Shortly after publishing our previous issue of the Newsletter, we received the sad news that Bill had died on 23 September 2020. This came after years of battling an illness that may have restricted Bill physicaaly but certainly failed to stop him from achieving what he set out to do in a variety of different fields. He was, of course, the driving force (along with Adrian Graves) behind this newsletter that followed from his research into the history of the Peruvian sugar industry. His interest developed in the early 1970s when he decided to branch out from studying the history of the British turnpike system and "retool" as a specialist in Peruvian economic history. Bill's research in Peru led to publications dealing with the Peruvian sugar industry as well as the economic history of South America before 1930. His work established contacts around the world and fostered the idea of bringing like-minded people together to share their common interest in the history of sugar. Three conferences followed along with the publication of their proceedings and this newsletter. In the mid-1990s Bill shifted focus once again as a consequence of both his health and the changes occurring in Britain's universities under the Thatcher government. He decided he'd had enough of academe, took an early retirement, and then devoted his attention to new endeavours. He became a driving force among disabled groups, participating in their activities and conferences in Britian and elsewhere in Europe. He continued writing and publishing, now in the form of short stories, novels, and, most recently, poetry. A list is available on his website, https://www.billalbert.me.uk/, along with other information about his life and copies of some of his short stories that reveal his delightful sense of humour and his keen appreciation of the absurd. To say that Bill was a memorable person would be an understatement. He was an unforgettable presence, a force for equality and progressive change, a most generous colleague, and a dear friend to numerous people around the world. Our condolences go out to Gill and to the rest of Bill's family. Peter Blanchard Books Lawrence Gibbs, Nebraska Sweet Beets: A History of Sugar Valley (Charleston/Cheltenham: Arcadia Publishing/The History Press, 2020), Pp. 192, ISBN 9781467144278 (pb). [From the publisher's note: "Sugar beets are as tenaciously rooted in Nebraska's history as they are in its soil, especially in a seventy-mile stretch of the North Platte Valley that extended into eastern Wyoming. The state's first processing facility opened in Grand Island in 1890, boasting the largest mill in the world. The height of the beet boom occurred in the early part of the twentieth century as Wyobraskan towns courted factory locations as feverishly as rival sugar companies competed for territory, and an irrigation network turned the region into America's Valley of the Nile. Some rail lines have disappeared from the map, while catastrophes like the Scottsbluff and Bayard sugar bin explosions and the Gering Molasses spill will never be forgotten."] Noa Kekuewa Lincoln, Ko: An Ethnobotanical Guide to Hawaiian Sugarcane Cultivars (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2020) pp. 192, ISBN 9780824873363 (pb). [From the publisher's note: "The enormous impact of sugarcane plantations in Hawai'i has overshadowed the fact that Native Hawaiians introduced sugarcane to the islands nearly a millennium before Europeans arrived. In fact, Hawaiians cultivated sugarcane extensively in a broad range of ecosystems using diverse agricultrual systems and developed dozens of native varieties of ko (Hawaiian sugarcane. Sugarcane played a vital role in the culture and livelihood of Native Hawaiians, as it did for many other Indigenous peoples across the Pacific. This long-awaited volume presents an overview of more than one hundred varieties of native and heirloom ko as well as detailed varietal descriptions of cultivars that are held in collections today. [It] . . . includes information on all known native canes developed by Hawaiian agriculturalists before European contact, cane introduced to Hawai'i from elsewhere in the Pacific, and a handful of early commercial hybrids."] Forthcoming Dale W. Tomich, Reinaldo Funes Monzote, Carlos Venegas Fornias, & Rafael de Bivar Marquese, Reconstructing the Landscapes of Slavery: A Visual History of the Plantation in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021), Pp. 192, ISBN 978-1-4696-6311-1 (hb); 978-1-4696-6312-8 (pb). [From the publisher's note: "Assessing a unique collection of more than eighty images, this innovative study of visual culture reveals the productive organization of plantation landscapes in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. These landscapes - from cotton fields in the Lower Mississippi Valley to sugar plantations in western Cuba and coffee plantations in Brazil's Paraiba Valley - demonstrate how the restructuring of the capitalist world economy led to the formation of new zones of commodity production. By extension, these environments radically transformed slave labor and the role such labor plaed in the expansion of the global economy."] Republications Alfred S. Eichner, The Emergence of Oligopoly: Sugar Refining as a Case Study (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019), pp. 402, ISBN 9781421430409 (pb); 9781421430836 (eb). Read for free on project MUSE: https://muse.jhu.edu/book/68017 [Originaly published in 1969. From the publisher's note: "Sugar refining was one of the first major industries to be consolidated (in the US), and its expertise was in many ways typical of the development of other industries. Eichner's focus is on the changing pattern of industrial organization."] Carl Henry Feuer, Jamaica and the Sugar Worker Cooperatives: The Politics of Reform (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019), Pp. 236, ISBN 9780367017316 (hb); 9780429047176 (eb); 9780367167189 (pb, in 2020). [Originally published in 1984.] Elizabeth McLean Petras, Jamaican Labor Migration: White Capital and Black Labor, 1850-1930 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019, Pp. 308, ISBN 9780367014216 (hb); 9780429044076 (eb); 9780367164089 (pb, forthcoming 2021). [Originally published in 1988.]
