Sweetness and Power

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.