Sweetness And Power Analysis

Rajiv Goswami

The increasing commodification of sugar from the 1500s onward has had lasting implications in both the New and Old Worlds. In Sweetness and Power by Sidney W. Mintz, the anthropological interpretation of the evolution of the sugar industry highlights how Europe transitioned from mercantilism to capitalism, agriculture to industry, class changes, and an overall increase in the quality of life. The Caribbean colonies saw an influx of African slaves and Europeans, with the former transforming the islands from backwaters into ultra- profitable cash crop centers, exacerbating the slave trade while increasing returns on investments for their European financiers. While Europe saw sugar as factor in bridging class differences, African

In the emerging years of the trade, the system of royal monopoly control and their trade as practiced by Spain and Portugal in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries proved to be inefficient and expensive, with trans-Atlantic enforcement being infeasible. However, the respective crowns tried maintaining as much control as they could over their subjects who were involved in overseas settlement and trade. Great Britain passed the Navigation Acts in 1651 which explicitly forbade British vessels from trading with rival powers stated, “Goods of the growth, production, or manufacture of Asia, Africa, or America, shall be imported only by ships that belong to the people of the British Commonwealth.” This protectionist measure ensured that the highly lucrative profits would be made from the natural resources and industries in the colonies, securing advantages for the products in Great Britain. Competition erupted between the British and rival powers, leading to military conflicts such as the Anglo- Dutch war. Competition with Spain led to Britain’s annexation of Spanish Jamaica. Britain's navy is noted to have been the most advanced in the world and this force drove England’s monopoly over the sugar trade. British superiority is noted in Sweetness and Power, when it states, “As English sugar became

It is stated, “The first half of the eighteenth century…a period of increased purchasing power for laboring people…,” (Mintz, 118). It is this dependency of the English populace to a large influx of sugar which, in line with the supply-demand theory, lowers the price of sugar and makes it more affordable. Where there was not demand, the sugar trade effectively created one. Though not nutritionally beneficial, sugar became a proletarian commodity which helped sustain England’s labor force. However, the increasing dependency reinforced and propelled the enslavement of Africans for the cultivation of the sugar cane in the West Indies. Samuel Dicker, a member of the House of Commons, wrote in his Letter to Parliament, “If a planter, to all his other advanced charges, hath a further duty laid upon his commodity, he will be disabled from purchasing every year a fresh supply of negroes…disabled of making the quantity of sugar,” (Dicker, 1). Dicker was an outspoken supporter of African slaves being brought into the Caribbean and was even appointed a councilor of Jamaica in the mid-1730s. He tried convincing his audience of English parliamentarians that for their own livelihoods, the sugar trade, and slavery, must continue for the superficial reason that England had grown to love the taste of sugar in their diet. Furthermore, by 1790, African slaves in Jamaica (Port Royal) outnumbered the British twenty to one, with the imbalance steadily