Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History

by Sidney W. Mintz

I gave no serious thought to why the demand for sugar should have risen so rapidly and so continuously for so many centuries, or even to why sweetness might be a desirable taste.

was taking demand for granted. And not just “demand” in the abstract; world sugar production shows the most remarkable upward production curve of any major food on the world market over the course of several centuries, and it is continuing upward still.

Such sugar, which contained considerable quantities of molasses (and some impurities), was hardened in ceramic molds or cones from which the more liquid molasses was drained, leaving behind the dark-brown, crystalline loaf.

holdings, ground and processed by ancient machinery, and consumed by the poor.

Eager to please his new friends, Charlie told me, he examined countless machetes in the island stores. But he was dismayed to discover that they were all manufactured in Connecticut—indeed, at a factory only a few hours’ drive from the New England school he and his friends were attending.

Because these island plantations had been the invention of Europe, overseas experiments of Europe, many of them successful (as far as the Europeans were concerned); and the history of European societies had in certain ways paralleled that of the plantation.

technical transformation, impressive as that is, but also the mystery of people unknown to one another being linked through space and time—and not just by politics and economics, but along a particular chain of connection maintained by their production.

How and why sugar has risen to such prevailing importance among European peoples to whom it had at one time been hardly known is still not altogether clear.

But this will require some prior examination of the production of the sugar that ended up on English tables in the tea, the jam, the biscuits and cakes and sweets.

But it is nevertheless possible to show how some people and groups unfamiliar with sugar (and other newly imported ingestibles) gradually became users of it—even, quite rapidly, daily users. Indeed, there is much evidence that many consumers, over time, would have gladly eaten more sugar had they been able to get it, while those who were already consuming it regularly were prepared only reluctantly to reduce or forgo its use.

repudiate other behaviors quite readily in order to act differently,

True, Malinowski never denied the presence of other Europeans, or of European influence—indeed, he eventually reproached himself for too studiedly ignoring the European presence, and called this his most serious deficiency.

Even those of us who have studied non-primitive societies seem eager to perpetuate the idea that the profession’s strength flows from our mastery of the primitive, more than from the study of change, or of becoming “modern.”

the

Sugar made from the juice of the cane had reached England in small quantities by about 1100 A.D.; during the next five centuries, the amounts of cane sugar available doubtless increased, slowly and irregularly. In chapter 2, I look at the production of sugar as the West began to consume more and more of it.

The need for nourishment is expressed in the course of all human interaction.

“Nutrition as a biological process,” wrote Audrey Richards, one of anthropology’s best students of food and ingestion, “is more fundamental than sex. In the life of the individual organism it is the more primary and recurrent want, while in the wider sphere of human society it determines, more largely than any other physiological function, the nature of social groupings, and the form their activities take.”

breaking of bread by gods with men as “a symbol and a confirmation of fellowship and mutual social obligations.”

“The fear of hunger is mitigated; the person one shares with will share in turn when he gets meat and people are sustained by a web of mutual obligation.

am concerned less with meals and more with mealtimes—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.

or are given—contextual meanings by those who use them.

which is also sweet, and tea, coffee, and chocolate, which are bitter—in the making of new dietary patterns. 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.

did they like it because they had too little of other foods to eat; or did other factors affect their disposition toward this costly food?

as in the case of sugar and spices—substances foreign to Europe, carried thence from distant lands, gradually entering into the diet of people trying them out for the first time; linked together mostly by the accident of usage and, to some extent, by origin, but overlapping and diverging as their uses overlapped and diverged and as the demand for them rose and fell.

Sugar has been associated during its history with slavery, in the colonies; with meat, in flavoring or concealing taste; with fruit, in preserving; with honey, as a substitute and rival.

good spouse, or a fulfilling life, is a social, not a biological, matter. Good food, as Lévi-Strauss suggested long ago, must be good to think about before it becomes good to eat.

structural pattern a “flavor principle” and they have drawn up lists of distinctive regional flavors, like the nuoc mam of Southeast Asia, the chili peppers (Capsicum species) of Mexico, West Africa, and parts of India and China, the sofrito of the Hispanic Americans, and so on.7

Even in diets where a wider range of food possibilities appears to be available, a general relationship between “center” and “edge” is usually discernible.

