Read the passage from Sugar Changed the World. My great-grandparents had come from India to Guyana—then British Guiana—in the late nineteenth century to work on the sugar plantations. Sugar was the backbone of the British Empire at that time. The demand was huge, for sugar had gone from being a luxury that only kings could afford to a necessity. Even the poorest of London shopgirls took sugar in their tea. Slavery was abolished in the British Empire in 1833, thirty years before the Emancipation Proclamation in the United States. But even after they freed their slaves, the sugar plantation owners were desperate to find cheap labor to cut cane and process sugar. So the British owners looked to another part of the empire—India—and recruited thousands of men and women, who were given five-year contracts and a passage back.
Read the passage from Sugar Changed the World.Eventually, I visited Guyana to find out the fate of our house. As our car passed old sugar estates, and I saw the palm trees bending against the wide sky, the lush cane growing in thick, shiny rows, the villages, which were really parcels of land surrounding the important estates, I realized that sugar had been the entire reason for this country's existence. Every now and then an old boiling house—where the cane is processed into crystals, molasses, and rum—would show itself on the flat landscape, cropping up like a hulking ghost.
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