Saskia K. S. Wilhelms, Haitian and Dominican Sugarcane Workers in Dominican Bateyes: Patterns and Effects of Prejudice, Stereotypes, and Discrimination (Abingdon: Routledge, 2021), Pp. 141, ISBN 9783825821968 (pb). [Originally published in 1994 by Lit Verlag (Munster).] Chapters in books Ashok Kumar Shrivastava, "Pioneer knowledge of sugarcane and sugar". In Sugar and Sugar Derivatives: Changing Consumer Preferences edited by Narendra Mohan & Priyanka Singh (Singapore: Springer Nature, 2020), Pp. xxiv, 307, ISBN 978-981-15-6662-2 (hb); 978-981-15-6663-9 (eb). [Focused on India's sugar industry, this book opens with Shrivastava's chapter offering "a perusal of the ancient Indian literature (on sugarcane and sugar), both Vedic and Ayurvedic".] Uwe Spiekermann, "Labor as a bottleneck: Entangled commodity chains of sugar in Hawaii and California in the late nineteenth century". In Global Commodity Chains and Labor Relations edited by Andrea Komlosy and Goran Music (Leiden: Boston Brill, 2021), Pp. 392, ISBN 978-90-04-44803-2 (hb); 978-90-04-44804-9 (eb). Review essay Pooja Bhatia, "The end of the plantocracy". (Review of The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Hiatian Revolution by Julius S. Scott; Maroon Nation: A History of Revolutionary Haiti by Johnhenry Gonzalez; and Black Spartacus: The Epic Life of Toussaint Louverture by Sudhir Hazareesingh), in London Review of Books 42:22 (19th November 2020). https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n22/pooja-bhatia/the-end-of-the-plantocracy/. Other Benjamin R. Cohen, Pure Adulteration: Cheating on Nature in the Age of Manufactured Food (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), Pp. 320, ISBN 9780226377926 (hb); 9780226667096 (eb). [From the publisher's note: "In the latter nineteenth century, extraordinary changes in food and agriculture gave rise to new tensions in the ways people understood, obtained, trusted, and ate their food. This was the Era of Adulteration. . . . Cohen follows farmers, manufacturers, grocers, hucksters, housewives, politicians, and scientific analysts as they struggled to demarcate and patrol the ever-contingent, always contested border between purity and adulteration, and as, at the end of the nineteenth century, the very notion of a pure food changed." He examines glucose in Chapter 6, "Glucose in the Empire of Sugar".] David T. Courtwright, The Age of Addiction: How Bad Habits Became Big Business (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019), Pp. 336, ISBN 9780674737372 (hb); 9780674248229 (pb) [From the publisher's note: "What can we do to resist temptations [such as sugar] that insidiously and deliberately rewire our brains? Nothing, David Courtwright says, unless we understand the history and character of the global enterprises that create and cater to our bad habits."] Barbara Freese, Industrial-Strength Denial: Eight Stories of Corporations Defending the Indefensible, from the Slave Trade to Climate Change (Oakland: University of California Press, 2021), Pp. 352, ISBN: 9780520296282 (hb); 9780520383081 (pb); 9780520968851 (eb). [The first chapter entitled 'A "More Pleasing Representation": The Alternate Reality Crafted by the Slave Lobby', focuses on sugar plantation slavery.] Chris Otter, Diet for a Large Planet: Industrial Britain, Food Systems, and World Ecology (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2020), Pp. 400, ISBN 9780226697109 (hb); 9780226705965 (eb). [From the publisher's note: "This comprehensive history helps us understand how the British played a significant role in making red meat, white bread, and sugar the diet of choice - linked to wealth, luxury, and power - and shows how dietary choices connect to the pressing issues of climate change and food supply."] Catching