How Sugar Changed the World

Overall, I found Sidney Mintz’s Sweetness and Power to be interesting and insightful, especially because I have never thought about sugar and its importance to Western societies and modern diets.  His arguments about the processes of history and the way anthropological studies are conducted are also noteworthy, as they provide a different way of looking at history and the formation of global capitalism, cultural norms, etc. At the same time, I thought certain sections of the book were extremely repetitive and frustrating, as in the case of his descriptions of consumption in Great Britain. His arguments became rather redundant at times, as he stated the same facts over and over, as if the reader could not understand them in the first go around.  In addition, I am not confident that sugar was kept as the focus of the book, which raises questions as to whether or not it truly is a “commodity history” (which we still have not entirely uncovered ourselves).  

In regard to our class and the questions we would pose to the author, I believe many of his chapters and arguments were aimed at keeping sugar at the center of the story, allowing readers to understand the product and its very long history, how it permeated societies, and how it helped to increase trade.  Mintz supplies the reader with an understanding of the processes which made it so popular, and he even provides the reader  with taste descriptions, but overall he fell short in his efforts to keep the focus on sugar.  He instead used the text to push a different understanding of the processes of history, namely his argument about the importance of sugar production and plantations (agro-industrial) to the rise of global capitalism, the industrial revolution, and “free trade” (pg. 51).  This fact, which we discussed in our last class extensively and which was was commented upon in a first blog post, raises questions to whether or not sugar was actually his main focus,  or if he just used the commodity as a vehicle to push his larger argument about the beginnings of a world market, the birth of the proletarian working class, and the linking of global trade to advancements in colonial production rather than the other way around as many historians believe.  Basically, he challenged the way we look at the world and globalization, rather than telling us completely about sugar.  I say this because of his sporadic arguments as well as the fact that his book stops at a point in history before the modern time period instead of continuing the discussion of sugar production into the current market.  He talks briefly about WWI and sugar rationing and sugar’s importance in Western diets, but he does not bring the discussion of supply and demand into the current economic structure, which I believe would have helped to connect the arguments of past and present.  After reading the book, I also tend to agree with Robbins in the article we read last week about the absurdity of presenting the “underdog” story and “how the commodity changed the world” approach, an argument in which Mintz slips into occasionally.