This is an incredible history of how the introduction of sugar has changed so much of our world. I was surprised to learn how little I knew about how this little ingredient came to be. Meticulously research, this book brings the reader from the 15th century up through the modern world, covering the depth of the slave trade to the way that sugar has impacted global health and how governments have gone out of their way to protect the sugar trade to the detriment of millions. I was truly shocked at so much of what this book uncovered. I've been recommending this book to everyone I know
The modern successor to Sweetness and Power, James Walvin’s Sugar is a rich and engaging work on a topic that continues to change our world.
How did a simple commodity, once the prized monopoly of kings and princes, become an essential ingredient in the lives of millions, before mutating yet again into the cause of a global health epidemic?
Prior to 1600, sugar was a costly luxury, the domain of the rich. But with the rise of the sugar colonies in the New World over the following century, sugar became cheap, ubiquitous and an everyday necessity. Less than fifty years ago, few people suggested that sugar posed a global health problem. And yet today, sugar is regularly denounced as a dangerous addiction, on a par with tobacco. While sugar consumption remains higher than ever―in some countries as high as 100lbs per head per year―some advertisements even proudly proclaim that their product contains no sugar.
How did sugar grow from prize to pariah? Acclaimed historian James Walvin looks at the history of our collective sweet tooth, beginning with the sugar grown by enslaved people who had been uprooted and shipped vast distances to undertake the grueling labor on plantations. The combination of sugar and slavery would transform the tastes of the Western world.
Masterfully insightful and probing, James Walvin reveals the relationship between society and sweetness over the past two centuries―and how it explains our conflicted relationship with sugar today.
8 pages of B&W photographs
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