Is Sweetness really that powerful?

The thesis of Sweetness and Power by Sidney Mintz is that the consumption of sugar by the Europeans (especially the English) changed the history of capitalism, industry and culture.   The book is narrative in style.  It integrates anthropology (culture and society) in with economics, a little sociology, and politics and of course told through history.  Mintz extensively refers to cookbooks to bolster his arguments on the changing importance sugar.  He obviously researched government documents, trade and colonial records.  He even says at the conclusion of his introduction “Though I do not accept uncritically the dictum that anthropology must become history or be nothing at all, I believe that without history its explanatory power is seriously compromised."  He goes on to say "Social phenomena are by their nature historical, which is to say that the relationships among events in one "moment" can never be abstracted from their past and future setting."  

Mintz’ ... used a historical materialist approach which held in tension the dialectical interaction between large processes of capitalist expansion and their local cultural responses. (Erika Kuever, 2006).  Its ambitious task was to develop a cultural, economic, and social history of sugar which revealed the complex way in which sugar production was connected to the development and organization of slavery and capitalist expansion. Mintz used anthropological methods and insights on historical texts in his analysis of the growth of sugar consumption and its ties to social status among the European classes.

Although influenced by a Marxist perspective, Sweetness and Power represented an inversion of historical materialism as it had been traditionally formulated. Mintz argued that the social as well as the economic importance of tea and sugar in eighteenth century Great Britain shaped British colonial policy, not the other way around. The notion that consumption could drive change would later gain favor in theories of the role of the “new consumer” in the construction and persistence of global commodity chains.

 

As an anthropologist, Mintz looks at the cultural phenomena of taste.  Using his experience in the field in the Caribbean, he starts the reader on a tour of the development of human taste, generally based on culture. He then moves to other worldwide "primitive" cultures to describe what is a "staple" food (the carbohydrate) was and what a secondary foods were (spice and/or sweetener).  He asks "How do a particular people become firmly habituated to a large, regular and dependable supply of sweetness"?  Is it individual choice or societal underpinnings that drive taste? Mintz goes into detail as to the meaning of sugar - his inner anthropologist is showing by examining the sources of supply, the chronology of uses and the combination of sugars with other foods.

He states that some scholars agree that plantations were "the favored child of capitalism," and other historians quarrel with this assessment.  A few questions stemmed from this debate.  Did sugar plantations operate within capitalism or start the trend towards capitalism? What drove the market for sugar production or consumption?  Would the world of the bitter drinks (tea, coffee and chocolate), thus a maturing world trade market, have been stunted or have been undeveloped if sugar was not in the picture?  With that in mind would a modern English society and the industrial revolution have come much later or developed in an emaciated was without the power and identity sugar fueled? 

I think the close of the book seemed to slip away, entering into the realm modern health and dietary issues (more sugar tied to prepared foods = more fat) and leaving history.  I think his conclusion is that sugar is so intertwined in modern life - it allows us to be modern - worldwide.   A bold an interesting concept, but a hard conclusion to swallow.