Sugar as Modern Capitalism’s Original Sin
A new book shows its history as anything but sweet.
Could sugar be modern capitalism’s original sin? It is closely associated in public imaginations with obesity and diabetes, which affect an increasing percentage of the world’s population, as global incomes rise and globalization makes sugar ever cheaper. (In 2021, the average global price was a mere 18 cents per pound.) Less obviously, demand for alternative fuel sources has driven deforestation as sugar cane is farmed to make ethanol. And unlike some other commodity histories, like that of salt or salmon, sugar’s past is just as inglorious as its present. The exploitation of labor and land is inextricable from sugar’s past 500 years.
Could sugar be modern capitalism’s original sin? It is closely associated in public imaginations with obesity and diabetes, which affect an increasing percentage of the world’s population, as global incomes rise and globalization makes sugar ever cheaper. (In 2021, the average global price was a mere 18 cents per pound.) Less obviously, demand for alternative fuel sources has driven deforestation as sugar cane is farmed to make ethanol. And unlike some other commodity histories, like that of salt or salmon, sugar’s past is just as inglorious as its present. The exploitation of labor and land is inextricable from sugar’s past 500 years.
A new book by Ulbe Bosma, The World of Sugar: How the Sweet Stuff Transformed Our Politics, Health, and Environment Over 2,000 Years, doesn’t so much show how sugar changed the world as explore how the emergence and evolution of capitalism changed sugar—from a luxury to a commercial commodity to a consumer necessity to a protected national industry.
The World of Sugar: How the Sweet Stuff Transformed Our Politics, Health, and Environment Over 2,000 Years, Ulbe Bosma, Belknap Press, 464 pp., $35, May 2023
Refined sugar—processed from sugar cane into white crystals—was originally a luxury reserved for Eurasian and North African elites. The refining process was capital intensive and extractive. Local rulers in India, “where it all began,” Bosma writes, owned refineries, and peasant producers sold their crop to the refiners. But elites’ demand for sugar didn’t benefit the peasant producers: The buyers of the sugar crop charged 17-20 percent interest for a half-year advance. Despite the expense, refined sugar was soon being traded across Central Asia and along the Bengal River. And the lure of exporting at great profit to Persia and Arabia led to innovations in the milling process, in the organization of labor, and in the search for new markets.
In the 17th century, India’s sugar producers who sought out new markets to their east were in competition with Chinese sugar. The Sung Dynasty (960-1279) fostered sugar’s mass appeal as it became a featured part of cooking as well as medicine. Marco Polo, the 13th-century Italian traveler, recorded edible sugar sculptures in the pages of Chinese cookbooks. And Taiwan’s mills were producing around 60,000 tons of sugar a year in the early 18th century. But even with the 18th-century emergence of Brazil, Cuba, Louisiana, and Hawaii as sugar cane rivals to Taiwan and India, supply could barely keep up with demand.
The central figures of Bosma’s story are global families, the bourgeois colonial producers. The World of Sugar shows the remarkable persistence of their model, which has withstood the rise and fall of empires, dynasties, nations, and economic ideologies. In addition to sugar, these families were also cultivating political power. Take the British Lascelles family, for instance, who owned sugar plantations in Barbados from 1648 until 1975. Henry Lascelles made a fortune in London “supplying loans and mortgages to West Indian planters and slave traders.” His son, educated at the University of Cambridge, used his inheritance to buy some sugar estates “at a bargain in the wake of the London and Amsterdam bank crisis of 1772-1773” and built a fortune on the back of enslaved labor, one that allowed his descendants to marry into the British royal family.
The rise of the Fanjul brothers perfectly illustrates the dynamics of the industry. Alfonso Fanjul Estrada was the nephew of the Spanish-born Cuban sugar tycoon Manuel Rionda. He also married into another Cuban sugar dynasty. Fleeing Fidel Castro’s government in 1959, Alfonso Fanjul decided to rebuild his sugar business in Florida, where a successful experiment in a Java sugar cane variant had yielded the first “Florida Crystals” a couple of decades earlier. The Spreckels family had sold their sugar operation to the American Sugar Refining Co. in 1963, and when high-fructose corn syrup lowered the value of their competitors, the British firm Tate & Lyle became the owners. In the 1990s, when Tate & Lyle sold its refineries in favor of a focus on artificial sweeteners, the Fanjul brothers— Alfonso Fanjul’s sons—gobbled them up. Their sugar company, ASR Group, is now the world’s largest. And with that size comes political influence. ASR lobbies both U.S. political parties to keep protectionism in place to prevent Brazilian sugar from wiping out U.S. sugar production.
