A Dark History of Sugar

257 Pages·2022·9.967 MB·English

by  Neil Buttery

A DARK
HISTORY
OF
SUGAR
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For Mum and Dad.
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A DARK
HISTORY
OF
SUGAR
NEIL BUTTERY
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First published in Great Britain in 2022 by
PEN AND SWORD HISTORY
An imprint of
Pen & Sword Books Ltd
Yorkshire – Philadelphia
Copyright © Neil Buttery, 2022
ISBN 978 1 52678 365 3
The right of Neil Buttery to be identified as Author of
this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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Contents
Acknowledgements ....................................................................................vi
Introduction ...............................................................................................vii
Chapter 1 Innocent Times ........................................................................1
Chapter 2 Enter the White Man .............................................................13
Chapter 3 Pioneers of the New World: The Spanish and
Portuguese Sugar Industry ....................................................21
Chapter 4 Life on the Sugar Colonies ...................................................34
Chapter 5 Making Sugar ........................................................................53
Chapter 6 Fear of Freedom ....................................................................65
Chapter 7 The Slave Trade .....................................................................80
Chapter 8 Abolition and Aftermath .......................................................99
Chapter 9 Sugar States .........................................................................118
Chapter 10 Sugar Takes Hold in Court ..................................................129
Chapter 11 Sugar for All ........................................................................139
Chapter 12 The Rise of Junk Food ........................................................151
Chapter 13 Fifty Words for Sugar ..........................................................168
Chapter 14 Legacy .................................................................................175
Afterword: A Brighter Future? ................................................................188
Notes .......................................................................................................192
Index .......................................................................................................229
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Acknowledgements
This was a book written during the Covid-19 epidemic and I am so
grateful to the wonderful and patient staff at Manchester Central Library,
the British Library, the National Maritime Museum and the International
Slavery Museum, who all worked so hard keeping me and everyone else
safe.
I’d like to thank too Karen Foltyn for helping me to locate some tricky
to find manuscripts, and Richard Fitch and Elise Fleming for their Tudor
sugar craft advice. I am eternally grateful to my editor Alan Murphy and
the supportive staff at Pen & Sword for their advice and for entrusting
me with such a complex and important topic.
A huge thanks to my forever supportive family and friends, especially
my mother and father, Sandra and David Buttery, Stuart Kinlough and
Brian Mulhearn for the encouragement, humour and humouring required
of them throughout the project. But the biggest thanks must be ladled
upon Hugues Roberts for his unabashed help, emotional support, and
constructive comments upon and criticism of the text; I really could not
have done it without you.
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Introduction
The use of sugar has increased every day, and there is no
household in the civilised world which can do without it.
Mrs Isabella Beeton1
Sugar is a nutrient that makes up a vital part of our diet, but it is more
than just a food group; our lives revolve around it, even if we don’t know
it. Sugar is a food desired, a food to be adored: our appetite for it is
huge, and our want of it has shaped the modern world in every sense –
physically, politically and culturally. Wars have been fought over it, and
countless millions exploited, enslaved and murdered just so that we can
spoon it onto cereals, beat it into cakes or stir it into macchiatos. That’s
how good it is.
In the English language the word ‘sweet’ is older than the word
‘sugar’ because in Europe sweetness was experienced first; before
sugar, sweetness came fleetingly in seasonal fruit gluts, tree saps and
honeycombs. The word ‘sweet’ was typically used in Old English in
combination with the word ‘honey’, the sweetest natural substance, to
make the word hunigswēte (honey-sweet).2 Sweetness without honey?
Impossible. But when sugar did slowly trickle into Europe at the turn
of the twelfth century people were amazed that the sweetness they were
tasting could be provided by a plant without the aid of bees. Sugar
and honey were one and the same, and were therefore revered as such,
though sugar would eventually displace honey to become the top-ranking
symbol of goodness. Sweet little girls are made of ‘sugar and spice and
all things nice’ after all.
