Sugar and Civilization: Cane Variety Research and Global Racial Hierarchies, 1910s–20s

Through the 1910s and 1920s commentators typically argued that the taste for and capacity to produce sugar signified civilization and racial progress. By this logic it seems that the became significantly more civilized after the Spanish American War of 1898, when it acquired a veritable sugar empire. tariff policies and capital investments stimulated the production of sugar in supposedly less-civilized tropical islands, including the,, Puerto Rico, and. This paper argues that the cultural politics of sugar consumption and production in this context were organized around ideas about civilization and purity. In particular the paper describes how sugar planters articulated these themes as they exploited the resources of insular sugar producers to solve their own agronomic and social problems between 1910 and 1930.

Beginning around 1912, a virus decimated’s plantations, which had been planted to a single, disease-vulnerable variety of cane. More than plant pathology was at stake. sugar planters feared that the genetic fragility of their cane plants mirrored the weakness of their white supremacy, and that as their sugar industry declined so too would’s civilization. Planters reacted by initiating a global program of sugarcane research. The U.S. Department of Agriculture collaborated with them by sponsoring exploration, breeding, and variety tests at newly established experiment stations across the Caribbean and. The USDA simultaneously implemented plant quarantines and border inspections to regulate the international movement of potentially diseased cane plants.

This paper argues that the technologies and language of exploration, breeding, and border control paralleled the popular fascination with racial purity and immigration restriction in the 1920s. By taking plant materials from “uncivilized” colonies and improving them through scientific breeding, the USDA and sugar planters hoped to save’s faltering plantation “civilization.”