Description: Traversing 2,500 years of global history, Ulbe Bosma shows how sugar, once a luxury reserved for Eastern emperors, stoked a mania in the West, transforming diets and ecosystems, destroying and creating cultures, and shaping the history of bondage and freedom. A major source of calories only since 1900, sugar has suddenly revolutionized our world.
Brief description: 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.
Review Quotes: Bosma lucidly depicts how a commodity that is challenging to cultivate and devoid of nutritional value was central to the development of European imperialism, transatlantic slavery, the Industrial Revolution, economic protectionism, and the postcolonial politics and environmental degradation of the Global South. Bosma's wide-ranging accounting is full of eye-opening insights...This is a comprehensive and alarming look at how one commodity changed the world.-- "Publishers Weekly" (1/31/2023 12:00:00 AM)