World Sugar History Newsletter

In this issue:

1. From the Editors
2. Updating Deerr: Sugar Production in Cyprus
3. Recent Publications
4. Recent PhD Theses

The world has been swept by a devastating pandemic since our last issue and we recognize the hardships many of you have faced. We offer our sympathies to any who have suffered a loss as a result of the pandemic.

In the field of the history of sugar, fresh evidence, new interpretations, and methodological flux ensure that it remains as lively a field of scholarship as ever and we continue to reach out to you to send us information about recent publications and activities or anything else that is relevant.

In this issue, the opening section on sugar production in mediaeval Cyprus encapsulates the advances in knowledge through archaeological, archival, and analytical study. Elsewhere there is some other clustering of citations, mostly as a result of unearthing previously unmentioned publications, but also due to a coincidence of recent publications and collegial correspondence.

Our next issue will be the tenth since the near-death experience of the Newsletter in 2016. It will mark the successful completion of a 5-year period of 'extra time'. It will also bring us closer to another decisive moment in the existence of the WSHN. While we are prepared to continue producing it under our current arrangement until September 2021 (issue No. 56), we see ourselves then calling it a day - that is unless there's somebody who would like to take over the production of the Newsletter. Please let us know if you would be interested.

Some years ago when a researcher interested in the east-to-west diffusion of culture and science might have enquired about general publications on the history of sugar production in Cyprus, it would have seemed reasonable to begin a recommended reading list with Noël Deerr, The History of Sugar (1949 & 1950) and J. H. Galloway, "The Mediterranean sugar industry," Geographical Review 67:2 (1977) and The Sugar Cane Industry: An Historical Geography from its Origins to 1914 (1989). Galloway's writing on the Mediterranean sugar industry was anchored, among others, on the following works:

Since the late 1980s there have been several additions to this list that would be of interest to the researcher who today embarks on the historical study of sugar production in mediaeval Cyprus. A selection of publications focussing on sugar production - and excluding the many related and contextual cultural studies and those addressing exchange/trade (through the port of Famagusta, for example) and earlier or contemporary sugar production in nearby Mediterranean lands (such as those by Bronstein, Stern, and Yehuda and by Sato that are listed elsewhere in this issue) - is presented chronologically to indicate the sequence of discovery and debate.

Adela Fábregas García, Producción y comercio de azúcar en el Mediterráneo medieval. El ejemplo del Reino de Granada (Granada: Editorial Universidad de Granada, 2000). ISBN 84-338-2710-3. [From the review in WSHN No. 31, 2002: "Fortified with [her] Granadan research, Fábregas García . . . takes issue with two points in the literature on the transfer of sugar production from the Mediterranean to the Americas. The arrival of the 'new sugars' from Madeira and the other Atlantic islands did not cause a decline in sugar cultivation in Granada. Rather, producers adapted, re-oriented themselves, and found new markets in Spain. Second, she argues that medieval Mediterranean agriculture and the American plantations were very different systems of production, that indeed there was not one continuous line of development reaching over the centuries from the Levant and Cyprus through the western Mediterranean and the Atlantic islands to Brazil and Barbados."

Marina Solomidou-Ieronymidou, "The medieval sugar mills of Episkopi Serayia and Kolossi, Cyprus" (Abstract of paper delivered at the 102nd annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America, 2001), American Journal of Archaeology 105:2 (2001), pp. 254-255. ["From the Arab world, the Crusaders introduced into the Mediterranean world the cultivation of sugar cane and the technology for its processing. Sugar was Cyprus's major export product during the Middle Ages, and it gave the island great prosperity and wealth. At Episkopi Serayia and at Kolossi, both sites in the Limassol District, there are important remains of establishments associated with the cane sugar industry. Various Medieval sources as well as foreign travelers who visited Cyprus between the 15th and 18th centuries provide valuable information concerning the subject. The biggest owners of sugar plantations on the island were the royal family of the Lusignans, the military Order of St. John of Jerusalem, the Catalan Ferrer family, the Latin Bishop of Limassol, and the Venetian Cornaro family. Remains of the industry at several sites in southern and western Cyprus confirm the documentary evidence in many ways. Sugar refining installations consisted of a complex of buildings where the various stages in the production of sugar were carried out, starting from the crushing and grinding of the sugar cane to the distillation and storing of sugar. The Episkopi sugar mill belonged to the Cornaro family and dates to the 15th century. The Kolossi sugar mill, together with the adjacent castle, belonged to the military Order of St. John of Jerusalem, otherwise known as the Knights Hospitallers. The excavations of these sugar mills constitute a first step in the field of Medieval industrial archaeology in the island of Cyprus."]

