Read the passage from Sugar Changed the World.The end of slavery was a great step for human rights. But what did it mean on the sugar plantations—which had depended on extremely cheap labor to keep up with the twenty-four-hour cycle from harvest to mill? In 1836, the same John Gladstone whose sugar estate had exhibited the chained body of the slave leader Quamina wrote to a shipping company. Gladstone asked it to provide a hundred workers (the slang name was "coolies") from India to labor on his plantations. Gladstone's first ships, the Whitby, carrying 249 passengers, and the Hesperus, carrying 244, sailed for Demerara in 1838.
Read the passage from Sugar Changed the World.Slave labor was valuable because it produced cheap sugar that everyone wanted to buy. But if people stopped buying that sugar, the whole slave system would collapse. In the years leading up to the American Revolution, the women of New England refused to buy English products and English tea. The loss of income made London rescind some of the taxes it had imposed on America. Now this same tactic—boycotting—was used to fight slavery. Some 400,000 English people stopped buying the sugar that slaves grew and harvested. Instead, they bought loaves of sugar that carried a label that said, "Produced by the labor of FREEMEN"—the sugar came from India.When the English looked at the sugar they used every day, Clarkson and the other abolitionists made them see the blood of the slaves who had created it. The very fact that slave-made sugar was so popular made it harder for the English to ignore the reality of slavery. Sugar was a bridge—like the sneakers and T-shirts and rugs that, today, we know are made by sweatshop labor. If you wanted the product, abolitionists forced you to think about how it was made. Slavery—a practice as ancient as human civilization—was becoming unacceptable, a form of inhumanity people could no longer tolerate.
Read the passage from Sugar Changed the World.In the 1400s, Spain and Portugal were competing to explore down the coast of Africa and find a sea route to Asia. That way, they could have the prized Asian spices they wanted without having to pay high prices to Venetian and Muslim middlemen. Spanish and Portuguese sailors searching for that sea route conquered the Canary Islands and the Azores. Soon they began building Muslim-style sugar plantations on the islands, some of them staffed by slaves purchased from nearby Africa. One sailor came to know these islands particularly well because he traded in "white gold"—sugar. And then, as he set off on his second voyage across the sea to what he thought was Asia, he carried sugar cane plants from Gomera, one of the Canary Islands, with him on his ship.His name was Christopher Columbus.
On what basis should a reader evaluate evidence for effectiveness? Select three options.
Read the passage from Sugar Changed the World.Sugar is a taste we all want, a taste we all crave. People throughout the planet everywhere have been willing to do anything, anything at all, to get that touch of sweetness. We even know exactly how thrilling it was to taste sugar for the first time. When the Lewis and Clark Expedition met up with the Shoshone, who had little previous contact with Old World products, Sacagawea gave a tiny piece of sugar to a chief. He loved it, saying it was "the best thing he had ever tasted." Sugar created a hunger, a need, which swept from one corner of the world to another, bringing the most terrible misery and destruction, but then, too, the most inspiring ideas of liberty.
Read the passage from Sugar Changed the World.In the Age of Honey, people tasted the neighborhood where they lived. From a light orange-blossom flavor that is almost a perfume to dark buckwheat with a hint of soil and grain, honey tastes like local flowers. And that was only part of its appeal. Bees work very hard, and it is easy to see that a queen bee is surrounded by worker bees that protect and serve her. To the ancients, a beehive was perfect, for it brought a gift of sweetness to people while being a mirror of their lives—a king or queen served by loyal subjects.
Read the passage and study the image and caption from Sugar Changed the World.Caption: The first factories were places like this cotton mill in Manchester, England.All over England, in sooty cities such as Manchester and Liverpool, when the factory whistle blew, workers would set down their presses and file out to drink a quick cup of tea sweetened with sugar—usually dipping a piece of bread in the warm drink. Soon a smart manufacturer figured out that this break, and the need for a jolt of sweetness, was an opportunity. English workers were offered sugary cookies and candies—what we call today energy bars—that quick pick-me-up that helped workers to make it through their long shifts.Starting around 1800, sugar became the staple food that allowed the English factories—the most advanced economies in the world—to run. Sugar supplied the energy, the hint of nutrition, the sweet taste to go with the warmth of tea that even the poorest factory worker could look forward to. Sugar was a necessity.

