Leesfragment: The World of Sugar

Maandag 15 mei wordt Ulbe Bosma’s The World of Sugar: How the Sweet Stuff Transformed Our Politics, Health, and Environment over 2,000 Years gepresenteerd bij SPUI25, met Cynthia McLeod, Charlotte Kleyn, Lenno Munnikes en Esther Marijnen. Lees bij ons de Inleiding!

The definitive 2,500-year history of sugar and its human costs, from its little-known origins as a luxury good in Asia to worldwide environmental devastation and the obesity pandemic.

For most of history, humans did without refined sugar. After all, it serves no necessary purpose in our diets, and extracting it from plants takes hard work and ingenuity. Granulated sugar was first produced in India around the sixth century BC, yet for almost 2,500 years afterward sugar remained marginal in the diets of most people. 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. Through the Middle Ages, traders brought small quantities of the precious white crystals to rajahs, emperors, and caliphs. But after sugar crossed the Mediterranean to Europe, where cane could not be cultivated, demand 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.

Introduction

To see how important sugar has become in our lives, we need only take some packaged food from our kitchen shelves and read the ingredient labels. Sugar is listed on almost every one. Sugar has fundamentally changed how we feed ourselves, has deeply affected human relations through its close relationship with slavery, and has caused extensive environmental degradation. These are stunning facts given that sugar was unknown for most of human history.
It took time for our simple white sugar to be become quotidian because it is difficult to make. Much more difficult than salt, for instance. It requires ingenuity and patience to extract from plant material the complex sucrose molecule C₁₂H₂₂O₁₁, a disaccharide or compound sugar that couples sweeter fructose and less sweet glucose molecules. The resulting white table sugar was a luxury 200 years ago and could only be produced in small quantities, through costly and time-consuming artisanal manufacturing. Today, huge factories with gigantic crushers, boilers, and centrifuges turn massive volumes of sugar beet or cane into crystalline sugar within a matter of hours.
Granulated sugar is no more than 2,500 years old, and white crystalline sugar started its career even more recently, about 1,500 years ago, in Asia as a pure luxury, a sign of power and wealth. Sugar initially had no purpose beyond royal banquets and ceremonies or in tiny medicinal doses. Royal sugar consumption percolated over time into the elites in the growing cities of China and India, as well as much of Central Asia and North Africa, before reaching Europe. By the thirteenth century, sugar-making skills had developed sufficiently for sugar to take off as a major commercial item throughout Eurasia. The history of sugar capitalism began in Asia, where most of the world’s sugar was produced until the 1870s.
Sugar’s widespread commercial success fostered a chain of small innovations in cane crushing and juice boiling, which further lowered the price. Over the past seven hundred years sugar has showed up in a rapidly growing number of recipes across the world and increasingly became part of daily diets. It was Europeans who turned sugar into a globally cultivated commodity, precisely because they were incapable of growing much of it on their own continent, at least not prior to the introduction of the sugar beet. When Europe learned to love sugar, its demand had to be met from overseas and from the Americas in particular. What followed was a story of deeply shocking cruelty at a scale beyond imagination. Between half and two-thirds of the 12.5 million Africans shipped across the Atlantic Ocean in the course of the slave trade were destined for sugar plantations. The labor regimes on sugar plantations were exhaustive and lethal, far more than those of tobacco and coffee production, for instance. By the late 1860s, when Karl Marx was writing his monumental Capital, half of the sugar consumed by the industrial proletariat in Europe and North America was produced by enslaved people.
In the mid-nineteenth century, sugar was what oil would become in the twentieth: the Global South’s most valuable export commodity. The crucial difference from oil, however, is that almost every country has been able to produce sugar. Since Europe was cut off from Caribbean sugar under Napoleon Bonaparte’s rule, beet sugar became a viable alternative. From these roots the same white crystals could be extracted, but never as cheaply as from cane. Powerful beet sugar cartels in wealthy countries convinced their governments to establish protectionist policies, not only shielding them from competition from poorer cane sugar–producing countries but also enabling them to dump their excess production abroad. The marriage between expansive global capitalism and increasingly powerful nation-states artificially cheapened sugar. This in turn facilitated sugar’s introduction, in massive quantities, into industrially produced food and beverages. Today, the scale and economic clout of the sugar industry makes it incredibly difficult to address market inefficiencies, overproduction, and overconsumption.