Marie-Louise von Wartburg, "The archaeology of cane sugar production: A survey of twenty years of research in Cyprus," Antiquaries Journal 81 (2001), pp. 305-335. [Abstract: "The first research project in medieval industrial archaeology in Cyprus originated with the investigation of the Lusignan cane sugar production centre at Kouklia (Stavros Project)[see von Wartburg, 1983, above]; it became an incentive for the exploration of the establishments of the Hospitallers at Kolossi and the Cornaro family at Episkopi. Excavations at Kouklia-Stavros (1980-82 and 1987-91) recovered a sophisticated structure of milling and refining installations, and revealed new economic and technological aspects of this important, but thus far hardly explored industry of the island in Lusignan and Venetian times. The wealth of new information gained made it possible to understand for the first time thoroughly how Levantine cane sugar refineries actually worked. The contextual approach of the Stavros Project, interrelating archaeological evidence and written information, suggests further interesting research topics such as the repercussions of the sugar industry on social structure, settlement patterns, and environment, or the transfer of the methods and technology of sugar production from Islamic lands to the western Mediterranean, and finally to the Americas."]

Katherine Strange Burke, "A note on archaeological evidence for sugar production in the Middle Islamic Periods in Bilad al-Sham," Mamluk Studies Review 8:2 (2004), pp. 109-118. https://doi.org/10.6082/M1Z899K1. [This article mentions a number of publications relevant to the study of sugar production in Cyprus.]

Mohamed Ouerfelli, Le sucre: Production, commercialisation et usages dans la Méditerranée médiévale (Leiden: Brill, 2008), Pp. 825, ISBN 978-90-04-16310-2 (hb); 978-90-47-43181-7 (eb). [From Kathryn Reyerson's review of this vast work in The Medieval Review, 5th February 2009: "Turning to the processes of sugar production, Ouerfelli discusses in detail the installations in terms of mills and refineries across the Mediterranean. He argues, on the basis of evidence from Cyprus where archeology has furnished vital new information, that there was not much difference in methods of production in terms of process and materials between the late Mediterranean world and the eighteenth-century New World. Misconceptions in the understanding of techniques gave rise to the theory of export of techniques and servile plantations from Europe to the Americas. Another erroneous conception asserts the superiority of the western Mediterranean over eastern Mediterranean technology in sugar. This was not the case. Sophisticated techniques existed in Egypt, in particular, but also elsewhere in the Near East. Ouerfelli provides his fullest development of the problems with the labor model at the end of Part I (287 ff); in dispute of claims by N. Deerr, Charles Verlinden, S. W. Mintz, J. H. Galloway, B. Essomba, M. Burac, and C. Montbrun, he intends to put to rest the matter of a relationship between the spread of sugar cane production and the trade in slaves in the Mediterranean and a slave economy that would in turn have spread across the Atlantic. Instead, in interrogating the evidence of Egypt, Sicily, Valencia, and Morocco, he finds salaried labor. Only in early fifteenth-century Cyprus were Muslim captives, taken by pirates, employed as servile labor (290)." [https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/tmr/article/view/16747.]

Marina Solomidou-Ieronymidou, "Sugar mills and sugar production in medieval Cyprus." In Medieval Cyprus: A Place of Cultural Encounter edited by Sabine Rogge and Michael Grünbart (Münster: Waxmann Verlag, 2015), Pp. 388, ISBN 978-3-8309-3360-1 (pb); 978-3-8309-8360-6 (eb). [This book is the product of a conference held in Münster in 2012.]

K. D. Politis (ed.), The Origins of the Sugar Industry and the Transmission of Ancient Greek and Medieval Arab Science and Technology from the Near East to Europe (Athens: National and Kapodistriako University of Athens, 2015), ISBN 978-618-81101-5-1. [Another book originating in a conference, this one in Athens in 2015 that was devoted entirely to sugar history and includes the following two Cyprus-specific chapters:]

Marina Solomidou-Ieronymidou, "The medieval sugar-mills of Episkopi-Serayia and Kolossi and sugar production in medieval Cyprus."

Marie-Louise von Wartburg, "Medieval cane sugar production in Cyprus: A review of archaeological and textual evidence with a focus on specific technological and economic developments."

