Book # 20

Sugar Changed the World:

A Story of Magic, Spice, Slavery, Freedom, and Science

by Marc Aronson and Marina Budhos

This wasn't the book I planned on reading next, but I was in the library and it caught my eye. So I thought I'd give it a lookie. And it was interesting. Lots of stuff I never knew.

To start out with, both authors have ancestors who were part of the history of sugar. Marc's distant uncle was a serf in Europe during the 1800's. At the time Britain controlled most of the sugar plantations in the Caribbean and the sea routes to Europe and so their rivals were looking for new ways to create sugar. Someone discovered that you could get sugar from beets. His relative, as the story goes, was an intelligent and remarkable man, who discovered how to give raw beet sugar sparkling colors. And although he was a serf, which was only a step above a slave, he made a lot of money from his invention and was able to buy his family a better life.

Marina's family story in sugar began when slavery was abolished in Britain in 1833. The British needed to find new cheap labor. So they turned to India. Marina's family were poor in India and so they went to Guyana to work on the sugar plantations and look for a better life. Marina's great-grandfather was chosen to be a "sirdar" in charge of the field hands. When his contract was over, he purchased land and prospered.

The book begins by describing "The Age of Honey" which was the sweetener before sugar was discovered. I liked this quote: "In the age of honey, people tasted the neighborhood where they lived. From a light orange blossom flavor that is almost a perfume, to dark buckwheat with a hint of soil and grain, honey tastes like local flowers. And that was only part of its appeal. Bees work very hard, and it is easy to see that a queen bee is surrounded by worker bees that protect and serve her. To the ancients, a beehive was perfect, for it brought a gift of sweetness to people while being a mirror of their lives--a king or queen served by loyal subjects....Honey was a way of living: people ate foods grown near them, did the same work as their parents and ancestors, and owed honor and respect to kings, nobles, those above them."

Cane sugar can be traced back to the island of New Guinea. The plant spread north to the Asian mainland. Polynesian seafarers took canes with them as they sailed from island to island and cane reached Hawaii around AD 1100.

India provides us with the first written record of sugar. It was used in religious and magical ceremonies. The word candy comes from the ancient Indian language Sanskrit. The word for "a piece of sugar" is khanda. Sugar had another use in India, it was considered medicine. "Today we say, a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down. But from ancient times until quite recently, sugar itself was a medicine, a means of healing."

Hmmmm......interesting. I'd love to see some modern studies on that!

The book then describes the intensive labor necessary to process cane into sugar. Not a pretty picture. There were two problems with processing sugar. Time and Location. Cut cane begins to dry out and turns woody if not into the boiling vat within 48 hours. Also  a great deal of wood to burn was needed to keep the vats boiling. Not many places in the world offer rich lands that can grow cane, are near water so that the sugar can be shipped to distant lands, and has plentiful trees to be cut and used for fuel. 

The plantation was primarily  invented to grow and process sugar. "On a regular farm there may be cows, pigs and chickens; fields of grain; orchards filled with fruit--many different kinds of food to eat or sell. By contrast, the plantation had only one purpose: to create a single product that could be grown, ground, boiled, dried, and sold to distant markets. Since one cannot live on sugar, the crop grown on plantations could not even feed the people who harvested it. Never before in human history had farms been run this way..."

Spain and Portugal were competing with other European countries and with the Muslims to explore the coast of Africa and find a sea route to Asia. Spanish and Portuguese sailors conquered the Canary Islands and Azores and established sugar plantations there ,staffed with slaves purchased from nearby Africa. "One sailor came to know these islands particularly well because he traded in white gold--sugar. And then, as he set off on his second voyage across the sea to what he thought was Asia, he carried sugar cane plants from Gomera, one of the Canary Islands, with him on his ship. His name was Christopher Columbus."

The book then begins to talk about the slaves used to work the plantations. Between 1701 and 1810, 252,500 enslaved African were brought to Barbados, an island that occupies only 166 square miles. In that same time, 662,400 Africans were taken to Jamaica. Thus sugar drove more than 900,000 people into slavery and those were just two of the sugar islands. By 1753, British ships were taking an average of 34,250 slaves from Africa every year, and by 1768, that number had reached 53,100. "Scientists have shown that people all over the world must learn to like salty tastes, sour tastes, mixed tastes. But from the moment we are born we crave sweetness. Cane sugar was the first product in human history that perfectly satisfied that desire. And the bitter lives of the enslaved Africans produced so much sugar that pure sweetness began to spread around the world."

"Day after day, week after week, month after month, the cane was cut, hauled to the mill and fed through the rollers. The mills kept going as long as there was cane to grind--the season varied between four and ten months, depending on local growing conditions. A visitor who came to Brazil in 1630 described the scene: 'People the color of the very night, working briskly and moaning at the same time without a moment of peace or rest, whoever sees all the confused and noisy machinery...will say that this indeed is the image of Hell' ".

The death rate on the plantations was very high. "Though we often think of slavery as a problem peculiar to the United States, only 4 percent of the slaves taken from Africa were brought to North America--which means 96 percent went to the Caribbean, Brazil, and the rest of South America to work with sugar. The slave population in North America grew over time as parents lived long enough to have children. Some 500,000 slaves were brought here, and there were 4 million enslaved African Americans at the time of Emancipation. But on the sugar islands, while more than 2 million people were brought over from Africa, there were only 670,000 at Emancipation. Sugar, with its demand for relentless labor, was a killer."

The next chapters dealt with the human fight for freedom, both for the black and the white. Americans protested the sugar act set upon them by England, Africans revolted on the sugar islands and in South America, the English began to see the blood in the sugar they used every day. Thomas Clarkson, Olaudah Equiano, William Willberforce were just a few of the many who fought to abolish slavery in England. The cry of freedom began to sound throughout the world. The French revolution, the American revolution, the American civil war. The revolutions fought by the slaves throughout the world. The book even talked about Ghandi and his work for freedom in South Africa and then in India. Ghandi was the first to use the idea of passive resistance for a mass movement. 

This is the second to last paragraph of the book..." Sugar turned human beings into property, yet sugar led people to reject the idea that any person can be owned by another. Sugar murdered millions of people, and yet it gave the voiceless a way to speak. Sugar crushed people, and yet it was because of sugar that Ghandi began his experiment in truth--so that every individual could free him or herself. Only sugar--the sweetness we all crave--could drive people to be so cruel, and to combat all forms of cruelty. The cravings for sugar took us from that ancient time when people were defined by the work of their ancestors to our modern world--the one Ghandi led us to see, in which each individual is valued as human. Though terrible conditions for sugar workers still exist in places such as the Dominican Republic, and cane sugar has been replaced by other sweeteners invented in the age of science, this one substance forever marked our history."....

Until next time ;o)