The definitive 2,500-year history of sugar and its human costs, from
its little-known origins as a luxury good in Asia to worldwide
environmental devastation and the obesity pandemic.
For most of history, humans did without refined sugar. After all, it
serves no necessary purpose in our diets, and extracting it from plants
takes hard work and ingenuity. Granulated sugar was first produced in
India around the sixth century BC, yet for almost 2,500 years afterward
sugar remained marginal in the diets of most people. Then, suddenly, it
was everywhere. How did sugar find its way into almost all the food we
eat, fostering illness and ecological crisis along the way?
The World of Sugar begins with the earliest evidence of sugar
production. Through the Middle Ages, traders brought small quantities of
the precious white crystals to rajahs, emperors, and caliphs. But after
sugar crossed the Mediterranean to Europe, where cane could not be
cultivated, demand spawned a brutal quest for supply. European cravings
were satisfied by enslaved labor; two-thirds of the 12.5 million
Africans taken across the Atlantic were destined for sugar plantations.
By the twentieth century, sugar was a major source of calories in diets
across Europe and North America.
Sugar transformed life on every continent, creating and destroying whole
cultures through industrialization, labor migration, and changes in
diet. Sugar made fortunes, corrupted governments, and shaped the
policies of technocrats. And it provoked freedom cries that rang with
world-changing consequences. In Ulbe Bosma's definitive telling, to
understand sugar's past is to glimpse the origins of our own world of
corn syrup and ethanol and begin to see the threat that a not-so-simple
commodity poses to our bodies, our environment, and our communities.