In his classic work Sweetness and Power (1985), the anthropologist Sidney Mintz argued that the history of sugar shows how modern consumption, global inequalities, and the emergence of modern capitalism are all part of the same massive transformation of our world. The history of capitalism is indeed Janus-faced, as it involved immense material progress but also caused social misery, unhealthy consumption patterns, and environmental destruction. The environmental consequences alone should make us rethink sugar production. Currently, the average annual sugar and sweetener consumption of a person living in Western Europe is 40 kilograms; in North America, that number is almost 60 kilograms. Now imagine if the entire world were to consume the same amount of sugar as the Europeans. Global production would have to increase from the present 180 million tons to 308 million tons. This would cause an almost-proportionate gobbling up of land, since increasing productivity per acre is rarely possible these days. And keep in mind that ever more land is already being used for cane cultivation, to produce ethanol as a so-called biofuel.
The industry that disgorges sugar in immense volumes has emerged as a formidable adversary to the medical profession, which spent the past century warning against excessive sugar consumption. Human metabolism evolved in light of food scarcity, not calorie abundance, and today we suffer the consequences. Sugar has already ruined the health of many, and matters are poised to grow worse. Incidence of type 2 diabetes—associated with obesity, a condition to which excessive sugar consumption contributes heavily— is expected to rise at an alarming rate over the next decades. The World Health Organization had every reason to declare obesity a pandemic in 1999, but the announcement went largely unnoticed. Sugar is not a virus, after all, and was allowed to quietly continue wreaking havoc.
This book is not only about sugar but also its history, which is made by people. It is the story of millions of workers doing exhausting labor, from field to factory, to produce sugar. It is a history of resistance by the enslaved and by contemporary cane and beet sugar workers, and by millions of farmers who persisted in making their own raw sugar rather than bringing their cane to the big industrialists. These industrialists, who typically operated in tight family networks, are also crucial actors. Big producers came from diverse national and ethnic backgrounds, but, if they were cane sugar producers, they were often born and raised in the tropics. They were among the first in the world to apply steam power and revolutionary insights from physics and chemistry to the manufacture refined sugar. They were truly a colonial sugar bourgeoisie spreading industrial modernity, although their progressiveness was confined to their narrow class interests. They created huge cartels and ruthlessly exploited labor and nature. We will meet the members of the world’s most important sugar dynasties: the Karimis of Egypt, the Venetian Corner family in Cyprus, the Lascelles of Barbados, the Havemeyers and Fanjuls in the United States, and the Birla family in India. In the front of this book, the reader can find a list of the dramatis personae in the world of sugar.
Sugar’s ascendency is a remarkable and globe-spanning story that covers more than two thousand years, the most important moments of which are indicated on a timeline included in the opening of this book. Over the centuries, humans have perfected the art of making sugar and unraveled the miracles of chemistry in service of the loftiest industrial and commercial goals. Sugar, once a soluble white gold, is omnipresent in every conceivable edible item today. This reality contains within it a history of human ingenuity—the transformation of something sweeter than nature into a bulk commodity. The ubiquity of sugar tells us about progress but also reveals a darker story of human exploitation, racism, obesity, and environmental destruction. Since sugar is a relatively recent phenomenon, we have not yet learned how to control it and bring it back to what it once was: a sweet luxury.

Excerpted from The World of Sugar: How the Sweet Stuff Transformed Our Politics, Health, and Environment Over 2,000 Years by Ulbe Bosma, published by The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

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