Doctoral Dissertation Research: An Empire of Purity: Making the Modern Sugar Economy

Massachusetts Institute Of Technology, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

Introduction This award supports doctoral dissertation research on changes in the notion of sugar that resulted from new modes of sugar production that were first implemented in the late 19th century. Between 1875 and 1925, in response to massive competitive pressure, the nature of sugar production in the Caribbean and throughout the cane-growing world was radically transformed. New sources and systems of free and coerced labor took the place of slavery, and small animal-powered plantations gave way to huge, technically sophisticated factories. The dramatic political, social, economic, and environmental changes brought by industrialization and centralization have been extensively studied. Yet the most remarkable change of all was perhaps the most subtle, a transformation of the very idea of sugar itself and what it meant for sugar to be pure. Until the end of the nineteenth century, "sugar" denoted a natural substance, something that could only be valued through the knowledge and skill of experienced individuals using all their senses and their judgment. But during the last decades of the 19th century and first decades of the 20th, this kind of evaluation of sugar's quality was superseded in commerce and production by a new concept of value, the chemical determination of its sucrose content. This dissertation explores the effect of this change in the meaning and nature of sugar and purity on the global production, labor, and trade in sugar; and how the sugar economy itself shaped those new ideas of value. Intellectual Merit The project focuses on two particular economic and intellectual relationships: first between the United States and Cuba, the source of half of US-consumed sugar; and second between Cuba and Glasgow, which provided the heavy equipment and expertise for modern sugar factories in Cuba and around the world. By analyzing published books and journals, factory production records, correspondences, and especially legal and trade disputes, in Cuban, British, and American archives, this project will demonstrate how this shift from sensory to scientific knowledge reshaped the nature of trade, production, and the organization of work in the world of sugar. The project will reconsider commodities and processes of commodification in history. Unlike the mechanical commodification of cotton, wheat, and other well-studied examples, sugar became a globally tradable item through the standardizing power of science. This research will clarify how natural products become globally exchangeable goods, and how that process affects the people and places touched by exchanges. It will use the history of science, especially science and empire, to understand the history of global trade; conversely, it will use the history of commodities and trade to help understand how science is contested and stabilized across vast distances. Potential Broader impacts This dissertation project will be of interest to scholars of business, economics, and trade as well as to historians of science. In addition to publishing a scholarly book and articles based on the dissertation and delivering presentations at professional scholarly meetings, the Co-PI intends to publish two articles aimed at nonspecialist audiences. These articles would use the sugar example to emphasize challenges facing all modern commodity exchanges, such as determining when dispersed producers, traders, and consumers should trust what they are buying and selling when such trusts depend on scientific measurements made on the far side of the planet.