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Title: Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History by Sidney Wilfred Mintz ISBN: 0-670-68702-2 Publisher: Viking Press Pub. Date: May, 1985 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $20.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.5 (12 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Good case study on commodites and development
Comment: I found this book very interesting as I read it for a development anthropology class. Mintz gives a detailed and informative history of the development of sugar as a commodity from the colonial age to the present. Coming from an anthropological point of view, he examines the cultural impact of sugar production on the Carribean nations that produce it. He also displays how British organization of the industry in their colonies created an increasing demand for sugar.
Rating: 3
Summary: interesting
Comment: Mintz's book is a bit hard to understand because he approaches the history of sugar from an intensely anthropological perspective. Basically, he studies the meaning associated with sugar (especially in England) during its centuries-long journey across time and economic class. Sugar began as an upper-class commodity. To have sugar displayed one's wealth and status. It was even endowed with magical and medicinal properties. Through colonialism, however, sugar was supplied to England cheaply and it became an daily part of the lower class English diet. It lost its high-status connotations and became a common day product. Mintz also studies the meanings sugar had in literature and speech, and even its effects today. This book is a worthwhile endeavor, and for anthropology, actually almost a fun read.
Rating: 4
Summary: How has sugar moved you
Comment: Mintz carefully places implications that sugar has caused human nature and culture to change and the end of his work, after a brief overview of all that we have been doing with sugar or rather sugar has been doing with us for the past 1000 years. MintzÕs work is divided into 5 sections: Food, Sociality and Sugar; Production; Consumption; Power; and finally Eating and Being. Mintz really hopes to build a base of facts to reveal to us how we as a people have identified with and sought to consume sugar over the past 1000 years and how that has affected us.
Sugar is always a labor intensive project, from the mill, to the distillery, to the storehouse and all the laborers it takes to run these places. Mintz discusses how this need for labor caused the British to look to Africa and other places to find cheap or free labor. With sugar came slavery, and those slaves who did the plantation work generally worked in the Caribbean while the product they created was delivered to British aristocracy.
In the mid-1700Õs sugar is made cheaper and more accessible to the lower classes and at this point shifts in its purpose to sweeten food. And as outlined by the upper statistics, sugar only continues to grow in demand. It is interesting that because sugar started as something precious and hard to come by, when it later became more cheap and accessible to the working class it still seemed to uphold that Òrareness.Ó The working class felt like they were increasing in freedom and status as they started to consume sugar. Sugar and like products Òrepresented the growing freedom of ordinary folks,Ó yet did Sugar really mean freedom?
In analysis of MintzÕs thesis I am most convinced that sugar is a powerful force that has moved us historically and today. Sugar production has not only caused the physical relocation, its consumption has caused us to form class and psychological identity around it; today we still live with the power of sweetness in our everyday life, most of the time not giving it a second thought.
Sugar took slaves from Africa to the new world in America. It created identity in the aristocracy and later a manufactured sense of freedom among the working class. Today it continues to grow in its use across the world and has become an everyday commodity. The more fast paced life becomes in the 21st century, the more consumers are drawn to pre-prepared processed foods consistently with high contents of sugar. Sucrose production separated African families in the 1700s, brought class distinction to EuropeÕs families during its shift to capitalism, and now it severs families from eating together at the dinner table with its processed and fast foods. With these implications either we allow sugar to keep moving us, or we move it off the table, out of the cupboard and dump it into Boston Harbor.
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Title: Bittersweet: The Story of Sugar by Peter Macinnis ISBN: 1865086576 Publisher: Allen & Unwin Pub. Date: 01 May, 2003 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom : Excursions into Eating, Power, and the Past by Sidney Mintz ISBN: 0807046299 Publisher: Beacon Press Pub. Date: 14 August, 1997 List Price(USD): $18.00 |
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Title: Food and Culture: A Reader by Carole Counihan, Penny Van Esterik, Penny Van Esterik ISBN: 0415917107 Publisher: Routledge Pub. Date: August, 1997 List Price(USD): $34.95 |
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Title: Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World by Mike Davis ISBN: 1859843824 Publisher: Verso Books Pub. Date: July, 2002 List Price(USD): $20.00 |
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Title: Tastes of Paradise : A Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and Intoxicants by Wolfgang Schivelbusch ISBN: 067974438X Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 29 June, 1993 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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