Capitalism and Atrocity

In The World of Sugar, Ulbe Bosma provides a sweeping and detailed overview of the global history of sugar. Beginning with the origins of granulated sugar in India 2,500 years ago, the book covers its spread throughout Asia, Europe, the Americas, and, in the twentieth century, Africa. Bosma's focus is on refined sucrose, the commodity today we usually refer to as sugar. For most of world history this product has been derived from sugarcane, though beginning in the eighteenth century it has also been derived from beet. At the end of this book, Bosma briefly addresses the emergence of high-fructose corn syrup, artificial sweeteners, and stevia.In some ways, The World of Sugar is an expanded and updated version of Sidney Mintz's classic Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (1986). This is not altogether surprising, given that The World of Sugar originated in a workshop held in Mintz's honor. But more than this, Mintz's book has long been a standard reference in world sugar history. To this day it remains a model of how the best sugar history might be written: it is at once transnational and encompassing of events in production, distribution, and consumption.Bosma's World of Sugar is a worthy companion to Mintz's scholarship. It also broadens its scope in certain respects. Like Mintz, Bosma charts the consumer, distributor, and producer sides of sugar history. Unlike Mintz, Bosma further charts sugar's expansion throughout Asia; he also provides a detailed discussion of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Bosma also looks at the history of granulated sugar in Africa, and he spends more time than Mintz excavating the names of the individuals, companies, and families that owned stakes in the sugar industry. Since Bosma takes sugar's story into the present, he also tracks such trends as the growth of sugar for ethanol, the rise of the sugar multinationals, the environmental consequences of mass cane production, and the ways that sugar policies in the Global North have affected the Global South.It is clear from the start, then, that Bosma has his own unique interests. Sugar as an example—and in many cases an engine—of global capitalism is a major theme. “If we define capitalism as a continuously advancing commodification of labor and nature for profit by private entrepreneurs,” Bosma writes, “then India's sugar sector clearly exhibited a capitalist dynamic” (10). Referring here to the thirteenth century, when urban sugar refiners were purchasing raw sugars from the countryside and selling them for profit, Bosma pinpoints this period and place as an initial moment in the history of sugar capitalism. Yet he also suggests that such capitalism may even extend as far back as the fifth century, when traders bought refined sugars in Persia and distributed them throughout central Asia (6, 335). By the time Europeans had begun producing sugar in the Mediterranean in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, sugar capitalism in Asia was well underway.Bosma directs attention to the period before the 1400s, but the bulk of the book is weighted toward more recent history. Of the book's fourteen chapters, only two explore sugar history before the fifteenth century. This century is significant, for it was in the 1400s that the European sugar industry moved, first, to the eastern Atlantic and, second, to the Caribbean. This century thus stands as an informal dividing line in the book, separating its first two chapters from its remaining twelve. Bosma does not specify the reason for organizing the book in this manner, but he does suggest that the transfer of the European sugar industry from the eastern Atlantic to the Americas was a significant rupture. It introduced widespread enslavement into an industry that had previously only had intermittent enslavement. This new form of enslavement culminated in the forced migration of over 12.5 million people from Africa to the Americas. Of these people, up to two-thirds were forced to work in sugar. The move of the European sugar industry across the Atlantic also represented an example of the “spatial fix” that Bosma says is inherent to “capitalist commodity production,” in that the industry “over[came] local ecological constraints by relocating” (44). Due to the rise of the European sugar industry in the Americas, the course of sugar history shifted, as did world history itself.The third chapter of The World of Sugar looks at enslavement in the Americas, focusing on the period before 1833, when abolition was declared in the British Empire. This is the most important chapter of the book: it offers an in-depth overview of enslavement and shows how European wealth and, later, that of the United States, was built upon profits earned through enslavement. Another important aspect of this chapter is Bosma's observation that sugar has never been sold according to provenance, in contrast to “Dijon mustard” or “Jamaica rum” (73). As a result, tropical regions producing sugar for northern metropoles were never able to claim a distinctive stake in sugar. Lack of provenance, in turn, has paved the way for wealthy international sugar buyers to simply select the cheapest sugars on the market, thereby ensuring a “race to the bottom” in terms of sugar prices.Chapters 4 through 8 cover the nineteenth century, taking the reader through industrialization, the rise of the Java and Cuba sugar industries, ongoing enslavement in Cuba and Brazil, the rise of the global indenture system, the development of hardier cane strains, and the emergence in the late 1800s of overproduction in the global export market. Bosma also covers the production of peasant sugar, including in India and Latin America, where production and consumption of gur and khandsari in the former and rapadura, piloncillo, and panela in the latter helped foster proud regional identities. They also supported local agricultural practices that resisted “corporate monocropping” (190).Chapters 9 through 11 introduce more recent trends. Chapter 9 focuses on the United States, looking at the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth century and exploring the American sugar monopolies; the treatment of American sugar territories overseas, including in Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines; and the United States’ close relationship with Cuba. Chapter 10 examines protectionism in domestic European markets, whereby European nations erected tariff walls to protect their beet sugar industries from cane imports. In the twentieth-century China, too, became protectionist, imposing tariffs on sugar from Java and Taiwan, thereby helping to decimate the sugar industries in these regions. Meanwhile, on the world market, the new disease-resistant “POJ wonder cane” led to overproduction, causing international prices to spiral downward and eventually contributing to the 1929 stock market crash (239). Finally, in chapter 11, Bosma discusses the ongoing ill treatment of the world's agricultural sugar workforce, whose members in the United States, Mexico, Cuba, Southeast Asia, and elsewhere have long faced forced migrations, coercion, hunger, violence, poverty, and other oppressive conditions.In chapters 12 and 13, Bosma discusses events