Page 69 - BBC History - September 2017

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expensive. Yet despite all this, as Walvin
explains, sugar has one enormously
alluring attraction: it satisfies our
seemingly innate desire for sweet tastes.
What’s more, sugar satisfies that desire
more completely than any other natural
form of sweetness ever can. But the
satisfaction that sugar provides comes
at a terrible cost, both to those who
produce it and those who consume it.
In clipped, to-the-point prose Walvin
catalogues the strange and, on the face
of it, unlikely story of how an Asian
luxury product, traditionally used in
tiny amounts, and only by the very
richest, became a staple food for billions
of people.
Sugar changed world history more
profoundly that any other crop. It
created the economic rationale for the
Atlantic slave trade and for the African
wars and chaos that fuelled it. The
importation of sugar cane transformed
the landscapes of the Caribbean islands
and great swathes of the southern US.
As billions of Europeans and Ameri-
cans became accustomed – or perhaps
A wood engraving of enslaved more accurately, addicted – to sugar, the
people working on a West Indian battle to meet demand transformed
sugar plantation, c1754. James world demographics.
Walvin traces the worldwide impact
of our insatiable desire for sugar We’re familiar with the terrible story
of how millions of enslaved Africans
were trafficked to the Caribbean, the
Not so sweet stuff US and Brazil, but the insatiable global
demand for sugar also led to the
migrations of other groups. In the
MAGAZINE
DAVID OLUSOGA admires a new work tracing the history CHOICE aftermath of abolition, in the British
of our damaging love affair with sugar West Indies the plantation owners
invented what became known as the
Sugar: The World Corrupted, and brings it disturbingly into the Indian indentured labour system, in
from Slavery to Obesity present day. which thousands of poor Indians were
by James Walvin Walvin, a world-renowned historian shipped from their homeland to the
of slavery and the Caribbean, begins his Caribbean, South America and Fiji.
Robinson, 352 pages, £18.99
global history of sugar in the place The profitability of sugar production
The idea of exploring where most of us begin our relationship also inspired American producers to
the past through the with the stuff: the sweet shops of ship Japanese peasants to plantations
history of a single crop childhood memory. If sugar is a guilty
has been around for a pleasure then it is one in which almost
while. What is striking every one of us indulges on a daily basis. Walvin catalogues
about James Walvin’s The unstoppable march of sugar, over
new book is that, while the centuries and across the world, of how an Asian luxury
focusing solely on course raises the question: why? After product became
GETTY IMAGES past. Rather, it takes the story of the successive processes of refinement a staple food for
all, cane sugar is difficult to grow and
sugar, it does not restrict itself to the
and clarification required to produce
perhaps the most transformative and
billions of people
destructive boom-crop of all time
edible sugar are protracted and

BBC History Magazine 69