Customer Reviews

Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History

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Mintz carefully places implications that sugar has caused human nature and culture to change and the end of his work, after a brief overview of all that we have been doing with sugar or rather sugar has been doing with us for the past 1000 years. MintzŐs work is divided into 5 sections: Food, Sociality and Sugar; Production; Consumption; Power; and finally Eating and Being. Mintz really hopes to build a base of facts to reveal to us how we as a people have identified with and sought to consume sugar over the past 1000 years and how that has affected us.

Sugar is always a labor intensive project, from the mill, to the distillery, to the storehouse and all the laborers it takes to run these places. Mintz discusses how this need for labor caused the British to look to Africa and other places to find cheap or free labor. With sugar came slavery, and those slaves who did the plantation work generally worked in the Caribbean while the product they created was delivered to British aristocracy.

In the mid-1700Ős sugar is made cheaper and more accessible to the lower classes and at this point shifts in its purpose to sweeten food. And as outlined by the upper statistics, sugar only continues to grow in demand. It is interesting that because sugar started as something precious and hard to come by, when it later became more cheap and accessible to the working class it still seemed to uphold that Òrareness.Ó The working class felt like they were increasing in freedom and status as they started to consume sugar. Sugar and like products Òrepresented the growing freedom of ordinary folks,Ó yet did Sugar really mean freedom?

In analysis of MintzŐs thesis I am most convinced that sugar is a powerful force that has moved us historically and today. Sugar production has not only caused the physical relocation, its consumption has caused us to form class and psychological identity around it; today we still live with the power of sweetness in our everyday life, most of the time not giving it a second thought.
Sugar took slaves from Africa to the new world in America. It created identity in the aristocracy and later a manufactured sense of freedom among the working class. Today it continues to grow in its use across the world and has become an everyday commodity. The more fast paced life becomes in the 21st century, the more consumers are drawn to pre-prepared processed foods consistently with high contents of sugar. Sucrose production separated African families in the 1700s, brought class distinction to EuropeŐs families during its shift to capitalism, and now it severs families from eating together at the dinner table with its processed and fast foods. With these implications either we allow sugar to keep moving us, or we move it off the table, out of the cupboard and dump it into Boston Harbor.

Sidney Mintz provides and an excellent background on the impact that sugar has made on humankind in the past 400 years. The theme of the of the books centers on sugar within the British economy and culture but provides a different insight on European colonialism and the impact of specialty items in mercantilism economies. Although the book reads as a straight history text, Mintz, as a trained anthropologist, provides a provocative case study into the intricate relationship among products, consumers and producers. The book is well documented/foot-noted. Any student of economics, anthropology or the history of Colonial/Industrial Britain should grace their bookshelf with this text.

I found this book very interesting as I read it for a development anthropology class. Mintz gives a detailed and informative history of the development of sugar as a commodity from the colonial age to the present. Coming from an anthropological point of view, he examines the cultural impact of sugar production on the Carribean nations that produce it. He also displays how British organization of the industry in their colonies created an increasing demand for sugar.

Sidney W. Mintz's Sweetness and Power situates economic analysis in consumption rather than production. The author believes that a producer's labor and exploitation is not enough to understand the exploitation of production. One must unpack the mythos of demand. Central to this is the idea that rational choice leads liberal individuals to consume products because it is in their best interest. Mintz correctly implies that in the historiography of western consumers and colonial producers, this liberal individual is almost always white, male, and couched in the trappings of "civilization." He criticizes prevailing practices in social anthropology that approach colonized peoples as pristine and discrete, a tendency that also has troubling sway over what he terms "anthropology of modern life." He sees the anthropology rooted in his study of a basic commodity-sugar-as a positive contestation of the bounded primitive as a mode of inquiry and one that connects rather than marginalizes its subjects.

Mintz's engagement with cultural anthropology is based on a sophisticated premise: the way in which canonical anthropology marginalizes the primitive in opposition to civil society is related to the way in which liberal economics marginalizes the producer in opposition to the liberal individual consumer. The term "in opposition to" is appropriate because in this marginalization, both ends are mutually decentered. Both the primitive and the civil as well as production and consumption are on the margins because there is a labor, an exploitation, and an invocation to behavior that defies logic on each end. This, Mintz implies, necessitates a rejection of the prevailing colonial narrative of one-way dominion. For him, the mass-consumption of sugar is an anthropological anomaly. This is the puzzle that leads him to root his study in England from roughly 1650 thru 1900, during which time sugar went from being a lavish luxury to a staple of working class diets. As he notes, there is ample anthropological precedent to model culture and society as resistant to change and resistant to the imposition of new practice and tradition, even amidst a changing milieu that raises contradictions. Thus, contrary to liberal economic theory, demand is not a matter of nature in which rational persons severed from cultural meaning rush toward rational hedonistic consumption with open arms. Indeed, anthropology suggests that nature resists this imposition of change. Because of this, demand must be a structural phenomenon. It must at some juncture interrupt and structure culture in a way that is alien to its natural progression. The author concludes that production must create cultural meaning.

