Sweetness and Power

Mintz’s book is about sugar, but it is still a key work in the history of coffee. It served as one of the major inspirations for my own study of the reception of coffee in early modern Britain. Sugar was a key ingredient in coffee by the later seventeenth century and would become a staple in the hot drinks consumed by the English working class. Mintz shows us how this symbiotic relationship between sugar and coffee developed, and he places the construction of an Atlantic slave system and the industrial revolution at the heart of his story. This is a… show more.

Sweetness and Power is a classic in world foodways, and still holds up against any book for its depth and complexity as a work of fascinating social history, anthropology, and commodity history. Although its main subject is the global trade and symbolism of sugar, I include it here because sugar makes molasses and molasses makes rum, and all three items were part of the original “triangular trade” connecting early colonial power networks of North America, Europe, and Africa. Mintz is particularly good at analyzing early images of sugar in their cultural contexts. (If you haven’t seen the elaborate “sugarwork” on… show more.

This book pioneered the blending of anthropology, sociology, and history to explore the impact of a single commodity on the history of the world. Europeans, Africans, and Americans transformed sugar from a relatively rare luxury into one of the most widely available goods and a staple of modern life. This sweetness, as Mintz explains, came at a heavy price—the destruction of indigenous peoples and landscapes, slavery, and the health of the consumer.