ABOUT THIS BOOK

A surprising look at how modern capitalism changed sugar from a natural food to a scientific commodity.

Sugar is everywhere in the western diet, blamed for epidemics of obesity, diabetes, and other modern maladies. Our addiction to sweetness has a long and unsavory history. Over the past five hundred years, sugar has shaped empires, made fortunes for a few, and brought misery for millions of workers both enslaved and free. How did sugar become a defining modern food and an essential global commodity?

In Unrefined, David Singerman recasts our thinking about this crucial substance in the history of capitalism. Before the nineteenth century, sugar’s value depended on natural qualities: its color, its taste, where it was grown, and who had made it. But beginning around 1850, a combination of plantation owners, industrialists, and scientists set out to redefine sugar itself. Deploying the tools and rhetoric of science, they transformed not just how sugar was produced or traded but even how people thought about it. By changing sugar into a pure chemical object, these forces stripped power from workers and enabled—and obscured—new kinds of fraud, corruption, and monopoly.

Taking us to unexplored spaces in the world of sugar, from laboratories and docks to refineries and the halls of Congress, Singerman illuminates dark intersections of the histories of corruption, science, and capitalism.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

David Singerman is assistant professor of history and American studies at the University of Virginia.

REVIEWS

"This robust and perceptive book traces the startling pathways through which sugar was turned into a standardized commodity. Using powerful stories and striking imagery, from beet fields and cane plantations to factories and commodity markets, Singerman demonstrates the artful combinations, violent collisions, and unlikely schemes that made sugar seem the most uniform of all goods, even while it exhibited an astonishing range of subtle distinctions. This book will be indispensable for anyone concerned with the history and politics of food, science, and how capital shaped the world of goods."

— Simon Schaffer, emeritus professor of the history of science, University of Cambridge

"Singerman has written an astonishing history of the making of sugar. With a keen eye for telling and absurd detail, he scrutinizes all the forms of knowledge, labor, and power crystallized in a substance so complex that it often appears irreducibly natural. Unrefined is pure brilliance.”

— Augustine Sedgewick, author of 'Coffeeland: One Man’s Dark Empire and the Making of Our Favorite Drug'

“This is an important new work on the relationship between science, measurement, capitalism, and commerce. It will be of value to anyone interested in the history of food, science and technology, commodities, trade, and economics.”

— Ambix

“Unrefined details the machinery that reshaped tropical cane sugar industries, the problematic rise of European beet sugars, and the process by which standards of purity were cast. It examines the knowledge, skills, and actions of chemists, artisans, laborers, plantation owners, corporations (especially in New York City), and state actors in this process. Historians of science and technology, Atlantic world scholars, and political economists will appreciate this book. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readership levels.”

— CHOICE

TABLE OF CONTENTS

REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE

If you are a student who cannot use this book in printed form, BiblioVault may be able to supply you with an electronic file for alternative access.

Please have the accessibility coordinator at your school fill out this form.

It can take 2-3 weeks for requests to be filled.