Summary Of Bittersweet: The Story Of Sugar By Macinnis

In Peter Macinnis’s book, Bittersweet: The Story of Sugar, he documents the history of sugar throughout world history. By exploring the book further, we can arrive at the idea that the history of sugar is “bittersweet” because of how it impacts social, economic, and political change over the course of history. To better understand the impact sugar made throughout history, we must address the summary points of Macinnis’s book.

Macinnis starts by talking about how the earliest records of sugar cane can be traced back to Buddha in India (around 550 B.C.), a Persian military expedition (510 B.C.), passing through India, and the army of Alexander the Great in India (around 325 B.C.) (Macinnis 2). “Sugar cane was already on the move, and could have

This stimulated production in other parts of the Mediterranean” (Macinnis 22). He later mentions that “the first recorded commercial importation of sugar into England was in 1319” (Macinnis 23). “Production in Palestine, Egypt and Syria declined in the fourteenth century as Cyprus, Crete and the western Mediterranean took over as the main centres. The fall-off in Egypt may have been due to Mameluke misrule…or population losses of the Black Death…This drop in production gave Venice and Genoa the opening they needed” (Macinnis 23). “By 1432, the Portuguese in Madeira began refining the first sugar there. Serious exports really only began somewhere between 1450 and 1460, when Madeiran sugar was first carried to England and Flanders. By 1500, Madeiran sugar was available all over Europe” (Macinnis 24). “By 1470 sugar refineries had been established in Venice, Bologna and Antwerp to process imported raw sugar, setting the pattern that would hold through into the nineteenth century of cheap raw sugar being sent to metropolitan centres where expensive refined sugar would be made…Sadly, cheap sugar required cheap labour, and that mean slaves” (Macinnis