30 pages • 1 hour read
Sidney W. MintzSweetness and Power
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1985A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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BetaChapter 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 2 Summary: “Production”
Mintz outlines the history of human sugar production from the first domestication of sugar cane in New Guinea thousands of years ago to the perfection of the plantation system in the Caribbean during the 18th century. The meaning of sugar changed for European consumers as rates of sugar consumption skyrocketed alongside increased production in the Americas.
While “the fundamental process associated with sugar making” (24) was likely invented in Persia and India, the Arab conquests of Europe in the seventh and eighth centuries introduced Europe to sugar cane, including the techniques associated with its cultivation and “a taste for this different sweetness” (23). The importance of the Mediterranean sugar industry began to decline when the major sites of production moved to Atlantic islands like La Palma and the Azores. These production sites eventually moved to the Caribbean and the Americas mainland, where European colonial powers fully developed the highly disciplined plantation system of sugar production.
Sugar production utilized forced labor since at least the early days of Mediterranean production, but the use of forced labor expanded massively on the Caribbean plantations. While labor on these “sugar islands” previously consisted of a greater mix of workers and enslaved people from Europe, Africa, and India from the founding of the colonies until the 17th century, African slavery became the dominant labor source thereafter. Hundreds of thousands of enslaved people were brought to English sugar-producing colonies like Barbados and Jamaica between 1701 and 1810. In addition to slavery, the state policy of mercantilism marked England’s relationship to its Caribbean colonies until the 19th century. From the colony’s point of view, English mercantilism meant: “[B]uy no finished goods elsewhere, sell none of your (tropical) products elsewhere, ship everything in British bottoms” (46). This was an extremely restrictive policy that sometimes benefited the planter class and at other times benefited interest groups on the English mainland.
Chapter 2 Analysis
Caribbean sugar plantations developed into a unique intermediary or hybrid system. This system clearly differed from traditional European feudal agricultural production, but it also did not fully represent a typical capitalist working arrangement. Despite emerging before the capitalist mode of production took hold in Europe, the Americas’ plantation system was undeniably industrial in nature. These industrial features of plantations include: “the combination of agriculture and processing under one authority” (51) and the need for strict discipline to synchronize production in both the mill and the field; the interchangeability of the labor force “characteristic of a lengthy middle period much later in the history of capitalism” (51), and the strict scheduling of plantation work, which “accorded well with the emphasis on time that was later to become a central feature of capitalist industry” (51).
North American continent sugar plantations were fundamentally racist enterprises. The use of forced labor fundamentally distinguishes the pre-1850 plantation system from capitalist workplaces that purchased labor power in exchange for wages (the characterization of the capitalist labor contract as an exchange of wages for labor power is a quintessentially Marxist understanding of labor). By the 18th century, the vast majority of America's plantation work was conducted by enslaved Africans rather than indentured servants or other hired help.
Until the mid-18th century, England maintained a mercantilist relationship with its colonies on the North American continent in which the “sugar islands” were required to purchase goods from England and sell its tropical products exclusively to the motherland in British boats. This unequal arrangement greatly benefited the United Kingdom: It guaranteed sugar supply and profits for the colonizer, guaranteed a “large overseas market for finished British goods” (46), and “supported the growth of the civil (and military) marine” (46). Although this arrangement was expensive for the state to maintain, it was a boon for various English business and political interests within the motherland’s borders.