Read the passage from Sugar Changed the World.We all crave sweetness, now more than ever since there are so many ways to satisfy that need. And there are still sugar plantations where the work is brutal. In places like the Dominican Republic (Haiti's island neighbor), some sugar work is not very different from what it was for Marina's Indian ancestors in British Guiana: hard, poorly paid labor by people who are often mistreated. But for most of us, chemists have more to say about how we satisfy that taste than do overseers. When sugar is in the headlines, critics speak about how much of it we eat, not who picked the crop. Doctors warn that young people are gaining too much weight from eating sugary snacks; parents learn that kids who drink too many sweet sodas can cycle between manic sugar "highs" and grinding sugar "crashes." No one worries about where the sweetness comes from. Our diet was transformed by the Age of Sugar, but that era is over.
Read the passage from Sugar Changed the World.The Muslims worked out a new form of farming to handle sugar, which came to be called the sugar plantation. A plantation was not a new technology but, rather, a new way of organizing planting, growing, cutting, and refining a crop. On a regular farm there may be cows, pigs, and chickens; fields of grain; orchards filled with fruit—many different kinds of foods to eat or sell. By contrast, the plantation had only one purpose: to create a single product that could be grown, ground, boiled, dried, and sold to distant markets. Since one cannot live on sugar, the crop grown on plantations could not even feed the people who harvested it. Never before in human history had farms been run this way, as machines designed to satisfy just one craving of buyers who could be thousands of miles away.On a plantation there were large groups of workers—between fifty and several hundred. The mill was right next to the crop, so that growing and grinding took place in the same spot.
Read the passage from Sugar Changed the World.From the 1750s on, sugar transformed how Europeans ate. Chefs who served the wealthy began to divide meals up. Where sugar had previously been used either as a decoration (as in the wedding feast) or as a spice to flavor all courses, now it was removed from recipes for meat, fish, and vegetables and given its own place—in desserts. Dessert as the extremely sweet end to the meal was invented because so much sugar was available. But the wealthy were not the only ones whose meals were changing. Sugar became a food, a necessity, and the foundation of the diet for England's poorest workers.
Read the passage from Sugar Changed the World. In one part of Russia, though, the nobles who owned the land were interested in trying out new tools, new equipment, and new ideas about how to improve the soil. This area was in the northern Ukraine just crossing into the Russian regions of Voronigh and Hurst. When word of the breakthrough in making sugar reached the landowners in that one more advanced part of Russia, they knew just what to do: plant beets.Cane sugar had brought millions of Africans into slavery, then helped foster the movement to abolish the slave trade. In Cuba large-scale sugar planting began in the 1800s, brought by new owners interested in using modern technology. Some of these planters led the way in freeing Cuban slaves. Now beet sugar set an example of modern farming that helped convince Russian nobles that it was time to free their millions of serfs. And that is precisely where Marc's family story begins—with Nina's grandfather, the serf who bought his freedom from figuring out how to color beet sugar.
Read the passage from Sugar Changed the World.Not only were Russian farms run on unfree labor, but they used very simple, old-fashioned methods of farming. Like the English back in the time of Henry III, all Russians aside from the very wealthy still lived in the Age of Honey—sugar was a luxury taken out only when special guests came to visit. Indeed, as late as 1894, when the average English person was eating close to ninety pounds of sugar a year, the average Russian used just eight pounds.
Read the passage from Sugar Changed the World.The only way to make a lot of sugar is to engineer a system in which an army of workers swarms through the fields, cuts the cane, and hauls the pile to be crushed into a syrup that flows into the boiling room. There, laboring around the clock, workers cook and clean the bubbling liquid so that the sweetest syrup turns into the sweetest sugar. This is not farming the way men and women had done it for thousands of years in the Age of Honey. It is much more like a factory, where masses of people must do every step right, on time, together, or the whole system collapses.
