Overview

For most of history, humans did without refined sugar. 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 to rajahs, emperors, and caliphs. But after sugar crossed the Mediterranean to Europe, 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. In Ulbe Bosma's definitive telling, to understand sugar's past is to glimpse the origins of our own world and begin to see the threat that a not-so-simple commodity poses to our bodies, our environment, and our communities.

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Ulbe Bosma is senior researcher at the International Institute of Social History and professor of international comparative social history at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. His books include The Making of a Periphery and The Sugar Plantation in India and Indonesia. British-born Julian Elfer is an award-winning New York City-based actor and audiobook narrator with over 100 titles to his credit. Hailed by the New York Times and Wall Street Journal for his lead performance in the Mint Theatre Company's A Day by the Sea, Julian brings a unique facility for characterization in fiction and an empathy for the personalities and events of the past.

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