Finished reading Peter Macinnis' BITTERSWEET: THE STORY OF SUGAR (Allen & Unwin, 2002). A very readable book on how sugar shaped world history. Sugar canes came to be cultivated in New Guinea only 9,000 years ago. Counting by the biological generation, it's about 400 generations.
"Without the combination of blades of volcanic stone, rich soil and ferocious rain, the discovery might have taken longer--but it is enough that somebody found that small pieces of cane poked into the ground would sprout and grow more sugar cane--and it would be easy enough to learn this in the wet season, in a land of rich and sticky volcanic soil." (XIX)
Thus began the plant's history of global migration.
Sugar played an essential role in the infamous triangular trade that ignited the European-led modernity. The other face of this trade is, of course, slavery.
"Risky or not, the triangular trade made many people rich. Lewis Carroll, baptised Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, had a middle name that honoured his great-grandfather, a slave trader. Edward Gibbon could afford to write his histories because his grandfather had been a director of the South Sea Company, a slave carrier. The Vicomte de Chateaubriand's father was a slave captain, and later a slave merchant, but nobody thought the less of Chateaubriand as a liberal and a man of letters. John Locke, the philosopher, was a shareholder in the Royal African Company, another slaving concern, even though he wrote: 'Slavery is so vile and miserable a state of man, and so directly opposite to the generous temper and courage of our nation, that it is hardly possible that an Englishman, much less a gentleman, should plead for it.'" (115)
The East India Company, that produced sugar not by slave labour but by hired labour, claimed the following:
"[...]the cost of a West Indies sugar slave's life was 450 pounds of sugar. It was said, in tones of moral outrage, that 'a family that uses 5 pounds of sugar a week will kill a slave every 21 months.' To rub the message in, the company told consumers that eight such families, in just nineteen and a half years, would kill 100 slaves with their sugar consumption!" (118)
The cane traditionally grown by "setts" (cut pieces of two or three joints) was called "Creole" that made a long journey out of New Guinea to Persia into the Mediterranean then across the Atlantic. There was no genetic diversity. Then Bougainville found a variety called "Otaheite" in Tahiti in 1768.
"This was the cane which Cook used to make beer soon afterwards. Bougainville took samples to Mauritius (then called Ile de Bourbon) in 1768, where the cane was namded 'Bourbon.' Around 1780, someone named Cossigny (...) brought more of this cane to mauritius and Réunion, and cane from Java reached these islands at about the same time. By 1789, the new canes had reached the French West Indies." (143)
So it took the variety 21 years to travel from Tahiti to the Antilles!
Sugar also made an unexpected figure to travel, too.
"In 1893, the 24-year old Gandhi left a lucrative law practice in Bombay to work for the rights of the Indian sugar workers in South Africa, where they were made to feel that they were remarkably second rate, and needed a firm and knowledgeable representative." (154)
And finally, what concerns the fate of Fiji:
"The first Indian indentured labourers arrived in Fiji in 1879, and by 1916 a total of 68515 had arrived. A number of these Indians were repatriated, found no place for themselves in India, and so re-emigrated to Fiji, where their descendants remain today." (154-5)
How have we, collectively, moved around, lived, and died for the most dangerous substance in human history! And I, everywhere I go, I encounter the traces of the sugar industry. Even now I live within a stone's reach from the Chelsea Refinery. I am HAUNTED by sugar!
