In the article Commodity Histories Bruce Robbins says that anthropologist Sidney Mintz’s book Sweetness and Power finds a rare balance of sympathy between the widely separated producers and the consumers of sugar; a balance that eludes many other commodity histories.  So I began the Mintz book expecting this balance, but what I found initially was a fascination with sugar that seemed to be fully approving of the commodity.  Mintz’s introduction tells us that world production has never fallen more than a decade at a time for five centuries and that it is the most remarkable upward production curve in the world market. Of all the colonially-produced stimulants or drug-foods in the world, sugar has “always been the most important,” he says.  We’re drawn in by this hagiographic attitude because we like sugar too, and we can identify with a fascination for this commodity.  Like Mintz at the beginning of the book, I had not speculated on the interconnectedness between makers and consumers, despite daily contact with sucrose. 

But by the end of the book, once we see how sugar began as a luxury for the rich and then percolated down social systems to become ubiquitous, Mintz changes his view; sugar has become bad – bad for the slave or indentured servant-producers who suffered through the harsh pseudo-factory conditions required to refine sugar, and bad for the British working-class consumers.  The English proletarians whose penchant for sweets was acquired “early and depressingly well” (my emphasis) eventually had “sugar pumped into every crevice of their diet.”  The French, who did not succumb to sugar’s malevolent pull, maintain a cuisine that Mintz describes as “excellent,” whereas the British sugar-laden diet produced “damaged” cooking.  And it went around the world.  Much as Marx describes the insalubrious imperialistic projects of the bourgeoisie, Mintz explains that sugar, like a disease, “penetrated,” (and ruined, one presumed) “one cuisine after another....”

 Joseph’s comments below might shed some light on the attitude shift Mintz elucidates.  If Mintz is blaming sugar, coupled with tea or other goods, for promoting the slave trade in the colonies and pushing people (or “drugging them”) into the industrial workforce in the motherland, this may explain how the early charm of sugar can shift to an uneasy regard of a malevolent commodity.  But I think Mintz's real distaste is with the political supporters and promoters of the commodity more than with the fascinating commodity itself.