Read the passage from Sugar Changed the World.After the Egyptians crushed cut cane and captured the juice, they boiled and strained the liquid, let it settle, then strained it again. The cane juice was now poured into molds with holes in the bottom, so that all the liquid could drain out, leaving only a powder. That powder was then mixed with milk and boiled again. After one round of these steps, the process was repeated all over again. As a result of all this effort and care, Egypt was known for the "whitest and purest" sugar.
Read the passage from Sugar Changed the World.Sugar was the connection, the tie, between slavery and freedom. In order to create sugar, Europeans and colonists in the Americas destroyed Africans, turned them into objects. Just at that very same moment, Europeans—at home and across the Atlantic—decided that they could no longer stand being objects themselves. They each needed to vote, to speak out, to challenge the rules of crowned kings and royal princes. How could that be? Why did people keep speaking of equality while profiting from slaves? In fact, the global hunger for slave-grown sugar led directly to the end of slavery. Following the strand of sugar and slavery leads directly into the tumult of the Age of Revolutions. For in North America, then England, France, Haiti, and once again North America, the Age of Sugar brought about the great, final clash between freedom and slavery.
Read the passage from Sugar Changed the World.Sugar is different from honey. It offers a stronger sweet flavor, and like steel or plastic, it had to be invented. In the Age of Sugar, Europeans bought a product made thousands of miles away that was less expensive than the honey from down the road. That was possible only because sugar set people in motion all across the world—millions of them as slaves, in chains; a few in search of their fortunes. A perfect taste made possible by the most brutal labor: That is the dark story of sugar.
Read the passage from Sugar Changed the World.You could date a great change in the world to a visit one Madame Villeneuve made to France in 1714. That year, Pauline, an enslaved woman from the Caribbean, arrived in France as the personal servant of her mistress. When Madame Villeneuve set off from the coast to visit Paris, she left Pauline in a convent. The young woman spent her time studying with the nuns and went so far in her training that she asked to become a nun herself and remain in the convent. The nuns agreed, which enraged Madame Villeneuve. She rushed to a judge, demanding to have her property back. Was Pauline a free woman, a bride of Christ, or an item to be bought, sold, and warehoused when she was not in use?Twenty-three years earlier, King Louis XIV had issued a set of rules that defined slavery as legal in the French sugar islands. But when two slaves managed to reach France, he freed them—saying they became free "as soon as they [touched] the soil" of France. The judges sided with Pauline—she was real to them, human, not a piece of property. For Pauline's judges, as for King Louis, slavery far off across the seas was completely different from enslaved individuals in France.
Read the passage from Sugar Changed the World.By the 1800s, it was clear that the Age of Sugar—that combination of enslavement, factories, and global trade—was replacing the Age of Honey, when people ate local foods, lived on the land of their ancestors, and valued tradition over change. Sugar was the product of the slave and the addiction of the poor factory worker—the meeting place of the barbarism of overseers such as Thomas Thistlewood and the rigid new economy. And yet, for that very reason, sugar also became the lynchpin of the struggle for freedom.When we talk about Atlantic slavery, we must describe sugar Hell; and yet that is only part of the story. Africans were at the heart of this great change in the economy, indeed in the lives of people throughout the world. Africans were the true global citizens—adjusting to a new land, a new religion, even to other Africans they would never have met in their homelands. Their labor made the Age of Sugar—the Industrial Age—possible. We should not see the enslaved people simply as victims, but rather as actors—as the heralds of the interconnected world in which we all live today. And indeed, it was when the enslaved Africans began to speak—in words and in actions—when Europeans began to see them as human, that the Age of Sugar also became the Age of Freedom.
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