The story of sugar: Black suffering, white windfall (via latimesopinion)
In an age when abundance is often taken for granted, some products have become so plentiful that they can scarcely be avoided, and perhaps none more so than sugar.
All of this makes it hard to imagine a time when sugar was an exorbitant rarity, but only in doing so can we understand the West’s road to modernity and the tragic links to slavery.Before the early 17th century, refined sugar was first known as an exotic spice and medicinal. In Europe, it was so expensive that its consumption was mostly limited to royalty and their courts.
The techniques put in place at Sao Tome — subjecting Africans to chattel slavery on large plantations using a set of highly synchronized activities that produced loaves of sugar in unprecedented quantities — quickly leaped across the Atlantic, and with them, the slave trade. For more than a century, standard Western narratives played down slavery’s role in the rise of Britain and in much of Atlantic-facing Europe, favoring cultural explanations for that continent’s divergence in wealth and power from other civilizations. Just as the U.S.
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