Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History is a
nonfiction book originally published in 1985 by Sidney Wilfred Mintz (November 16,
1922€“December 27, 2015). Mintz was a distinguished anthropologist whose scholarship focused on
cultural anthropology and anthropology of food. He did extensive work on the Caribbean as a
region. Throughout his career, he was particularly concerned with how slavery and forced labor
in the New World differed from ancient slavery due to their relationships with the new economic
system of global capitalism. His study of sugar continued this theme by showing how the
conditions of the working lives of slaves in the Caribbean responded to capitalism and how they
also provided sites of resistance to it. When they became freed, they exhibited creative forms
of collectivism.
More importantly, though, he presents a long and complex
history of sugar, examining the factors that transformed it from a rare luxury to a staple of
our diets. He suggests...
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