This is the fascinating history of how sugar became so important to us, and of the brutal human cost and the ecological harm caused by the sugar plantations. The problem of sugar is on everyone’s lips. But before about 1600, in the West, sugar was a costly luxury available only to the rich and powerful. James Walvin has written extensively on slavery in the Americas, and as slavery enabled the cheap mass production of sugar he’s the right writer for this book. By 1800, slavery in the sugar plantations had made sugar a cheap, ubiquitous and hugely popular product, even among the poor. Australians consume about 50kg of sugar per person per year, so this is an important subject for all of us.
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