Overall, it was…
…Fine. I wish that instead of The World of Sugar it was titled The Labor History of Sugar or similar, which would be more apt but sounded less exciting. I may not have picked it up, but then that would have been fine by me. The vast majority of page count is spent on the relationships between workers and capitalists in sugar production, which is a topic worthy of a book-length discussion. I do wish it had dwelt more on the cultural significance of sugar and the consumer side, though this is written about at some points, especially in the last chapter (with much moralizing about over-indulgence).
I did learn some things, though, including…
…Some zany European attempts at non-cane sugar
Beet sugar only became commercially developed in the early 1810s, but was only one among many potential plants from which to extract sugar. Maple and grapes were considered, but also less sane options: “throughout Europe there were frantic attempts to produce sugar from potatoes and even mushrooms.” For perspective, mushrooms have only 1.65g of sugar per 100g, and potatoes only 0.82g out of 100g. Beets have 6.76g sugar per 100g, still less than I might have expected, though modern sugar beets seem to have been bred for more at circa 16% sugar mass.
And, most interestingly, though glossed over as an aside in this book…
…Somebody had to convince the French that potatoes were edible?
That man was Antoine-Augustine Parmentier, a pharmacist and agronomer. A quote, from the Wikipedia page on Parmentier:
While serving as an army pharmacist for France in the Seven Years’ War, he was captured by the Prussians, and in prison in Prussia was faced with eating potatoes, known to the French only as hog feed. The potato had been introduced from South America to Europe by the Spaniards at the beginning of the 16th century. It was introduced to the rest of Europe by 1640 but (outside Spain and Ireland) was usually used only for animal feed… In 1748 France had actually forbidden the cultivation of the potato (on the grounds that it was thought to cause leprosy among other things), and this law remained on the books in Parmentier’s time, until 1772.
I like to keep a mental list of universally palatable foods; those foods which, if introduced into a culture that hadn’t previously been familiar with them, would be easy to enjoy and not require much getting used to. At the very top of this list is sugar, and while the author never directly comments on its extreme popularity among foods, I have no reason after reading this book to doubt it. The second item on my list, however, has always been fried potatoes, but apparently I was quite wrong about that. Or was I, and most Europeans just did not consider frying them? But if so, why not? Surely they were familiar with frying, or at the very least boiling, of other foods by this time? Did they just assume they were hog’s food without ever trying one? This is so baffling to me.
Finally, a note on intra-white racism
European colonizers kept African slaves in the West Indies for the purpose of sugar cultivation from about the sixteenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries. Naturally, this means that the history of slavery is prominent in this book.
Even after the abolition of slavery in the British empire, and Britain imposing this abolition on Spain, plantation owners wanted cheap labor to work the fields. Bosma describes how slavery was replaced with indentured labor—poor workers implied by Bosma to be coerced into toiling in grueling and exploitative conditions. These workers were often European, but from southern Europe and therefore darker-skinned than the northern Europeans who owned the plantations. Bosma claims this contributed to a tiered system of whiteness, and of seeing racial distinctions within Europeans as important, with darker-skinned Europeans being seen as inferior.
There are a couple of places, however, where this story doesn’t add up. Firstly, Bosma on the one hand writes as though these workers were coerced, while on the other claims that workers would walk long distances and compete for these jobs. I would really have liked some context on what the other options were for these people, and why they were eager to take up work that seems horrible by all accounts (in contrast, for instance, Chinese workers given the option generally declined).
I would also have liked context on the economy of running a plantation, what profit margins were like, and how these changed with working conditions—Bosma does mention that labor costs comprised a large share of total plantation costs, however I would have liked more exact figures, or at least educated estimates.
Secondly, why would this create a tiered system of whiteness in a time when the Spanish and Portuguese also ran plantations? In the early 1800s, national wealth levels of European countries don’t seem obviously correlated to or tied with latitude. I find it plausible that this mechanism was in place, but would have liked more explanation of what the steps were—perhaps the peasantry in southern Europe was poorer, or had fewer other options? Perhaps there was less social mobility? In any case, it isn’t elaborated upon.