up Urmi Engineer, "Sugar revisited: Sweetness and the environment in the early modern world". In The Global Lives of Things: The Material Culture of Connections in the Early Modern World edited by Anne Gerritson & Giorgio Riello (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015), Pp. 266, ISBN 9781138776661 (hb); 9781138776753 (pb); 9781315672908 (eb). Chuck Meide, "The sugar factory in the colonial West Indies: an archaeological and historical comparative analysis," (College of William and Mary: pdf article, 2003), Pp. 71. https://www.academia.edu/3258102/The_Sugar_Factory_in_the_Colonial_West_Indies_an_Archaeological_and_Historical_Comparative_Analysis With acknowledgement to OATD.ORG: Samuel Tobias Aylett, The Museum of London, 1976-2007: reimagining metropolitan narratives in postcolonial London. Open University, PhD, Arts & Social Science, 2020. https://oro.open.ac.uk/70375 [From the Abstract: "'The Peopling of London' (exhibition), launched in 1993 . . . marked the Museum's initial serious engagement with the legacies of British colonialism in relation to its urban constituents. The legacy of this small exhibition led to incrreased engagement with postcolonial histories, culminating with 'London, Sugar and Slavery' in 2007, staged at the Museum of London Docklands to mark the bicentenary of the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade. The cumulative picture is a complex, sometimes ambiguous, relationship between the Museum and London's colonial past."] Michael Fraikin writes that he has one of the largest collections of scripophily related to the sugar industry - presently numbering around 1200 certificates - and has begun putting it on a website: Startseite - Museum Fraikin (museum-fraikin.de) https://museum-fraikin.de/. The site has over 200 pieces that presently are almost all from Germany or related to Java, but he has plans to expand and would be pleased to receive any feedback at 0615872741@t-online.de.
This marks the final issue of the World Sugar History Newsletter. It has had a remarkable run despite its rather specific focus and appeal. It first appeared in November 1982 under the co-direction of Bill Albert and Adrian Graves following a conference entitled "Crisis and Change in the INternational Sugar Economy 1860-1914" held at Edinburgh in September of that year. This was followed by two more conferences as well as the publication of their proceedings and the appearance of this newsletter. Bill and Adrian took advantage of the interest and enthusiasm raised by the conferences and over the following years published book reviews, lists of sugar-related publications, archive reports, conference reports, research, and the like. In December 1994 Jock Galloway and Peter Blanchard took over the reins of the WSHN and continued the format established by Bill and Adrian. In September 2016 David Lincoln assumed Jock's role and worked with Peter to maintain the Newsletter's production. David had committed himself to five years in this role and that period has now come to an end, and with it we bring the Newsletter to a close. It has been a great pleasure to have spread information about the history of sugar to our numerous readers. The communications over the years have indicated the breadth of the Newsletter's impact, as has the willingness of colleagues to provide book reviews and a wide variety of other relevant information. The WSHN will remaiin alive in its existing website so that future readers will have access to the information for years to come. And so we say many thanks to all and goodbye. Peter Blanchard and David Lincoln 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/
BILL ALBERT: AN APPRECIATION
RECENT PUBLICATIONS
RECENT PhD THESIS
SCRIPOPHILY RELATED TO THE SUGAR INDUSTRY
GOODBYE