Michael Given, "The precarious conviviality of watermills," Archaeological Dialogues 25:1 (2018), pp. 71-94. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1380203818000089. [From the abstract: "The European-owned sugar plantations, mills and refineries of medieval Cyprus, by contrast [to the water-powered grain mills of Ottoman Cyprus], divided and alienated their workforce, and their demands for water, labour, soil and fuel surpassed what their landscape and society could provide. They are, then, unconvivial tools. Conviviality is always precarious: it needs continual negotiation, conflict and compromise, as well as an acceptance of the mutual dependence of all participants, non-human and human. This politics of conviviality is particularly urgent in times of social and ecological crisis."]

Adela Fábregas García, "Commercial crop or plantation system? Sugar cane production from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic." In From Al-Andalus to the Atlantic (13th - 17th Centuries). Destruction and Construction of Societies edited by Thomas F. Glick, Antonio Malpica, Félix Retamero, and Josep Torró (Leiden: Brill, 2018), ISBN 978-90-04-36332-8 (hb); 978-90-04-36577-3 (eb).

Books

César J. Ayala and Laird W. Bergad, Agrarian Puerto Rico: Reconsidering Rural Economy and Society, 1899-1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), Pp. 322, ISBN 9781108488464 (hb); 9781108803908 (eb). [From the publisher's notes: "Fundamental tenets of colonial historiography are challenged by showing that US capital investment into this colony did not lead to the disappearance of the small farmer. Contrary to well-established narratives . . . new data suggest that the colonial economy [producing coffee, sugar, and tobacco] was not polarized into landless Puerto Rican rural workers on one side and corporate US capitalists on the other. The persistence of Puerto Rican small farmers in some regions and the expansion of local property ownership and production disprove this socioeconomic model. Other aspects of extant Puerto Rican historiography are confronted in order to make room for thorough analyses and new conclusions on the economy of colonial Puerto Rico during the early twentieth century."]

Terry-Ann Jones, Sugarcane Labor Migration in Brazil (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Pivot, 2020), Pp. 116, ISBN 978-3-030-35670-5 (hb); 978-3-030-35671-2 (eb). [From the publisher's notes: "The author explores details of the labor migration experience with a central premise that the conditions are not a direct outcome of the industry, but rather a manifestation of fundamental inequalities rooted in Brazil's colonial history." And from Chapter 1's abstract: "The book begins with a cursory discussion of the history of Brazil's sugarcane industry and some of the past and contemporary challenges, particularly with regard to the use of labor, from slave labor to the current model of recruiting seasonal domestic migrants from less affluent northeastern states."]

Journal articles

Elisabeth R. Anker, "'White and deadly': sugar, slavery, and the sweet taste of freedom," Theory & Event 23:1 (2020), pp. 169-206. https://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/747100. [From the introduction: "If theories of modern freedom are often told through a story of the progressive history of a universal political ideal, what would it mean to reread that story through the history of sugar, which is tied to centuries of brutality, dispossession, and racism? Sugar, I argue, makes palpable, and palatable, the interconnections between individual personhood, rule of law, and private property with settler colonialism, enslavement, resource extraction, and corporate consolidation. Sugar offers both a theory of freedom and a gustatory archive of freedom's violent practices."]

Donica Belisle, "Eating clean: anti-Chinese sugar advertising and the making of white racial purity in the Canadian Pacific," Global Food History 6:1 (2020), pp. 41-59. https://doi.org/10.1080/20549547.2020.1712577. [From the abstract: "Between 1891 and 1914, western Canada's largest sugar manufacturer - BC Sugar - constructed a racialized discourse of food cleanliness. This discourse argued that Chinese-made sugars were contaminated while Canadian-made sugars were clean. Through an analysis of this discourse, this article argues that BC Sugar constructed a purity/polluted binary that suggested that white consumers' racial purity was threatened by Chinese-made sugars. [The article then] . . . illustrates that BC Sugar's construction of pure versus polluted foods supported the effort to establish white supremacy in the Canadian Pacific . . . , demonstrates that discourses of food purity enabled white settlers to construct bodily purity by the eating of so-called clean foods . . . [and] argues that since contemporary discourses of food cleanliness rely on pure versus polluted metaphors, scholars must attend to the motivations driving today's clean eating movement."]

