book for everyone who wishes to understand how sugar and the sugar industry have shaped the world in which we live.
-- Gary Taubes, author of The Case Against Sugar
-- Gary Taubes, author of The Case Against Sugar
How is it that a chemical that has no nutritional value, that is inherently poisonous, that is responsible for morbidity and mortality, and that is breaking the health care budget of every developed and developing country is the seminal thread running through human history for the last 3,000 years? The World of Sugar narrates the critical events that made sugar the dominant force in world politics from antiquity to our own era. In this magisterial history, Bosma offers a much-needed cautionary tale about how addiction leads to societal downfall. As we watch newer addictions destroy the climate and Earth’s inhabitants, we would all do well to learn the hard lessons of sugar.
-- Robert Lustig, author of Metabolical: The Lure and the Lies of Processed Food, Nutrition, and Modern Medicine
-- Robert Lustig, author of Metabolical: The Lure and the Lies of Processed Food, Nutrition, and Modern Medicine
The World of Sugar is compelling, deeply researched, and globe-spanning. Bosma puts sugar at the heart of global capitalism; he shows how the quest for sweetness has driven slavery, violence, and massive ecological destruction. This is a timely and impressive book that illuminates some of our most urgent contemporary debates.
-- Sunil Amrith, author of Unruly Waters: How Mountain Rivers and Monsoons Have Shaped South Asia’s History
-- Sunil Amrith, author of Unruly Waters: How Mountain Rivers and Monsoons Have Shaped South Asia’s History
Sugar got the modern world moving in a way few other commodities did. Revealing the bitter downside of sweetness, Bosma gives us a spectacular narrative that deftly weaves in all of sugar’s stories: labor and consumption, power and trade, science and technology.
-- Jürgen Osterhammel, author of The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century
-- Jürgen Osterhammel, author of The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century
Topics
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Frontmatter
i -
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Contents
v -
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Timeline
vii -
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Dramatis Personae
ix -
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Introduction
1 -
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1 Asia’s World of Sugar
5 -
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2 Sugar Going West
24 -
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3 War and Slavery
44 -
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4 Science and Steam
79 -
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5 State and Industry
100 -
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6 Slavery Stays
122 -
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7 Crisis and Wonder Cane
153 -
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8 Global Sugar, National Identities
174 -
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9 American Sugar Kingdom
199 -
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10 Rising Protectionism
224 -
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11 The Proletariat
243 -
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12 Failed Decolonization
268 -
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13 Corporate Sugar
291 -
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14 Sweeter Than Nature
307 -
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Conclusion
335 -
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Notes
341 -
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Acknowledgments
429 -
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Image Credits
431 -
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Index
433
Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
May 4, 2023
eBook ISBN:
9780674293311
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook ISBN:
9780674293311
Keywords for this book
slavery; global capitalism; cooperatives; quota; corporation; protectionism; consumption; caribbean; west indies; cuba; java; dumping; peasant; artificial sweeteners; american sugar kingdom; export; imperialism; beet; barbados; jamaica; workers