following World War II. Chapter 12—perhaps the most important chapter in the book after chapter 3—demonstrates how decisions in the Global North exacerbated economic problems in the Global South. Wealthy countries mechanized beet and in some cases cane growing with relative ease, whereas in the Global South, mechanization spelled the end of many cane workers’ incomes. For this reason, many countries in the Global South to this day have not mechanized their cane fields. During the 1970s, cooperatives tried to share resources, but these faltered due not only to landowner opposition but also to “dwindling world market prices,” again caused by protectionism by wealthier countries (276). Meanwhile, consolidation in the corporate sector has grown, spurred by the Commonwealth Sugar Agreement of 1951, which tended to benefit UK sugar companies like Tate & Lyle, which began harvesting cane in Africa and is now running a major cane industry there. In chapter 13, Bosma continues his discussion of corporate concentration, noting that the world's two largest sugar companies are currently American Sugar Refining, based in Florida and operating in ten countries, and Associated British Foods, which operates in southern Africa, China, and Europe (299–300). This entire chapter is a master class in how to track the most powerful players in the twenty-first-century sugar industry, demonstrating that older sugar dynasties are still very much involved in international sugar operations, and indicating, too, which world regions are now exporting the most sugar. In descending order, they are the European Union, Brazil, Thailand, and Cuba.Chapter 14 is a departure from the rest of the book, in that it looks at changing sugar consumption patterns from the mid-1800s onward, primarily in the Global North. It blames the industry for artificially driving up sugar intake. This chapter echoes Mintz's analyses, in that Bosma looks at the industrialization of the food system, the cheapening of processed foods, and the shrinking time urban families have available for the preparation of healthful foods. Bosma, however, also spends considerable time exploring the “pure foods” movement and the rise of food packaging, a feature seen as making foods safer for consumption. In this scenario, food giants operating on mass scales won out over local food producers. Bosma additionally examines sugar's impact on health. Here his writings can be considered somewhat more controversial, in that he sides with writers Gary Taubes and John Yudkin in their critiques of refined sugar. Arguing that sugar causes obesity and elevates risks for diabetes, Bosma recommends taxes on sugary items among other regulations. Bypassing long-established critiques of obesity discourse—which argue, among other things, that “obesity” is an elusive health concern, that fat shaming is discriminatory, that diabetes is caused by trauma in addition to diet, and that food policing is moralistic—Bosma here emerges as being on the more conservative side of discussions today. He also tends to focus more on sugar discourse in western Europe and the United States while only intermittently referencing sugar discourse elsewhere.The World of Sugar is a tour de force. As with all other books, there are areas that might be usefully attended to in future editions. Stronger authorial intervention in certain places might be helpful. Some of the chapters begin and end in medias res, with little explanation as to the significance of the events discussed in the previous chapter or about to be discussed in the present chapter. A broader linking of themes and events across time and space might allow the major findings of the book to come through more clearly.Some regions and topics do receive more attention in this book than others. Certainly it would be impossible to cover every aspect of world sugar history in a single book. Yet it is also true that Oceania, with the exception of Australia, receives less attention in this book than might otherwise be the case—which is somewhat surprising given that some cane varieties have their origins in the Pacific Islands. As well, there is less emphasis than might be expected on the Indian indenture system—a regime that between 1834 and 1916 saw 1.2 million indentured people depart from India under bondage so as to serve five-year indenture contracts on sugarcane plantations located throughout the colonial world.When it comes to commodity history, it is sometimes fruitful to consider what is foregrounded and what recedes within the historiographical frame. Given that this book's spotlight is on granulated sugar—a commodity that has shaped world history—political conflicts among nations and territories recede from view, and production, distribution, and consumption become more important. Also highlighted is the story of sugar itself: how it is made, why it is desired, what effects it has had, and so on. At the same time, the actions of enslaved, indentured, and other people in the sugarcane fields perhaps receive less treatment in this book than do those of planters and corporations. Certainly, these people are present and Bosma discusses their roles, but since this book tracks sugar's movement across place and time, the focus always returns to the business of sugar.As a final point, I would suggest that perhaps future editions of this book include more comparisons between sugar and such other world-altering commodities as gold or oil. In places, the book makes tantalizing suggestions—for example, Bosma points out that “in the mid-nineteenth century, sugar was what oil would become in the twentieth” (2)—but for the most part, the focus remains on sugar. This reviewer was at times left wondering about how the influence of sugar on world history compares to that of other equally powerful commodities. More broadly, this reviewer would also like to pose two questions to all commodity historians. What is it about the particular commodity under study that makes it unique? And how does that commodity's influence compare to others’, and why?Bringing together mountains of research, both primary and secondary, The World of Sugar is a powerful synthesis of the most recent findings in sugar history. For this contribution alone this reader is grateful. But, more than this, the book tells a story about sugar's rise, spread, and eventual global domination. This narrative casts capitalism as a central player, demonstrating that sugar's history has been driven by those seeking to make profits by selling sugar. Capitalism, too, has been responsible for sugar's spread across borders, and it has further been responsible for ongoing atrocious conditions in the beet and cane fields. To this story, as well, must be added the environmental destruction that plagues industrial sugar production. As Bosma puts it, “capital-intensive plantations” are today “akin to mining companies, geared toward getting the maximum energy out of the soil at minimal cost” (292).The World of Sugar is a welcome and much-needed addition to the global canon of sugar history. Bringing together the best of many existing approaches to the topic, The World of Sugar will become the standard reference text and leading analytical study of world sugar history for some time to come.