‘From empire to industry, sugar impacted humans and ecology’

James Walvin

is professor emeritus in history at the

University of York

. He tells

Times Evoke

about the complex past that explains the remarkable expansion of

sugar

around the world:


I am a historian and in the 1960s, I started studying the history of a sugar plantation in Jamaica which was founded in 1670. That grew into a broader study of the extraordinary impacts of sugar on demography — I’ve researched the huge movements of humans pushed into slavery and transported from Africa to produce sugar across the Atlantic. More recently, I have been working on the impacts of sugar on global health.



Sugar is a very distinctive product since it moved very quickly from being considered a great luxury to becoming an extremely cheap everyday necessity. There are physiological factors underpinning this — scientists have conducted research where they have found that if you give an infant a bit of sugar, they like it, which is the opposite reaction they have to salt. It is as if we are hardwired towards sweetness. In recent times, and particularly since the Second World War onwards, the great global commercial empires of food and beverage manufacture have used this factor to promote their products. But the world should think more deeply about the history that underpins this desire.

A STORY IN EVERY BITE: Sugar's journey from being a royal and special indulgence to a common everyday treat has an extraordinary antiquity. (Picture source: iStock)

Western European powers moved more than twelve million Africans across the Atlantic to grow sugar, later expanding the use of slavery into tobacco and cotton cultivation. Then, after having constructed this brutal system, in the 19th century, the British started to get righteous and decided that slavery was wrong. They turned to another form of less than free labour — indentured labour. They introduced huge numbers of Indian indentured labour into the Caribbean and other locations to cultivate sugar. Initially, sugar was very expensive and people in the

West

used honey for sweetness. But once inexpensive labour in the form of slavery was linked to sugar, its price began to fall.



What in the Middle Ages was a luxury only aristocrats and royalty could afford became the daily commodity of the common person. By 1750, the price of sugar had fallen dramatically even though it was still shipped across vast distances. Ordinary people across

Western Europe

and North America began to mix sugar daily into their food and beverages — the phrase ‘sweetened to taste’ became a part of the Western vernacular. Interestingly, sugar became a theme in the lives of working people in the West just as the need for cheap labour was expanding there. Sugar helped the physically demanding labour that was at the heart of the Industrial Revolution — for people whose lives were dominated by hard labour, sugar provided a form of energy at a low cost. The commercial manufacture of sugar-based common products began to intensify in the late 18th century with the mass production of candies, sweets and confectionary like biscuits and cakes. By the 1880s, the skylines of cities in Europe and the Americas were dominated by huge factories producing these goods.



Sweetness started to get embedded into cheap diets which became a part of everyday life in the Western world — by export and migration, this way of eating spread. This worked so well that adding sugar to other products in the wider world of food production became common. While this practice began with beet sugar, in the 20th century, this grew to include many forms of chemical sweeteners in almost every consumable product. By the 1960s, scientists began releasing findings on the health impacts of the excessive consumption of sugar with dental science, for instance, finding deleterious effects on children’s teeth and physiologists observing marked rises in obesity. This was once thought to be a Western phenomenon but today, obesity is everywhere also because artificially sweetened food products and drinks are everywhere.

A diet rich in sweetness gives immediate satisfaction but it doesn’t give the nutrition people truly need. Instead, it causes lifestyle-related chronic health problems, now an unavoidable global health issue. Sugar also left its mark on the world’s ecology. Slave-grown sugar in the Americas and the Caribbean was cultivated in plantations, characterised by the destruction of the natural habitat over large swathes and the imposition of an intensively grown crop requiring a great deal of water and other inputs. These plantations then became the model frequently for timber production, pineapples, tea, rubber, tobacco and so on worldwide. Such agriculture has impacted huge areas of the tropical and semi-tropical world, destroying biodiversity and imposing a monoculture which has severe environmental fall-outs. These are all important aspects of history to consider in the effort to build a better future for both the environment and human societies.

Don't miss the yearly horoscope 2025 and Chinese horoscope 2025 for Rat, Ox, Tiger, Rabbit, Dragon, Snake, Horse, Goat, Monkey, Rooster, Dog, and Pig zodiac signs. Spread love this holiday season with these Happy New Year wishes, messages, and quotes.