Sugar is good because it is sweet, and things that are sweet are pure
and they are lovely. Someone described as ‘sweet’ is nice, polite, pretty,
innocent even, your romantic partner is your sweetheart, and if you are
an exemplar of virginal godly goodness, you are all sweetness and light.
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A DARK HISTORY OF SUGAR
To be sweet is also to be pure and clean, like sweet mountain air or
sweet-smelling freshly laundered sheets, and don’t we all want a sweet-
smelling sweetheart who is all sweetness and light? That would be a
sweet life indeed. And when things are not so sweet, and we have to tell
others bad news, we sometimes help things along by sugar-coating it. But
sweetness is not always a positive thing. There are phrases such as the
back-handed compliment ‘arm candy’ – used when someone’s partner
is very good-looking but has little else going for them. If sweetness
is ladled on too thickly (like in many a romantic comedy) it becomes
sickly sweet, syrupy or cloying, and if a sweet smile is discovered to be
insincere, it is not made of sugar, but of bittersweet saccharine.
The word sugar has ancient roots, coming from the Sanskrit word
karkara meaning ‘sand gravel’. As sugar spread through Asia, then the
Middle and Near East, the word changed as sugar muscled its way into
new cultures and new languages: sakkara in Prakrit and then sukkur in
Arabic, finally becoming sugar; the word was first spotted in English in
the thirteenth century.3
This was not food of the everyday. In Europe sugar was ‘an
extravagant luxury’4 at this time, appearing on the banquet tables and
medicine chests of kings and their cronies. We get glimpses of the ways
sugar was eaten from early manuscripts such as Forme of Cury (c1380),
the first cookbook in the English language, written by the master cooks
of Richard II. In attendance at many of Richard’s opulent banquets was
one Geoffrey Chaucer5, who included several descriptive accounts of
sugar and sweet foods in his writing, as illustrated in this description of
a banquet from the Tale of Sir Topaz (Thopas):
They fetched him first the sweetest wine,
Then mead in mazers they combine
With lots of royal spice,
And gingerbread, exceedingly fine,
And liquorice and eglantine
And sugar, very nice.6
Sugar and honey are particularly revered in religion: Ancient Egyptians
ate honey at the Festival of Thoth and welcomed each other with the
greeting ‘sweet is the truth’,7 and it has been discovered amongst the
array of burial goods in the tombs of long-dead pharaohs (sometimes still
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INTRODUCTION
perfectly edible). Early well-off Christians even preserved their dead in
honey.8 The Roman poet Virgil described honey as ‘heaven’s gift’9, and
many a Roman grave has been found to contain honey cakes placed to
nourish the dead as they travelled to the afterlife.
Sugar and honey frequently appear in the Old Testament. Whenever
manna from heaven is discussed, it is invariably in terms of milk and
honey, both reckoned to be found in vast amounts in the Promised Land.
Sugarcane was evidently important too because it was included in rituals
such as sacrifice. In Isaiah (43:24), God makes clear his disappointment
to Jacob when he did not include sugarcane in his sacrificial offerings:
‘Thou hast bought me no sweet cane with money, neither hast thou
filled me with the fat of thy sacrifices; but thou hast made me to serve
with thy sins, thou hast wearied me with thine iniquities.’ But then in
Jeremiah (6:20) He takes the exact opposite view: ‘To what purpose
cometh there to me incense from Sheba [frankincense] and sweet cane
from a far country? Your burnt offerings are not acceptable, Nor your
sacrifices sweet to Me.’10 God was obviously in two minds Himself as to
the virtuousness of the stuff.
Religion and reverie have put sweetness – in every form – on a
pedestal, making our cravings stronger and compelling us to seek it ever
more readily. Sweetness is not just nice or pure, it is positively godly, and
literally heaven-sent. There can be no higher regard.
But what substance are we talking about when we speak of sugar?
If we mean the sugar we stir into tea or beat into a sponge cake batter,
then we are talking about the sugar derived from either sugarcane or
sugar beet: sucrose. The suffix ‘-ose’ is used in biochemistry to tell us
the compound is a sugar and ‘sucr-’ is taken from the French sucre, so
literally, it means ‘sweet sugar’. Sugars are a simple type of carbohydrate,
and there are several types. The simplest are the monosaccharides, a
single ring-shaped molecule; fructose and glucose are examples of this,
meaning ‘fruit sugar’ and ‘sweet sugar’ respectively (the ‘sweet’ coming
this time from Greek11), and they taste very sweet. Indeed, the latter is
commonly found as high fructose corn syrup in American sodas, and it is
to blame for the lion’s share of type-2 diabetes cases in the United States.
Monosaccharides join with a partner to form disaccharides, of which
sucrose – the star of the show – is one, but there are others such as
maltose, which is extracted from malted barley and is found in beer
and a range of sweet drinks and desserts, and lactose, the sugar found
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