Judith Bronstein, Edna J. Stern, and Elisabeth Yehuda, "Franks, locals and sugar cane: a case study of cultural interaction in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem," Journal of Medieval History 45:3 (2019), pp. 316-330. https://doi.org/10.1080/03044181.2019.1612185. [From the abstract: "This study examines influences and cultural interactions between Frankish settlers and the local populations in the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem through the prism of sugar cane. . . . It focuses on sites near Acre for which there is historical and archaeological evidence of sugar production from before the arrival of the crusaders, and during [the] Frankish period (twelfth and thirteenth centuries). After acquainting themselves with the new land and its products, the Franks became largely involved in the production of sugar, one of the kingdom's most lucrative cash-crops, which brought significant technological developments and changes in the lives of local inhabitants."]

Joshua. R. Eichen, "Cheapness and (labor-)power: the role of early modern Brazilian sugar plantations in the racializing Capitalocene," Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 38:1 (2020), pp. 35-52. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775818798035. [Abstract: "This essay looks at the historical geography of sugar plantations in Northeast Brazil during the 16th and 17th centuries to critique the spatio-temporality of the discourse of the Anthropocene. I argue that sugar plantations were key places in early systemic cycles of capital accumulation with their grim calculus of cheap labor-power and acceptable deaths. Sugar plantations were simultaneously prototypical racializing state actors and part of the emergent relations of capital changing the climate. With their rationalized, time-disciplined labor for processing cane into sugar, plantations were not only fundamentally proto-industrial sites, but also one of capital's laboratories of modernity. They were primordial sites of proletarianization, of spatio-temporal patterns that repopulated the Americas and central in the production not of the Anthropocene but of the racializing Capitalocene."]

Francisco Scarano, "Revisiting Puerto Rico's nineteenth-century sugar-and-slavery history," Centro Journal 32:1 (2020), pp. 4-32. ISSN: 15386279; E-ISSN: 21632960. [Abstract: "In the 1970s, a group of young historians took up the challenge of (re) writing historical narratives about Puerto Rico's 19th century. Most of the narratives focused on the economic and social history of the island's integration into the world economy via the export trades in sugar, coffee, and tobacco. No one was more influential than Andrés A. Ramos Mattei in breaking new ground on these historical topics. [See his review of Scarano's Sugar and Slavery (1984) in WSHN No. 6, 1985.] I contributed a study on the sugar plantation economy of the Ponce region - the island's largest - during the first half of the century, a period when production fell largely in the hands of enslaved workers from Africa. The essay revisits the Sugar and Slavery book with the intention of placing it in a larger historiographical context, i.e., writings on the slave-holding Puerto Rican economy and society before and since the book's publication. It concludes that while it raised some significant points, there were also meaningful gaps and silences. I consider three of these (silence on gender and its intersectionalities, missed opportunities on the study of proto-peasantry, and little attention to culture-building) for further conceptualization, calling on future historians of Puerto Rico to take these up in new and more integral investigations."]

Peter van Dam, "Goodbye to grand politics: the cane sugar campaign and the limits of transnational activism, 1968-1974," Contemporary European History 28:4 (2019), pp. 518-534. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0960777319000249. [Abstract: "In 1968 Dutch activists launched a campaign focused on cane sugar as a symbol of unfair trading conditions for the global South. The history of the cane sugar campaign from 1968 to 1974 highlights how European integration provided hope for large-scale change and a common target. This led activists to establish European networks and campaigns. Its demise sheds new light on the new social movements' shift from 'grand politics', aimed at a sudden and drastic transformation through global and European politics, towards incremental change by locally targeting specific companies and countries."]

Karsten Voss and Klaus Weber, "Their most valuable and most vulnerable asset: slaves on the early sugar plantations of Saint-Domingue (1697-1715)," Journal of Global Slavery 5:2 (2020), pp. 204-237. https://doi.org/10.1163/2405836X-00502004. [Abstract: "From 1698, colonial officers and investors from France forged a conglomerate of companies for transforming Saint-Domingue into a sugar colony, thus augmenting incomes of tax farmers and of the crown. Capital was also captured from enemy colonies and generated through trade with Spanish possessions. The most important capital was slaves, both as laborers and mortgageable property - crucial during the War of Spanish Succession, which brought price volatility and speculation in land and sugar. In order to secure the colony's development, authorities restricted rights of owners over their slaves, preventing their sale or abuse. Only around 1715 was such protection of slaves suppressed."]

