Sugar

The human affinity for sweet-tasting things appears to be universal. Nonetheless, the consumption of sweeteners, most notably in the form of processed sugar, has not remained constant over human history. Broadly speaking, per capita sugar consumption has increased significantly over time from its first documented usage in the early first millennium BC in the Bengal region of northeastern India to our sugar-saturated present. But this rise has not been a steady one, nor has it always moved at the same pace in different parts of the world. Indeed, the meteoric increase in sugar consumption in the late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has been heralded as [Page 1402]a global “epidemic” by many nutritionists. Scholars who have studied the history and the economics of this phenomenon have begun to question whether a surge of this magnitude might be a supply-driven response or if it is reasonable to posit a fundamental shift in people's tastes.

All plants store sugars (monosaccharide molecules) in some form or another, but the most common source of processed sugar for human consumption, at least until the mid-nineteenth century, was a tropical grass known commonly as sugarcane. When steamed and pressed, it yields a viscous, dark brown syrup that can be eaten raw or be further refined. The application of more heat as well as beating the syrup produces, among other products, small white crystals that are then easily added to food, drink, or medicine, or can be rendered directly into confections made entirely or mostly of sugar. In the twentieth century, production of sugar from cane, which is a water-intensive crop, was overtaken by increased reliance on sugar beets for the manufacture of refined sugar and on corn syrup for the sweetening of already processed foods. Other sweeteners are derived from maple syrup, honey, and some fruits, but all of these sources are small compared with the sugar suitable for refining. It is this latter sugar that is the focus of this entry.

By necessity of geography, all sugar production from cane before the European age of exploration was limited to those parts of South Asia and East Asia with tropical climates. Sugarcane began to migrate slowly from its home in the subcontinent to the most southerly parts of China in approximately the third century BC, but it did not really spread widely until the later centuries of the first millennium AD. Urban expansion (perhaps in conjunction with the spread of Buddhism) in the eleventh and twelfth centuries led to a rapid rise in sugar consumption. Then, despite the tremendous increase in the Chinese production of sugar for overseas markets across the early modern period (sixteenth to eighteenth centuries), domestic consumption did not begin to grow appreciably again until the late-twentieth century. It is only recently that per capita consumption in China has even attained a third of what it is in the United States and the countries of the European Union.

Aside from the current policy concerns about the global health implications of the seemingly ever-increasing consumption of sugar, the other issue that looms large over the history of sugar consumption is its strong association with the slave plantation economies of the European colonial powers, a system not fully dismantled until the close of the nineteenth century, and with lingering implications for postcolonial economies to the present. It has long been assumed that sugar cultivation and production, at least on a scale amenable to mass consumption, was feasible only in the context of viciously exploited labor. Recent work on Chinese sugar production, however, shows that sugar cultivation and processing for a global market could be successfully carried out by smallholders as well. Chinese peasant production in the mid-seventeenth century managed to supply the export market alone with ten to fifteen million pounds of surplus sugar annually, in comparison to a total production figure for Portuguese plantations in Brazil of forty-five million pounds over the same period. Sugar was consistently the third most important Chinese export until the end of the nineteenth century, just behind tea and silk in both volume and value. This suggests that plantation slavery, although successful at increasing supply, was not the sole prerequisite for doing so. The one limitation that seems to have been imposed by the Chinese system of small-scale peasant cultivation, where peasants were also growing their own subsistence, was on peasant consumption itself. By the nineteenth century, the British working class was able to consume both more sugar and tea than the typical Chinese producer of either crop. The real beneficiaries then, of the sweat of both Chinese peasants and Caribbean and South American slaves, were the laboring and middle classes in Europe for whom relatively, and then absolutely, cheap sugar came to be an increasingly important part of both the diet and the practices of everyday life.

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