All this because, despite consumers’ insatiable appetite for sugar, profits have never been guaranteed. The high labor, land, and capital demands in sugar production meant that the trick for sugar entrepreneurs who hoped to make a profit in a competitive global market was in finding marginal gains—and securing government support. Tiny advantages in labor-saving or in vertical integration of the production process could make all the difference for the families investing in sugar.
One of the cost-saving advantages that sugar investors sought was in labor. Refined sugar production was relentlessly labor intensive. The 12.5 million enslaved Africans who were transported to the Americas with the support of European empires were overwhelmingly engaged in sugar production. The interconnection of sugar and slavery is particularly well known and was the subject of protests in the late 18th century that reminded consumers that sugar—still a luxury but one that was increasingly turning into a staple—was “stained with spots of human blood,” as abolitionist William Fox wrote in a 1791 pamphlet. But labor conditions barely improved with the formal abolition of enslaved labor in the mid-19th century.
The French discovery of a process to extract sugar from beets spread sugar production to cooler climates in Europe and across North America. The French had begun looking for an alternative to sugar cane in part because of the revolution in their colony of Saint-Domingue (Haiti), the largest successful revolt of enslaved workers in history. But while beet sugar was grown in Europe rather than in its colonies, it still relied on exploiting immigrant labor from the continent’s poorest regions. By the 1920s, more than 2 percent of the world’s population were laborers in sugar beet and sugar cane fields. (For comparison, 2 percent of the world’s population today would make it the ninth-largest country, between Bangladesh and Russia.) When even immigrant laborers were able to make their demands for better labor conditions heard, or when immigration restrictions reduced the number of low-wage sugar field workers, as in Hawaii during the 1940s and 1950s, mechanization was a last resort.
Ultimately, sugar investors came back again and again to the state as a protector of their industry’s profits. The ongoing search for marginal gains through new technologies, new crops, and new labor sources drove prices down for consumers but repeatedly led to problems of overproduction in the global market as producers tried to gain a larger and larger market share. Mercantilism in the 18th century, protectionism in the 19th century, and cartelization in the 20th century were all attempts to control the oversupply problem for sugar investors. The only way to keep the bottom from completely falling out of the market was to find ways to fix prices. In the second half of the 20th century, as imperial protection was replaced by new trading blocs and ideas about the global movement of commodities, capital, and labor, attempts to create a global regulatory system for sugar failed, Bosma argues, because of the “premise that sugar was a global commodity, when governments were increasingly treating it as a national staple.”
Part of this confusion has been the lack of a coherent national position on whether sugar is a national strategic industry worth protecting or whether protecting cheap consumer staples is more important. Tate & Lyle, the British sugar giant whose refineries are now owned by ASR Group, supported Brexit in the hope that its access to tropical sugar cane would allow it to overtake its rival Associated British Foods’ protected domestic beet sugar if European Union-imposed tariffs and quotas were eliminated.
One thing is for certain: The cartelization of sugar and the protective tariffs for national sugar production have pushed prices up for consumers in the past few decades. When this happened before, in the mid-19th century, the British campaign to end protective tariffs on imperial sugar in the 1840s helped consumers during a cost-of-living crisis that was putting unwanted pressure on industry to increase workers’ wages. Sugar—in tea especially—had become a crucial part of British diets, helping to add vital calories to get workers through the day. Industrial and consumer lobbyists worked together for an end to protection that was guaranteeing profits for the British sugar barons. But this decision allowed British consumers to purchase cheaper sugar grown by enslaved laborers in Cuba and Brazil.
The incoherence of national sugar protection becomes all the more frustrating when faced with the ecological effects of sugar cultivation. Global sugar production, Bosma writes, “causes so much collateral environmental damage that comparisons with mining operations come to mind.” National protection of sugar investors, alongside concerns about reliance on foreign oil production, has led states such as Brazil to heavily subsidize ethanol production, resulting in more carbon emissions and incentivizing yet more investment in converting new land to sugar agriculture, even as sugar producers in other countries struggle to find a market for their own sugar. Sugar smuggling is surprisingly rampant, as states such as Senegal try to protect their own industries while their consumers turn to cheaper imports.
The World of Sugar shows the globalized tangle of interests that capitalism creates among consumers, producers, investors, labor, national governments, and transnational organizations. As Bosma writes, “every change for the better [for one of those constituencies] created new problems and contradictions” for the others. Sugar offers a bitter reminder of the enduring tensions between the complexity of national interests and the interests of capital.
Books are independently selected by FP editors. FP earns an affiliate commission on anything purchased through links to Amazon.com on this page.
Bronwen Everill is a lecturer in history and fellow of Gonville & Caius College at the University of Cambridge. Most recently, she is the author of Not Made by Slaves: Ethical Capitalism in the Age of Abolition. Twitter: @bronweneverill
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