Nobel Conference explores sugar’s bitter role in world history

Few commodities are baked into modern life more than sugar. Whether it’s derived from cane, beets or corn, this form of glucose flavors the foods we eat and beverages we drink. 

Gustavus Adolphus College’s 61st annual Nobel Conference puts the sweet stuff at center stage. “Sugar: Bringing Sweetness to Light,” running Tuesday through Wednesday in person at the St. Peter campus and over livestream, will explore sugar’s rise to dominance as an energy source, its role in European colonization and the Atlantic slave trade, and the adverse health impacts linked to its excessive consumption.

On Wednesday, historian Ulbe Bosma will discuss his book, “The World of Sugar: How the Sweet Stuff Transformed Our Politics, Health, and Environment over 2,000 Years,” which was published by Harvard University Press in 2023. 

The senior researcher at the International Institute for Social History in Amsterdam spoke with MinnPost ahead of the conference about his work on sugar’s role in global history. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

MinnPost: As a commodities researcher, what got you interested in sugar?

Ulbe Bosma: I started as a historian on colonial Indonesia. The sugar industry of colonial Indonesia, particularly in Java, was second only to Cuba as a cane sugar exporter. So that was a logical link. 

In order to study sugar in a global context, you have to study the different systems and different types of sugar production, that’s one thing. The other thing, and why it’s so interesting and so important, is that what oil was in the 20th century, sugar was in the 19th century. It was the most-traded commodity in terms of value in the 19th century. When you talk about commodities and geopolitics, oil, of course, is a prime example. Most people will understand that. That’s for the 20th century. But in the 19th century, of course, there was no oil; there was sugar, and that makes sugar such an important and also an interesting subject to study.

Related: Documents reveal sugar industry’s role in shaping dietary advice

MP: Is it safe to say that sugar was the most influential commodity of the 19th century? 

UB: Yes, I think in a way it was. We might go back a bit to the 17th and 18th century, when we talk about the history of slavery. Two-thirds of all the enslaved people from Africa who survived the Middle Passage ended up at plantations in the New World or in the Americas. So, here we already have a very important link between sugar and the blackest pages of history, so to speak. 

In the 19th century, an immense amount of labor and trade was involved in the production and consumption of sugar. For example, in the United States one of the most powerful companies in the Gilded Age was the so-called Sugar Trust of Henry O. Havemeyer. This was the sixth biggest company at the Dow Jones index in the final years of the 19th century. So we’re really talking about big, big business. A big business, moreover, that also has a broad and important electoral base, because there are also hundreds of thousands of beet and cane farmers who make their living from growing beets or cane and delivering them to the factories.

MP: Your book is described as a history of sugar’s ties to culture, business, economics, identity, race, slavery and capitalism. Picking out any of those areas, what do you want people to know about sugar’s historical connection to them? 

UB: Sugar production is tremendously labor intensive, and that explains why millions of people were working in the sugar sector in rather dreadful conditions. When sugar production moved to Latin America and the Caribbean region, local populations were not able to provide that labor, either not willing or they were already killed during the genocide of the early 16th century. That meant that all kinds of mechanisms came into play to bring people from Africa to the Caribbean region, to Brazil and to the southern states of the United States. An entire economic sector began to emerge around slavery-based production. This is also an important part of this history of sugar. 

These people were all immigrants, either forced or voluntarily, but they were immigrants, so you immediately have this whole complex of who belongs to the nation, who does not belong to the nation. The whole concept of race-making is actually based upon this. Sugar has played an incredibly important role in that, alongside, of course, cotton, another crop. So I think this is something which we need to understand. 

Another very particular thing about sugar is that we eat it often. It has shaped our diet. Sugar is everywhere, and, of course, it has become a health-harming industry today. It also exhausts the soil. After a couple of years, sugar plantations would have to hop to another island, which happened in the Caribbean. It has become an ecological predicament. 

MP: You note in the book that exploitative sugar production isn’t only a historical practice. What does it look like today? 

