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The definitive 2,500-year history of sugar and its human costs,
from its little-known origins as a luxury good in Asia to worldwide
environmental devastation and the obesity pandemic. For most of
history, humans did without refined sugar. After all, it serves no
necessary purpose in our diets, and extracting it from plants takes
hard work and ingenuity. Granulated sugar was first produced in
India around the sixth century BC, yet for almost 2,500 years
afterward sugar remained marginal in the diets of most people.
Then, suddenly, it was everywhere. How did sugar find its way into
almost all the food we eat, fostering illness and ecological crisis
along the way? The World of Sugar begins with the earliest evidence
of sugar production. Through the Middle Ages, traders brought small
quantities of the precious white crystals to rajahs, emperors, and
caliphs. But after sugar crossed the Mediterranean to Europe, where
cane could not be cultivated, demand spawned a brutal quest for
supply. European cravings were satisfied by enslaved labor;
two-thirds of the 12.5 million Africans taken across the Atlantic
were destined for sugar plantations. By the twentieth century,
sugar was a major source of calories in diets across Europe and
North America. Sugar transformed life on every continent, creating
and destroying whole cultures through industrialization, labor
migration, and changes in diet. Sugar made fortunes, corrupted
governments, and shaped the policies of technocrats. And it
provoked freedom cries that rang with world-changing consequences.
In Ulbe Bosma’s definitive telling, to understand sugar’s past
is to glimpse the origins of our own world of corn syrup and
ethanol and begin to see the threat that a not-so-simple commodity
poses to our bodies, our environment, and our communities.
This book examines the role of mercantile networks in linking Asian
economies to the global economy. It contains fourteen contributions
on East, Southeast and South Asia covering the period from 1750 to
the present.
Island Southeast Asia was once a thriving region, and its products
found eager consumers from China to Europe. Today, the Philippines,
Indonesia, and Malaysia are primarily exporters of their surplus of
cheap labor, with more than ten million emigrants from the region
working all over the world. How did a prosperous region become a
peripheral one? In The Making of a Periphery, Ulbe Bosma draws on
new archival sources from the colonial period to the present to
demonstrate how high demographic growth and a long history of
bonded labor relegated Southeast Asia to the margins of the global
economy. Bosma finds that the region's contact with colonial
trading powers during the early nineteenth century led to improved
health care and longer life spans as the Spanish and Dutch colonial
governments began to vaccinate their subjects against smallpox. The
resulting abundance of workers ushered in extensive migration
toward emerging labor-intensive plantation and mining belts.
European powers exploited existing patron-client labor systems with
the intermediation of indigenous elites and non-European agents to
develop extractive industries and plantation agriculture. Bosma
shows that these trends shaped the postcolonial era as these
migration networks expanded far beyond the region. A wide-ranging
comparative study of colonial commodity production and labor
regimes, The Making of a Periphery is of major significance to
international economic history, colonial and postcolonial history,
and Southeast Asian history.
Sugar was the single most valuable bulk commodity traded
internationally before oil became the world's prime resource. From
the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, cane sugar production was
pre-eminent in the Atlantic Islands, the Caribbean, and Brazil.
Subsequently, cane sugar industries in the Americas were
transformed by a fusion of new and old forces of production, as the
international sugar economy incorporated production areas in Asia,
the Pacific, and Africa. Sugar's global economic importance and its
intimate relationship with colonialism offer an important context
for probing the nature of colonial societies. This book questions
some major assumptions about the nexus between sugar production and
colonial societies in the Caribbean and Southeast Asia, especially
in the second (post-1800) colonial era.
These transfers of sovereignty resulted in extensive, unforeseen
movements of citizens and subjects to their former countries. The
phenomenon of postcolonial migration affected not only European
nations, but also the United States, Japan and post-Soviet Russia.
The political and societal reactions to the unexpected and often
unwelcome migrants was significant to postcolonial migrants'
identity politics and how these influenced metropolitan debates
about citizenship, national identity and colonial history. The
contributors explore the historical background and contemporary
significance of these migrations and discuss the ethnic and class
composition and the patterns of integration of the migrant
population.
Sugar was the single most valuable bulk commodity traded
internationally before oil became the world's prime resource. From
the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, cane sugar production was
pre-eminent in the Atlantic Islands, the Caribbean, and Brazil.
Subsequently, cane sugar industries in the Americas were
transformed by a fusion of new and old forces of production, as the
international sugar economy incorporated production areas in Asia,
the Pacific, and Africa. Sugar's global economic importance and its
intimate relationship with colonialism offer an important context
for probing the nature of colonial societies. This book questions
some major assumptions about the nexus between sugar production and
colonial societies in the Caribbean and Southeast Asia, especially
in the second (post-1800) colonial era.
European markets almost exclusively relied on Caribbean sugar
produced by slave labor until abolitionist campaigns began around
1800. Thereafter, importing Asian sugar and transferring plantation
production to Asia became a serious option for the Western world.
In this book, Ulbe Bosma details how the British and Dutch
introduced the sugar plantation model in Asia and refashioned it
over time. Although initial attempts by British planters in India
failed, the Dutch colonial administration was far more successful
in Java, where it introduced in 1830 a system of forced cultivation
that tied local peasant production to industrial manufacturing. A
century later, India adopted the Java model in combination with
farmers' cooperatives rather than employing coercive measures.
Cooperatives did not prevent industrial sugar production from
exploiting small farmers and cane cutters, however, and Bosma finds
that much of modern sugar production in Asia resembles the abuses
of labor by the old plantation systems of the Caribbean.
European markets almost exclusively relied on Caribbean sugar
produced by slave labor until abolitionist campaigns began around
1800. Thereafter, importing Asian sugar and transferring plantation
production to Asia became a serious option for the Western world.
In this book, Ulbe Bosma details how the British and Dutch
introduced the sugar plantation model in Asia and refashioned it
over time. Although initial attempts by British planters in India
failed, the Dutch colonial administration was far more successful
in Java, where it introduced in 1830 a system of forced cultivation
that tied local peasant production to industrial manufacturing. A
century later, India adopted the Java model in combination with
farmers' cooperatives rather than employing coercive measures.
Cooperatives did not prevent industrial sugar production from
exploiting small farmers and cane cutters, however, and Bosma finds
that much of modern sugar production in Asia resembles the abuses
of labor by the old plantation systems of the Caribbean.
The essays in this volume aim to explain the evolution and
persistence of various practices of indirect labour recruitment.
Labour intermediation is understood as a global phenomenon, present
for many centuries in most countries of the world and taking on a
wide range of forms: varying from outright trafficking to job
placement in the context of national employment policies. The
contributions cover a broad geographical scope, including case
studies from Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia and Europe. By
focusing on the actual practices of different types of labour
mediators in various regions of the world during the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, and by highlighting both the national as well
as the international and translocal contexts of these practices,
this volume intends to further a historically informed global
perspective on the subject.
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