Sugar Changed the World: a Story of Magic, Spice, Slavery, Freedom, and Science

Aronson, Marc and Marina Budhos. Sugar Changed the World: a Story of Magic, Spice, Slavery, Freedom, and Science. Clarion Books, New York: 2010. 166 pages. Tr. $20.00 ISBN 9780618574926

Annotation:

Sugar Changed the World is a history of how sugar spread throughout the world, changing economies and lives of people from Asia, Africa, Europe, and all the way to the new world in America. 

Review:

Authors Marc Aronson and Marina Budhos were inspired to write Sugar Changed the World, after discovering that sugar played a prominent role in both of their family’s histories.  Today sugar is one of those items everyone has in their pantry.  Most of us in the Western world use and eat sugar everyday without thinking about where it comes from or the bitter history of this sweet and popular spice.  But there was a time when sugar was hard to come by, a time when even kings stooped to beg for allotments of sugar.  Why was sugar so hard to come by?  For starters, it only grows in tropical climates.  Also, to produce sugar in large quantities requires not only the right climate, but large swaths of land and huge amounts of human labor.  There was no way to make sugar profitable without a large, cheap work force.  The European’s discovery of the Americas was the first part of making sugar profitable.  In America there were large, uncultivated, tracts of land perfect for growing sugar cane.   The fact that there were already people inhabiting these lands did not stop the Europeans, they simply saw the Native peoples a possible work force for growing sugar.  When enslaving the natives did not work the Europeans began and active slave trade with Africa, shipping millions of African slaves to the Americas to work on the sugar plantations.  Growing and refining sugar was a dangerous business that required long hours of physically exhausting work and many slaves were killed in the process.  The mills used to crush the cane could easily kill a person caught in the machinery and the fires used to refine the cane mash were hot, dangerous, and kept burning at all times.  All it took was for a slave to nod off for a minute and slip into the boiling liquid.  The world continued to change and slaves revolted in some areas of the Caribbean and in other areas of the world slavery became taboo and in others people searched for other ways to produce sugar more safely.  One of these methods led to the discovery of beet sugar by one of Aronson’s ancestors, and other led to safer methods of refining cane.  Sugar truly did change the world in the exchange of money, ideas and people.   

Awards/Honors

YALSA Award for Excellence in Nonfiction Finalist

Front and Back Matter:

TOC, How we Researched and Wrote this Book, Acknowledgments, Timeline, Web Guide to Color Images, Notes and Sources, Abbreviations Used in these Notes, Bibliography, Websites, Index

Author’s Website:

 http://www.marcaronson.com/

 http://www.marinabudhos.com/