UB: It was in 2022 that the Biden government banned sugar imports from the Dominican Republic because of atrocious labor conditions there, the way in which Haitian migrant laborers were exploited by some of these big plantations. That’s very close to the United States. 

Cane harvesting by hand, manually, is absolutely, literally a deadly kind of work because of the arduousness of the work and the dehydration that is taking place. After seven or eight years, people are completely, literally demolished, and their kidneys are demolished. This tragic history is still not over today. Of course, governments can do something against it by introducing mechanical cane harvesting, but the sad part of the story is that in some cases it’s cheaper for the sugar factories to have cane cut manually than to introduce cane harvesters, particularly in India. 

When we put our gaze on India and West India, still substantial amounts of sugar are cut manually. These cane cutters and these families, often indebted migrant workers, are also severely exploited. They leave with almost nothing after a season of cane cutting in cane fields. 

In Brazil also there are horrific stories of exploitation of cane cutters. Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s government has started to do something against that by introducing mechanical cane harvesting. 

In Florida, I think there was still manual cane cutting in the 1980s. Before that there were migrant laborers from Jamaica coming to Florida.

MP: Minnesota is a major sugar beet producer in the U.S. How and when did it begin as an industry here? 

UB: That started in the 1890s. Until that time, the United States was not very interested in growing its own sugar, apart from in Louisiana. But the Civil War had all but destroyed the sugar industry of Louisiana, so in the 1890s it became of interest to the United States to start its own domestic sugar industry. There was huge immigration from Europe, so the idea was to create rural welfare by growing beets, following the example of Europe. It started first in California and then moved to the east through Nebraska to Minnesota. All these states began to grow sugar, and it was also supported by the American government with the homesteading plans, and big irrigation projects were undertaken.

MP: When did sugar become so ubiquitous in everyday life? 

UB: It varies. Great Britain was the wealthiest country in Europe in the early 19th century, so here you could see a staggering amount of sugar consumption. In most European countries people consumed 3 to 4 kilograms of sugar per year, but by the mid-19th century, you’d see the United Kingdom already moving to 20 kilos. That has everything to do with urbanization, with wealth, with industrialization. People moved to the city, no longer growing their own food. The rural base weakened, and so they had to obtain and buy food in the city. Much of that food was not very good. It was often rotten, even poisonous sometimes. The food industry jumped in to produce food that had a guaranteed quality, so food became branded. 

Now, as such, that would not be a problem. But the interesting thing is that to maintain packaged food, to maintain it and keep it on the shelf for longer times, producers will add some stuff to preserve it, and sugar is an excellent way to preserve food. Here you see that much of the packaged food then becomes loaded with sugar, and people get used to high quantities of sugar in their food.

An important contribution we can make as historians is to show how this started with industrialization and urbanization, that sugar’s (rapid rise in its role in our lives) only began in the past 150 years. Our bodies are not used to this. Our bodies are used to living in times of scarcity, not in times of an overflow of abundance of calories. So we have to learn to cope with it. I understand that the food system is functioning as it does, and is capable of feeding a lot more people than in the past, but we need some additional legislation.

Related: Remembering the expansion of American Crystal Sugar into the Red River Valley

MP: What kind of legislation? 

UB: We have to set maximums to sugar consumption. There are people who say we really need the sugar tax to steer the food industry towards a more responsible attitude in the amounts of sugar that go into food, because this is ridiculous. The World Health Organization had already expressed or stated in 1999 that there was a diabetes type 2 pandemic, and there’s a clear relationship between obesity and type 2 diabetes, and a clear relationship between sugar overconsumption and obesity. This is really something which we need to address, because the health care costs are really tremendous because of this. 

MP: Anything else you want people to keep in mind about your lecture at the Nobel Conference, and about your book?

UB: Don’t blame the sugar industry. Blame ourselves that we do not implement the legislation which is necessary to regulate this industry. We need the food industry. There’s no problem there. A market-based economy and market-based food system has logic, but it needs regulation.

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