Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History

by Sidney W. Mintz

one needs to understand just what makes demand work: how and why it increases under what conditions.

framing question

I will look at the history of sugar consumption in Great Britain especially between 1650, when sugar began to be fairly common, and 1900, by which time it had entered firmly into the diet of every working family.

Scope

Because anthropology is concerned with how people stubbornly maintain past practices, even when under strong negative pressures, but repudiate other behaviors quite readily in order to act differently, these materials throw light upon the historical circumstances from a perspective rather different from the historian’s. Though I cannot answer many questions that historians might bring to these data, I shall suggest that anthropologists ask (and try to answer) certain other questions.

important note on perspective

anthropology’s strength as a discipline comes from knowing about societies the behaviors of whose members are sufficiently different from our own, yet are based on sufficiently similar principles, to allow us to document the marvelous variability of human custom while vouchsafing the unshakable, essential oneness of the species.

In chapter 1, I attempt to open the subject of the anthropology of food and eating, as part of an anthropology of modern life. This leads me to a discussion of sweetness, as opposed to sweet substances. Sweetness is a taste—what Hobbes called a “Quality”—and the sugars, sucrose (which is won principally from the cane and the sugar beet) among them, are substances that excite the sensation of sweetness.

Scope

In chapter 2, I look at the production of sugar as the West began to consume more and more of it. From 1650 onward, sugar began to change from a luxury and a rarity into a commonplace and a necessity in many nations, England among them; with a few significant exceptions, this increased consumption after 1650 accompanied the “development” of the West.

Scope

in chapter 3, I discuss the consumption of sugar. My aim is, first, to show how production and consumption were so closely bound together that each may be said partly to have determined the other, and, second, to show that consumption must be explained in terms of what people did and thought: sugar penetrated social behavior and, in being put to new uses and taking on new meanings, was transformed from curiosity and luxury into commonplace and necessity.

Scope

The relationship between production and consumption

chapter 4, I try to say something about why things happened as they did, and I attempt some treatment of circumstance, conjuncture, and cause. Finally, in chapter 5, I offer a few suggestions about where sugar, and the study of sugar in modern society, may be going.

Scope

Food choices and eating habits reveal distinctions of age, sex, status, culture, and even occupation. These distinctions are immensely important adornments on an inescapable necessity.

how meals were adapted to modern, industrial society, or how that society affected the sociality of ingestion, how foods and the ways to eat them were added to a diet or eliminated from it. Specifically, I am concerned with a single substance called sucrose, a kind of sugar extracted primarily from the sugar cane,

In 1000 A.D., few Europeans knew of the existence of sucrose, or cane sugar. But soon afterward they learned about it; by 1650, in England the nobility and the wealthy had become inveterate sugar eaters, and sugar figured in their medicine, literary imagery, and displays of rank. By no later than 1800, sugar had become a necessity—albeit a costly and rare one—in the diet of every English person; by 1900, it was supplying nearly one-fifth of the calories in the English diet.

Brief Sugar timeline

How and why did this happen? What turned an exotic, foreign, and costly substance into the daily fare of even the poorest and humblest people? How could it have become so important so swiftly? What did sugar mean to the rulers of the United Kingdom; what did it come to mean to the ordinary folk who became its mass consumers?

Structural questions

The sources of sugar involve those tropical and subtropical regions that were transformed into British colonies, and so we must examine the relationships between such colonies and the motherland, also the areas that produced no sugar but the tea with which it was drunk, and the people who were enslaved in order to produce it.

Relationship between sugar and Colonialism → I assume this will be further explored.

we must understand how, in the creation of an entirely new economic system, strange and foreign luxuries, unknown even to European nobility a few short centuries earlier, could so swiftly become part of the crucial social center of British daily life, the universal substances of social relationship for the farthest-flung empire in world history.

Sugar was also first associated with the rich and the noble classes, and it remained out of the reach of the less privileged for centuries.

Most great (and many minor) sedentary civilizations have been built on the cultivation of a particular complex carbohydrate, such as maize or potatoes or rice or millet or wheat.

Other plant foods, oils, flesh, fish, fowl, fruits, nuts, and seasonings—many of the ingredients of which are nutritively essential—will also be consumed, but the users themselves usually view them as secondary, even if necessary, additions to the major starch.

Many scholars have promoted the thesis that mammalian responsiveness to sweetness arose because for millions of years a sweet taste served to indicate edibility to the tasting organism.13 Hominid evolution from arboreal, fruit-eating primate ancestors makes this thesis particularly persuasive, and has encouraged some students of the problem to go to logical extremes:

point

In fact, it can be argued equally well (and more convincingly, it seems to me) that the widely variant sugar-eating habits of contemporary populations show that no ancestral predisposition within the species can adequately explain what are in fact culturally conventionalized norms, not biological imperatives.

counter point

I concentrate in this book on sucrose,

Good to know

and made largely irrelevant such other products as maple sugar

obviously not from the northeast

The sugar cane (Saccharum officinarum L.) was first domesticated in New Guinea, and very anciently. The botanists Artschwager and Brandes believe that there were three diffusions of sugar cane from New Guinea, the first taking place around 8000 B.C. Perhaps two thousand years later, the cane was carried to the Philippines and India, and possibly to Indonesia (though some authorities regard Indonesia as yet another locus of domestication).

