Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (1986) is a comprehensive study by American anthropologist Sidney Mintz about the history of Caribbean sugar production, the relationship between sugar-producing colonial islands and the English mainland, and sugar’s role in the emergence of a global market alongside the rise of industrial capitalism. Mintz maintained a lifelong interest in the subject and performed anthropological fieldwork in Puerto Rico on a sugar plantation as a graduate student. In this work, Mintz emphasizes the changing meanings of sugar for different classes of consumers at different historical moments and contributes to a field of study that the author describes as an “anthropology of the present” (xxvii).

Summary

In the first chapter, Mintz discusses examples of African tribal food practices that illustrate food meanings for people living in pre-industrial societies. While these practices would likely strike 20th-century Western consumers as intense or difficult to understand, the author establishes that food meanings do not typically emerge out of any intrinsic qualities in food products themselves; they depend on pre-existing cultural contexts and their interactions with the particularities of individuals and their group associations.

Chapter 2 focuses on the history of sugar production from its Persian and Indian roots, through the Arab conquests that brought sugar and a taste for sweetness to Europe, and finally to the plantation systems responsible for Caribbean sugar production for English consumers since the 17th century. Mintz outlines the mercantile arrangement between England and its colonies, emphasizing European reliance on forced labor to prepare sugar cane for export to the English metropolis for refinement and consumption.

Chapter 3 concerns sugar products’ various uses and meanings. Mintz contextualizes the unfamiliar (at least for modern Western consumers) uses of sugar as a spice and medicine as well as the common use of sugar as sweetener and food ingredient. Historically, members of different classes have taken up and interpreted sugar differently at different times; the royal family and upper classes adopted sugar as an exotic status symbol as early as the 16th century, and poor working Britons became reliant upon sugar as a daily necessity in the 19th century, especially as a sweetener mixed with tea.

The rise of capitalism and free trade policies changed the uses and meaning of sugar for working-class Britons, a phenomenon explained in Chapter 4. Like most structural changes in society, these changes unequally benefited particular social groups. For example, factory owners were pleased about the profits resulting from the heightened demand and lower cost of sugar in the 19th century. Even the average working person’s obsession with tea and sugar ultimately benefited business owners who could rely on the stimulating effect of these substances to increase workplace productivity.

In the final chapter, Mintz describes the state of 20th-century meal-taking. The triumph of sugar in the West is clear in its constant presence in the majority of processed snack foods, for qualities including its sweetness and contribution to food texture and its preservative effect. The author laments the decline of the traditional communal meal; there has been a desocializing effect as individual periodic snacking replaced the joys and struggles of family gatherings around a homemade meal prepared by one person in the family kitchen.