Understanding demand as structure and not nature allows there to be a liminal space between production and consumption. For Mintz, sugar inscribes a genealogy of contact upon this space. He sees the global connectedness of commodity as a new shape in which to group peoples in the study of kinship, religion and other cultural phenomena. In revealing how sugar came to England as science, theology, morality and a bedfellow (or perhaps even a progenitor) of the Enlightenment and other significant social shifts, the author hopes to springboard similar scholarship in cultural studies. The text concludes that the massive success of sugar in imposing a sort of consumptive hegemony in places like England and the United States, while not as significantly restructuring cultural practices in places like France and China, presents fertile ground for future research. If it has a shortfalling, it is the absence of a more explicit centering of power-this is to say that in focusing on the mutual marginalization of production and consumption there is a lack of coherence when it comes to narrating a driving force behind it all. Nonetheless the author makes significant contributions to cultural studies and interdisciplinary scholarship as well as hinting at the potential for deploying commodity as a postnational and contra-national discourse.

Mintz's book is a bit hard to understand because he approaches the history of sugar from an intensely anthropological perspective. Basically, he studies the meaning associated with sugar (especially in England) during its centuries-long journey across time and economic class. Sugar began as an upper-class commodity. To have sugar displayed one's wealth and status. It was even endowed with magical and medicinal properties. Through colonialism, however, sugar was supplied to England cheaply and it became an daily part of the lower class English diet. It lost its high-status connotations and became a common day product. Mintz also studies the meanings sugar had in literature and speech, and even its effects today. This book is a worthwhile endeavor, and for anthropology, actually almost a fun read.

I read this book for an economic anthropology class. I thought it gave an excellent anthropological perspective on how sugar changed history. Mintz makes some striking points on the influence of slavery on the development of capitalism, as well as drawing a parallel between the sugar plantations in the Carribean and the capitalist, industrial factories that developed shortly after. The book is packed with historical information, overall a really informative read.

I bought this book simply out of curiousity, and it was marvelous! It really details the ways in which the sugar trade transformed and created the modern world -- I would highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in how markets act and how the history of substances we view as everyday. My one complaint is an overly long section tracing the rise in English sugar consumption, but the political and economic facts are tremendous.

Someone scribbled the following on the first page of the introduction of my copy of this book: "NOTE: this work may be of marginal use!!" I disagree.

Sugar is such a heavily-used part of most diets, yet we rarely stop to reflect how it came to be that way. Our dependence on sugar is surely not healthy, yet it is incredibly hard to wean oneself from sugaring so much of what we eat. I found Mintz's discussion on the history of the production and consumption patterns of sugar to be interesting, and the repercussions to our social structures to be even more so. This is still a timely read given the current reflection on the nature of world markets.

Mintz provides a fascinating history of sugar, placing it in context within the transatlantic world. Sugar acquired ever increasing importance as the means for its production improved, its availability spread and its price decreased. Underpinning the success of sugar was the tragedy of slavery. Not only did slaves serve the sugar plantations and mills, but Mintz makes a compelling case for sugar's being the single key force behind the firm establishment of black slavery in the western hemisphere.

Quick Summary:

Unlike many anthropologists out there, Sydney Mintz' style is quite accessible for the casual reader. In this particular book he takes us through the genealogy of sugar and begins to dissect that refined white stuff we put in our coffees and teas for what it originally was--a medicine or spice. He then walks us through shifts in the "meanings" of sugar as we began to develop a whole economy (around this very substance) and this economy, still exists today in the system we call "capitalism". In so doing this we learn of triangles of trade, the rising proletariat in England and, their mirror image, slaves in the Caribbean, the British 'sweet tooth' and much more.

Little Review:

This 86-year old anthropologist who still works as a research professor at John Hopkins University tells a wonderful story that anyone who can read should read. It will make you want to brush your teeth. It will make you want to ease your sugar habits, but most of all, it will cause you to reconsider your views on slave labor in the Americas.

Mintz, does have some theoretical things to say in this book, but for the less casual reader, you might feel as if he was lacking here. Most obvious in terms of this, was his small, but interesting discussions of power. For a nice complement to this book, I suggest seeing the film Sugar Cane Alley, which I have also reviewed. Sugar Cane Alley