Catching up

Christopher Ebert, Between Empires: Brazilian Sugar in the Early Atlantic Economy, 1550-1630 (Leiden: Brill, 2008), Pp. 212, ISBN 978-90-04-16768-1 (hb); 978-90-47-44277-6 (eb). [From the publisher's notes: "This study examines the wholesale trade in sugar from Brazil to markets in Europe. The principal market was northwestern Europe, but for much of the time between 1550 and 1630 Portugal was drawn into the conflict between Habsburg Spain and the Dutch Republic. In spite of political obstacles, the trade persisted because it was not subject to monopolies and was relatively lightly regulated and taxed. The investment structure was highly international, as Portugal and northwestern Europe exchanged communities of merchants who were mobile and inter-imperial in both their composition and organization. This conclusion challenges an imperial or mercantilist perspective of the Atlantic economy in its earliest phases."]

Lizette Cabrera Salcedo, De los bueyes al vapor: caminos de la tecnologia del azúcar en Puerto Rico y el Caribe (San Juan: La Editorial, Universidad de Puerto Rico, 2010), Pp. 497, ISBN 0847711315; 9780847711314 (pb).

Tsugitaka Sato, "Sugar in the economic life of Mamluk Egypt," Mamlu­k Studies Review 8:2 (2004), pp. 87-107. https://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/1106.

Tsugitaka Sato, Sugar in the Social Life of Medieval Islam (Leiden: Brill, 2014), Pp. 232, ISBN 978-90-04-27752-6 (hb); 978-90-04-28156-1 (eb). [From the publisher's notes: The author "explores the actual day-to-day life in medieval Muslim societies through different aspects of sugar. Drawing from a wealth of historical sources - chronicles, geographies, travel accounts, biographies, medical and pharmacological texts, and more - he describes sugarcane cultivation, sugar production, the sugar trade, and sugar's use as a sweetener, a medicine, and a symbol of power. He gives us a new perspective on the history of the Middle East, as well as the history of sugar across the world." See also the review by Mohamed Ouerfelli, in Mamluk Studies Review 20 (2017), pp. 247-251.https://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/971].

With acknowledgement to OATD.ORG:

Alvaro Jose Moreno Garcia, The entrepreneur as an agent of change in the economy: the case of James M. Eder in early Colombia. University of Virginia, PhD, Business Administration, 2019. https://dx.doi.org/10.18130/v3-yr7z-1x63. [From the abstract: "This dissertation unveils the events that led to the establishment of the first industrial sugar mill in Colombia in 1901. It is a study of entrepreneurial history that tracks the international endeavors the Latvian-born American entrepreneur James M. Eder undertook in the Colombian Cauca River Valley during the second half of the nineteenth century. . . . Over forty years, Eder became a pioneer of Colombia's industrialization, while transforming the Cauca River Valley's infrastructure, commerce, and trade."]

Bianka Vidonja Balanzategui, Small sugar farmer agency in the tropics 1872-1914 and the anomalous Herbert River Farmers' Association. James Cook University, College of Arts, Society and Education, PhD, History, 2019. https://doi.org/10.25903/5e461faf4ed40. [From the abstract: "On the Herbert [River] a plantation mode of sugar production began in 1872. The . . . HRFA [Herbert River Farmers' Association] . . . actively participate[d] in the transition of the tropical Australian sugar industry from plantation to small, family farms by 1914. . . . Accounts of the origins and nature of the sugar industry agricultural association movement focus exclusively on the planter associations while small sugar farmer associations are virtually invisible in the scholarship. Agricultural associations were vehicles both planters and farmers used to access rural extension, promote agricultural skills and innovation, and lobby with one voice. A top-down approach has made for a void in the understanding and appreciation of the development and role of small sugar industry agricultural associations in Australia. The Australian small sugar farmer' association was unique in the global sugar industry association movement and the HRFA was the first of its kind in the plantation era in tropical Australia."]

This issue of the World Sugar History Newsletter has been compiled by David Lincoln and Peter Blanchard. Correspondence should be sent to David Lincoln, Department of Sociology, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch, Cape Town, 7700, South Africa david.lincoln@uct.ac.za, or to Peter Blanchard, Department of History, University of Toronto, 100 St. George Street, Toronto, ON, Canada M5S3G3 peter.blanchard@utoronto.ca. Past issues of the Newsletter can be found at http://projects.chass.utoronto.ca/wshn/