Sidney W. Mintz’s Sweetness and Power (1985) is widely regarded as a classic in cultural history and economic anthropology, not because it tells an engaging and sweeping political story, but because it takes something as seemingly ordinary as sugar and uses it to illuminate the foundations of the modern world. Where other historians have traced the rise of empires through battles, laws, and statesmen, Mintz follows a crystal of sucrose from Caribbean cane fields to English teacups, showing how its production and consumption transformed economies, reshaped class structures, and altered daily life across centuries. And as of the late twentieth century, sugar’s growth and impact showed no signs of letting up: “world sugar production shows the most remarkable upward production curve of any major food on the world market over the course of several centuries,” Mintz writes, “and it is continuing upward still.”
At its heart, Sweetness and Power is about the intersection of fashion and power: how human desire for luxury and sweetness tied together slavery, colonialism, capitalism, and the growth of industrial society. Mintz argues persuasively that sugar was never simply a foodstuff. It was at once a luxury, a drug, an energy source, and a social symbol. Its trajectory – from an exotic rarity in medieval Europe to a staple of working-class diets by the nineteenth century – mirrors the making of the modern world.
One of Mintz’s central themes is the changing social meaning of sugar. In medieval Europe, sugar was a luxury item – rare and expensive, a prized commodity used in medicines, feasts, and decorative confections for the aristocracy. Its presence on the table symbolized wealth and status, the same way nutmeg and cloves did. But as European colonization spread into the Caribbean in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, sugar production expanded dramatically through the brutal labor of enslaved Africans. Over the course of two centuries, the economics of plantation slavery made sugar abundant, and its price fell. For instance, between 1645 and 1680 the price of sugar dropped by seventy percent. In one decade between 1840 and 1850 it dropped thirty percent, and then dropped another twenty-five percent over the next two decades.
A rarity in 1650, sugar had become a luxury by 1750, and a mass market necessity by 1850. Sugar had become a commodity, increasingly woven into the diets of ordinary people in Britain and increasingly used as both an energy source and a preservative. Indeed, sugar had transitioned from a “luxury of kings into the kingly luxury of commoners,” Mintz says, supplying nearly twenty percent of the calories in the English diet by 1900. Over the centuries, as production methods improved and new lands were put under cultivation, the price of sugar had the tendency to drop dramatically. “As sugar became cheaper and more plentiful, its potency as a symbol of power declined while its potency as a source of profit gradually increased.” Here Mintz’s anthropological eye is sharpest: sugar did not just sweeten tea and coffee; it fueled the industrial revolution by providing quick, cheap calories for urban workers. The transformation of sugar from luxury to necessity exemplifies how capitalism restructured not only global trade but the rhythms of everyday life. By the twentieth century the average British citizen was consuming over one hundred pounds of sugar per year.
Another of the book’s enduring insights is its relentless reminder of the human cost behind sweetness. The mercantilist system – colonies buying from and selling to only the motherland and conducting trade only in the motherland’s ships – was underpinned by forced labor. From 1701 to 1810 Barbados, a mere 166 square miles in area (roughly the size of Brooklyn and Queens), received 252,000 African slaves. In the same 109 year period, Jamaica (roughly 4,000 square miles) received 662,000 enslaved Africans. The triangular trade – enslaved Africans shipped across the Atlantic, sugar shipped back to Europe, and capital reinvested into industry – was a central engine of early modern capitalism. The last vestiges of sugar slave plantations were only fully eradicated in 1884 when slavery came to an end in Cuba.
“What we call ‘sugar’,” Mintz writes, “is the end product of an ancient, complex, and difficult process.” But it was only known in Europe after Arab traders introduced it in the eighth century (and England only in the twelfth century); sugar, Mintz says, followed the Koran. At first it was considered a spice. By the thirteenth century sugar was in continuous use by wealthy households across Europe. Europeans became producers of sugar themselves in the Mediterranean as a consequence of the Crusades, but the conquest of sugar-growing islands in the Atlantic and Caribbean and the Portuguese development of Brazil in the sixteenth century changed everything.
Mintz emphasizes that the sheer profitability of sugar distinguished it from many other colonial crops and made the challenges of production worthwhile. He says the turning point for British sugar was the settlement of Barbados in 1627. English production and consumption of sugar grew relentlessly at five percent a year for half a century (in 1660 England was consuming 1,000 hogheads of sugar and exporting 2,000 annually; by 1730 she was importing 100,000 and exporting 18,000). By 1800 British sugar consumption per capita had increased 2,500 percent in 150 years. According to Mintz, “it may be enough to say that probably no other food in world history has had a comparable performance.”