And it is important to note that the radical dietary changes of the last three hundred years have largely been achieved by revolutionary pressures in food processing and consumption and by adding on new foods, rather than simply cutting back on older ones.

elsewhere were struggling to stabilize their diets around adequate quantities of starch (in the form of wheat or other grains), not to move beyond such consumption.

As recently as a century ago, the combination diet of a single starch supplemented by a variety of other foods, and the constant possibility of widespread hunger—sometimes famine—would have characterized something like 85 percent of the world’s population. Today, this picture still applies in much of Asia, Africa, and Latin America; and the pattern of one-starch “centricity” still typifies perhaps three-quarters of the world’s population.

Culture must be understood “not simply as a product but also as production, not simply as socially constituted but also as socially constituting.”10 One decodes the process of codification, and not merely the code itself.

That there are links between fruit eating, the sensation of sweetness, and the evolution of the primates is persuasive. That they “explain” the heavy consumption of refined sugar by some peoples in the modern world is not.

Sensations of sweetness must be carefully distinguished from the substances that give rise to them; and processed sugars, such as sucrose, dextrose, and fructose, which are manufactured and refined technochemically, must be distinguished from sugars as they occur in nature.

Other peoples seem less inclined to treat sweetness as a “slot taste,” suitable in only one or several positions; for them a sweet food might appear at any point in the meal—as one of the middle courses, or as one of several dishes served simultaneously. The propensity to mix sweetness with other tastes is also highly variable.

bitterness, sourness, and saltiness, which make up the taste “tetrahedron,”19 or is contrasted to the piquancy or hotness with which it is sometimes associated in Chinese, Mexican, and West African cuisines,

Cane is propagated asexually from cuttings of the stem having at least one bud.7 Once planted, the cane sprouts and with adequate heat and moisture may grow an inch a day for six weeks. It becomes ripe—and reaches the optimum condition for extraction—in a dry season after anywhere from nine to eighteen months.

Pure and refined sugars may be made in any color, of course. But at one time their whiteness served as evidence of their fineness and purity.

The idea that the finest and purest sucrose would also be the whitest is probably a symbolically potent aspect of sugar’s early European history; but the fact that sucrose can be prepared in many usable forms, one of which resembles honey, is also significant. The honeylike “treacle” or “golden syrup,” so important in the making of the modern English diet, gradually won out over the ancient competitor, honey, which it mimicked.

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

Sugar itself was now known throughout western Europe, even though it was still a product de luxe, rather than a common commodity or necessity. No longer so precious a good as musk or pearls, shipped to the courts of Europe via intermediary countries and their luxury traders, sugar was becoming a raw material whose supply and refining were managed more and more by European powers, as European populations consumed it in larger and larger quantities. The

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. Cane was first grown in the New World in Spanish Santo Domingo; it was from that point that sugar was first shipped back to Europe, beginning around 1516. Santo Domingo’s pristine sugar industry was worked by enslaved Africans, the first slaves having been imported there soon after the sugar cane. Hence it was Spain that pioneered sugar cane, sugar making, African slave labor, and the plantation form in the Americas.

As English sugar became price-competitive with Portuguese sugar, England was able to drive Portugal out of the north European trade.

extension of empire outward, but on the other, they mark an absorption, a kind of swallowing up, of sugar consumption as a national habit. Like tea, sugar came to define English “character.”

Slaves were a “false commodity” because a human being is not an object, even when treated as one. In this instance, millions of human beings were treated as commodities.

and rarity and became the first mass-produced exotic necessity of a proletarian working class.

it is not clear why such preconceptions should interfere with a recognition of the industrial aspects of plantation development.

Third, the system was time-conscious. This time-consciousness was dictated by the nature of the sugar cane and its processing requirements, but it permeated all phases of plantation life and accorded well with the emphasis on time that was later to become a central feature of capitalist industry. The

Most students of capitalism (though not all) believe that capitalism itself became a governing economic form in the late eighteenth century and not before. But the rise of capitalism involved the destruction of economic systems that had preceded it—notably, European feudalism—and

and the creation of a system of world trade.