Sugar and the Indian Ocean World: Trade and Consumption in the Eighteenth‐Century Persian Gulf.NorifumiDaito, (Bloomsbury, 2024. Pp. 248. ISBN: 9781350399211. Hbk $115)

In Sugar and the Indian Ocean World, Norifumi Daito explores the economic, social, and cultural role of sugar in the seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Safavid Empire.The monograph offers a novel perspective on the history of sugar as well as on the history of the Safavid Empire in the eighteenth century.Instead of painting the eighteenth century as a time of economic decline of a region previously ruled by the Safavid Empire, the book emphasizes the continuous engagement of the region in global trade, the on-going demand for consuming imported goods such as sugar, and the role of foreign merchants, including European trading companies, in satisfying this demand.Daito shows the period as one of furthering integration into regional and global trade networks, and sugar as a commodity exemplifying this integration.The author uses data from the Duch East India Company (VOC) for this study to overcome the lack of quantitative materials on the topic and adopts the lens of the VOC to study the sugar trade.The introduction offers a wider insight into the history of the Safavid Empire, Persian Gulf, and Indian Ocean world in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, sketching out the political, social, and cultural developments in this period.It looks at these developments through the lens of the Safavid Empire but brings a comparative view in addition to exploring the roles of European merchants, especially the VOC.This chapter then describes the significance of sugar in the Empire and integrates its economic and social role in the Safavid Empire into the debates about the historical role of sugar in the Western world.Chapter 1 focuses on the market with sugar and on sugar consumption in Safavid Iran.It portrays sugar as an essential consumption good widely consumed in drinks, conserves, and sweetmeats; at banquets by the wealthy but also by the rest of the society; and as a good perceived to have medicinal properties.Chapter 2 looks at the ways in which the Afghan conquest of the Safavid Empire shaped the early eighteenth-century trade in sugar.The author shows that sugar continued to be imported even after the fall of the Safavid Empire and shows the restructuring of the trade roots and the entering of new traders such as the English East India Company (EIC).The chapter disagrees with the previous portrayals of the period after the end of the Safavid Empire as one of economic