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.No one could have seen it at the time, but the invention of beet sugar was not just a challenge to cane. It was a hint—just a glimpse, like a twist that comes about two thirds of the way through a movie—that the end of the Age of Sugar was in sight. For beet sugar showed that in order to create that perfect sweetness you did not need slaves, you did not need plantations, in fact you did not even need cane. Beet sugar was a foreshadowing of what we have today: the Age of Science, in which sweetness is a product of chemistry, not whips.In 1854 only 11 percent of world sugar production came from beets. By 1899 the percentage had risen to about 65 percent. And beet sugar was just the first challenge to cane. By 1879 chemists discovered saccharine—a laboratory-created substance that is several hundred times sweeter than natural sugar. Today the sweeteners used in the foods you eat may come from corn (high-fructose corn syrup), from fruit (fructose), or directly from the lab (for example, aspartame, invented in 1965, or sucralose—Splenda—created in 1976). Brazil is the land that imported more Africans than any other to work on sugar plantations, and in Brazil the soil is still perfect for sugar. Cane grows in Brazil today, but not always for sugar. Instead, cane is often used to create ethanol, much as corn farmers in America now convert their harvest into fuel.
Read the passage from the All Men Are Created Equal section of Sugar Changed the World.To say that "all men are equal" in 1716, when slavery was flourishing in every corner of the world and most eastern Europeans themselves were farmers who could be sold along with the land they worked, was like announcing that there was a new sun in the sky. In the Age of Sugar, when slavery was more brutal than ever before, the idea that all humans are equal began to spread—toppling kings, overturning governments, transforming the entire 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 the Serfs and Sweetness section of Sugar Changed the World.In the 1800s, the Russian czars controlled the largest empire in the world, and yet their land was caught in a kind of time warp. While the English were building factories, drinking tea, and organizing against the slave trade, the vast majority of Russians were serfs. Serfs were in a position very similar to slaves’—they could not choose where to live, they could not choose their work, and the person who owned their land and labor was free to punish and abuse them as he saw fit. In Russia, serfdom only finally ended in 1861, two years before Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.Not only were Russian farms run on unfree labor, but they used very simple, old-fashioned methods of farming. Like the English back in the time of Henry III, all Russians aside from the very wealthy still lived in the Age of Honey—sugar was a luxury taken out only when special guests came to visit. Indeed, as late as 1894, when the average English person was eating close to ninety pounds of sugar a year, the average Russian used just eight pounds.In one part of Russia, though, the nobles who owned the land were interested in trying out new tools, new equipment, and new ideas about how to improve the soil. This area was in the northern Ukraine just crossing into the Russian regions of Voronigh and Hurst. When word of the breakthrough in making sugar reached the landowners in that one more advanced part of Russia, they knew just what to do: plant beets.Cane sugar had brought millions of Africans into slavery, then helped foster the movement to abolish the slave trade. In Cuba large-scale sugar planting began in the 1800s, brought by new owners interested in using modern technology. Some of these planters led the way in freeing Cuban slaves. Now beet sugar set an example of modern farming that helped convince Russian nobles that it was time to free their millions of serfs.
How does this image support the claim that monarchs of the 1700s had wealth and influence? Select three options.
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.Slave owners fought back, arguing that owners should be able to list their slaves as property when they arrived in France and take them with them when they left. Though most parts of France agreed to this, lawmakers in Paris hesitated. Pierre Lemerre the Younger made the case for the slaves. "All men are equal," he insisted in 1716—exactly sixty years before the Declaration of Independence.To say that "all men are equal" in 1716, when slavery was flourishing in every corner of the world and most eastern Europeans themselves were farmers who could be sold along with the land they worked, was like announcing that there was a new sun in the sky. In the Age of Sugar, when slavery was more brutal than ever before, the idea that all humans are equal began to spread—toppling kings, overturning governments, transforming the entire world.
Read the passage from Sugar Changed the World.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.
What is the best explanation of the situational irony in this passage?
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