Sweetness and Power

One of the finest qualities of Sidney Mintz’s Sweetness and Power, is the fact that it is eminently readable. Mintz is a fantastic story teller and his tale of how sucrose (primarily yielded from of sugar cane, and, to some extent, sugar beets) captured the world was incredibly fascinating.

            Mintz’s introduction discusses some of his fieldwork throughout the Caribbean and the experiences he gained working among the workers whose lives revolved around sugar cane. He appears to be in awe of the subject he has chosen to examine, viewing the role of sugar in interregional political, economic, and social relations as both self-evident and enigmatic.

            Mintz makes the distinction between sweetness and peoples’ affinity for sweet substances. He asserts that sweetness is a taste all humans recognize and enjoy and that this predisposition of enjoying sweetness begins in infancy. Yet, although humans enjoy the taste of sweetness, people consume sweet things at very different rates. Mintz attributes this disparity in consumption to the various meanings sweet substances can be ascribed, which are dependent on how sweets are used in varying social contexts. I never considered sugar, or any food for that matter, in this way before. However, after reading Mintz’s work, this now seems to me to be an obvious concept, one which I should have picked up on before.

            I think that Mintz’s most masterful element in this work is his methodical and focused explanation of the development of sugar production. His argument that sugar plantations were essentially agribusinesses, operating in a sort of quasi-capitalist capacity, was very compelling. Mintz’s work challenged a lot of the assumptions I had held regarding entrepreneurialism and the rise of capitalism, and was an excellent first true venture into commodity history.