Unlike tobacco or indigo, sugar required enormous capital investment in mills, fields, labor, and time (sugar crops needed up to eighteen months to mature), but it could yield extraordinary returns. However, “sugar was never a sure thing,” Mintz says. Plantations were highly speculative enterprises and bankruptcies were common. “A mass market for sugar emerged rather tardily,” he says. Nevertheless, entire islands were transformed into monoculture landscapes. The wealth sugar generated underwrote not only merchants and planters but also the rise of banking, shipping, and insurance in Europe. In this sense, sugar was not just a commodity but a cornerstone of the Atlantic economic system.
What sets Sweetness and Power apart from a purely economic history is Mintz’s insistence on cultural analysis. Sugar, he argues, cannot be understood only in terms of supply and demand. Its role in British society was symbolic as much as nutritional. Sweetened tea, for example, became a defining ritual of working-class life. Confectionery and desserts marked holidays and family celebrations. Even as sugar was produced under coercion and violence abroad, it came to signify comfort, warmth, and domesticity at home. “As the first exotic luxury to be transformed into a proletarian necessity,” Mintz says, “sugar was among the first imports to take on a new and different political and military importance to the broadening capitalist classes in the metropolis – different, that is, from gold, ivory, silk, and other durable luxuries.” Along with tobacco and tea, sugar was one of the first objects in capitalism that suggested that one could become different by consuming differently.
Several qualities explain why Mintz’s book has endured as a classic. First, it broke new ground in method. By focusing on a single commodity and following its production, trade, and consumption, Mintz pioneered what has since become a vibrant field of “commodity studies.” Later histories of cotton (Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton, 2014), oil (Daniel Yergin’s The Prize, 1990), and even cod (Mark Kurlansky’s Cod, 1997), to name just a few notable examples, owe a debt to Mintz’s model.
Second, it bridged disciplines. Anthropologists, historians, sociologists, and economists alike found in it a framework for connecting culture with political economy. Mintz showed how food habits could not be divorced from global systems of labor and capital.
Third, it offered a moral lens. Without polemics, Mintz revealed the violence at the core of European modernity. His treatment of slavery is not abstract but tied to daily consumer choices: the sweetness in a British worker’s cup of tea was inseparable from the suffering of enslaved Africans in Jamaica or Barbados. That connection gave the book both scholarly weight and ethical perspective.
Sugar, like cotton or oil, two other world-making commodities, played a distinct role in shaping modern history. For instance, cotton, like sugar, was intimately tied to slavery and plantation economies. Both commodities drove the transatlantic slave trade and enriched European powers. Yet cotton became the fabric of industrialization itself – feeding the textile mills of Manchester and Lowell and clothing the masses. Sugar, by contrast, shaped industrial society not through inputs to manufacturing but through consumption patterns: it was fuel for workers and a cultural marker. Cotton was the raw material of production; sugar was the raw material of diet and habit.
Oil’s role in the twentieth century parallels sugar’s earlier role in some respects, too. Both are energy sources that underpin daily life – sugar as caloric fuel, oil as mechanical fuel. Both created vast wealth, geopolitical conflict, and environmental consequences. But oil is consumed invisibly, powering machines, whereas sugar’s appeal is sensory and symbolic, bound to pleasure, taste, and ritual. Oil’s empire is industrial; sugar’s was colonial and domestic.
What links them all is the way each commodity concentrates global networks of power: cotton tied the American South to European industry; oil ties the Middle East to global superpowers; sugar tied African labor to Caribbean plantations to European diets. Each reveals how something seemingly commonplace – clothes, fuel, food – rests on massive structures of coercion, capital, and culture.
Mintz writes with authority and conviction, but Sweetness and Power is by no means a page-turner. It lacks the narrative cohesion and punch that makes Beckert, Yergin, and Kurlansky readable prize-winners and commercially successful in a way never achieved by Mintz. The author’s narrative is less a chronological story than a thematic meditation, circling around production, trade, and consumption. This can sometimes make the book feel less linear than readers might expect from a traditional history.
Another limitation is that the book, published in 1985, cannot fully capture sugar’s late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century trajectory – its industrial use in processed foods, its role in global health crises (especially the twin plagues of obesity and diabetes), and the rise of high-fructose corn syrup. For example, at the time of publication, only about two percent of Americans were diagnosed with diabetes; today the figure is closer to twelve percent, a fivefold increase within just two generations. Even so, Mintz’s framework remains strikingly relevant to contemporary debates over diet, public health, and the structure of global food systems.
Compared to cotton or oil, sugar may seem less consequential in today’s geopolitics. Yet its historical role in reshaping labor systems, fueling industrialization, and creating global consumer habits places it firmly among the great commodities that made the modern world. Mintz’s enduring achievement is to remind us that commodities are never just material things – they are engines of culture, power, and history.
Nearly forty years after its publication, Sweetness and Power remains required reading for anyone interested in how something small and everyday can reveal the deepest structures of global change.
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