Power: How it to wield it and how to gain more.

Like other posters have mentioned, Mintz compares Caribbean slavery and free labor in Europe, their importance in the commodities trade and how they were bound together in production and consumption. They were tied together in “the creation of a commodity that would permit taste and the symbolic faculty to be exercised." (183) This line of reasoning is one of the most intriguing. Mintz traces the use of sugar in five specific ways: “as a spice, a decorative item, medicine, sweetener and preservative”  (79)  and in trying to figure out the transformation of a luxury item into a necessity used by all classes he takes a route that many historians don’t use. Instead of looking at sugar from one angle whether it be slavery, imperialism, capitalism, industrialization, etc and instead of looking at it from a Caribbean, African or European point of view, he uses all of these views and angles to produce a work that drives the question 'how did our society become so dependent on sugar?' Has it always been this way or have our tastes as a society changed over the centuries? As he says, he “hopes to explain what sugar reveals about a wider world.” (xxiv)

His most personally relevant chapter, and funnily enough, the most powerful and impactful, is the fourth chapter, Power. In his introduction he says that “one cannot simply assume that everyone has an infinite desire for sweetness” and yet in the same paragraph he says “it is nevertheless possible to show how some people and groups unfamiliar with sugar…gradually became users of it – even, quite rapidly, daily users.” (xxv) In his second full paragraph on page 180 he argues that sugar was one of the first luxury products that was transformed into a “proletarian necessity”. How did it become a necessity for the lower classes? Sugar was a product that provided power and those who wielded it had to find ways to enhance their power. He argues that they did so by conditioning public tastes by using “sugar and other drug foods, by provisioning, sating – and indeed, drugging, farm and factory workers, sharply reduced the overall cost of creating and reproducing the metropolitan proletariat.”(180)  He goes on to say that the “readiness of working people to work harder in order to be able to earn – and thus consume – was a crucial feature of the evolution of modern patterns of eating.” (180)He argues that the increase in the demand and consumption of sugar was a consequence of changes in the lives of the proletariat “which made new forms of food and eating conceivable” (181) something it wasn’t before.  Sugar and those products whose popularity grew thanks to it like coffee, tea and chocolate, were a representation of the growing freedom of the lower classes because they had the choice to elevate their own standard of living. However, Mintz accurately points out that these freedoms were limited because they were in fact chosen for them by those who wielded true power and those choices were a set few “within a range of possibilities laid down by forces over which those who were, supposedly, freely choosing exercised no control at all.” (183) Once the magnitude of sugar as a means of gaining bureaucratic, mercantile and industrial wealth was realised, maintaining control over it became even more important. (185) That desire to wield more power is one explanation for what led to sugar's increased production and consumption.