in 1963, and when high-fructose corn syrup lowered the value of their competitors, the British firm Tate & Lyle became the owners. The Spreckels family had sold their sugar operation to the American Sugar Refining Co. 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. He also married into another Cuban sugar dynasty. Alfonso Fanjul Estrada was the nephew of the Spanish-born Cuban sugar tycoon Manuel Rionda. The rise of the Fanjul brothers perfectly illustrates the dynamics of the industry. 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. Take the British Lascelles family, for instance, who owned sugar plantations in Barbados from 1648 until 1975. In addition to sugar, these families were also cultivating political power. 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. The central figures of Bosma’s story are global families, the bourgeois colonial producers. 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. And Taiwan’s mills were producing around 60,000 tons of sugar a year in the early 18th century. Marco Polo, the 13th-century Italian traveler, recorded edible sugar sculptures in the pages of Chinese cookbooks. The Sung Dynasty (960-1279) fostered sugar’s mass appeal as it became a featured part of cooking as well as medicine. In the 17th century, India’s sugar producers who sought out new markets to their east were in competition with Chinese sugar. 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. Despite the expense, refined sugar was soon being traded across Central Asia and along the Bengal River. 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. Local rulers in India, “where it all began,” Bosma writes, owned refineries, and peasant producers sold their crop to the refiners. The refining process was capital intensive and extractive. Refined sugar-processed from sugar cane into white crystals-was originally a luxury reserved for Eurasian and North African elites. 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 The cover of the book World of Sugar by Ulbe Bosma.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |