Sugar and the world
Sweetness and Power by Sidney Mintz
changed my views of sugar from ordinary substance that is used daily by everyone,
to exotic and limited product accessible only to the elite of societies. The book was able to transform sugar from
yesterday’s luxury into today’s necessity, with sugar being the component that
changed the world and made Europeans focus into new territories and compete one
another. The competition placed Great
Britain on the top of that chain due to their expansion and consumption of
sugar, and then industrial Britain was born.
Although the book discussed sugar and its importance to the world,
however the author used examples that sometimes made that importance vague to
the reader. Also I sense from the author
that, other important crops during that time were not valued as much as sugar although
he covers briefly tobacco was more marketable than sugar.
In this book Mintz expressed his views of
the importance sugar as commodity, but failed to convince his reader of the
chain of supply and demand, the explanations he used was unclear and
confusing. Even though he touched the
plague and World War two but failed to explain further the supply and demand
chain. Looking back and our class last week I see that Mintz has similar views
to “From Silver to Cocaine” book in
defining commodity as state or ownership, and his examples were the concurred
lands and the slave ownership.
The images this book is giving us about
the history of sugar is not something that our generation today can relate to, we
born thankfully in time that sugar was necessity not luxury. But it made me wonder if through time Gold,
Oil and Diamond could lose their values as sugar did.
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