The Mahābhāshya of Patanjali, for instance, a commentary on Panini’s study of Sanskrit, the first grammar of a language ever written (probably around 400–350 B.C.), mentions sugar repeatedly in particular food combinations (rice pudding with milk and sugar; barley meal and sugar; fermented drinks flavored with ginger and sugar);

interesting

The Arab expansion westward marked a turning point in the European experience of sugar.

Only in recent years have the civilizational accomplishments of the Arab world begun to receive fair attention in the West. The Europe-centered historical view most of us share tends to exclude interest in the rest of the

Yes

But this flat claim is unfounded. Slavery played a part in the Moroccan sugar industry17 and probably elsewhere; a slave revolt involving thousands of East African agricultural laborers took place in the Tigris-Euphrates delta in the mid-ninth century, and they may even have been sugar-cane-plantation workers.18 But slavery did grow more important as the European Crusaders seized the sugar plantations of the eastern Mediterranean from their predecessors;

an important correction

The Crusades gave many Europeans the opportunity—though not the first, as is sometimes claimed—to familiarize themselves with many new products, sugar among them.

Something not often remembered about the Crusades.

In other words, Europeans became producers of sugar (or, better, the controllers of sugar producers in conquered areas) as a consequence of the Crusades.

Start of the European → Sugar timeline

He believes that warfare and plague, with the resultant declines of population, hurt the sugar industry in Crete and Cyprus. Also, the prices of labor-costly goods like sugar rose after the Black Death. Indeed, in his opinion, 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.”

"He" is J.H. Galloway. Very important claim still @the Start of the European → sugar (and slavery) timeline.

Portugal was not content to experiment with sugar-cane cultivation at home in the Algarve when better opportunities beckoned elsewhere, and Spain was not far behind.

It is important to remember that Portugal was one of the first countries to initiate the African slave trade

The movement of the industry to the Atlantic islands occurred when European demand was probably growing. Individual entrepreneurs were encouraged to establish sugar-cane (and other) plantations on the Atlantic islands, manned with African slaves and destined to produce sugar for Portugal and other European markets, because their presence safeguarded the extension of Portuguese trade routes around Africa and toward the Orient:

I was aware of sugar being one catalyst for plantation /enslavement expansion in the Mediterranean, but was not aware that it was the primary driving force → though upon further contemplation it does make sense

There were intimate links between the Atlantic-island experiments of the Portuguese, especially São Tomé, and west European centers of commercial and technical power, especially Antwerp.

The increasing differentiation of sugars, in line with the growing differentiation of demand, was another cause of growth.

Spanish scholar Fernández-Armesto tells us that the striking feature of the Canarian industry was its use of both free and enslaved labor, a combination that resembled more the pioneering mixed-labor systems of a later era: the seventeenth-century British and French Caribbean plantations, on which enslaved and indentured laborers would work alongside one another.

The use of a combination labor system in these regions during the 17th - 19 th Centuries is well known - So learning that this type of System was used @ the advent of the Carribean slave system is not surprising, but quite interesting.

Sugar cane was first carried to the New World by Columbus on his second voyage, in 1493; he brought it there from the Spanish Canary Islands.

The first African slaves were imported before 1503, and in spite of local fears of depredations by slave runaways (cimarrones), the importations continued. By 1509, enslaved Africans were being imported to work the royal mines; others soon followed to power the sugar industry.

By the 1530s, the island had a “fairly stable total” of thirty-four mills; and by 1568, “plantations owning a hundred-fifty to two hundred slaves were not uncommon. A few of the more magnificent estates possessed up to five hundred slaves, with production figures correspondingly high.”37 One interesting feature of this development was the part played by the state and, indeed, by civil servants, who owned, administered, bought, and sold plantations.

(referring to Santo Domingo). It is important to remember that the majority of enslaved peoples taken from Africa we taken to South America and the Caribbean market.

The Portuguese planters in Brazil succeeded where the Spaniards in the Antilles failed. Within only a century, the French, and even more the British (though with Dutch help from the outset), became the western world’s great sugar makers and exporters. One wonders why the early phase of the Hispanic sugar industry stagnated so swiftly after such promising beginnings, and the explanations we have are not entirely satisfactory. The flight of island colonists to the Mexican mainland after the conquest of Tenochtitlán (1519–21); the Spaniards’ obsession with metallic riches; the excessively authoritarian controls imposed by the crown on all productive private enterprise in the New World; the chronic lack of capital for investment; the so-called deshonor del trabajo (ignobility of [manual] labor) supposedly typical of the Spanish colonists—these factors seem reasonable, but are not entirely convincing.

French and British sugar plantations were primarily found in Brazil. I agree with Mintz that the commonly given reasons for Spanish failure in the sugar market are flimsy and unsatisfying. while the conquest of Tenochtitlan was significant and did draw a number of spanish colonists - it does not seem as if it would largely contribute to the fall of a swifty growing economic system. A more probable primary cause would likely be the difference in power and wealth (Comparing Britain and France to Spain and Portugal). But a combination of all of these is most probable (without further reading / research).

and Spain’s ability or inability to export a sugar surplus.

important to consider