“This Peculiarly Indispensible Commodity”: Sugar, the United States, and the Logic of Commodification during World War I

The United States took a leading role in coordinating a complex global geography of sugar production and consumption during and immediately after World War I. The war shifted the global sugar economy in fundamental ways. Cane sugar from the Caribbean and Pacific colonies took on an increasing significance as European beet sugar production dwindled. The United States responded to these conditions by creating new institutions to control both the domestic and international sugar trade. Policymakers sought efficiency and order in sugar distribution, and they brought their own recent colonial experiences to bear as they coordinated the global cane industry. Administrators justified the U.S. government’s unprecedented involvement in the day to day management of the sugar trade because of the benefits of sugar as a cheap food for soldiers and civilians alike.

Administrators discovered that sugar remained imperfectly commodified, and many colonial producers were not yet fully integrated into standard systems of centrifugal sugar manufacture. New market and political imperatives during the war heightened the demand for standard products and large scale production. Investors redoubled their efforts to develop modern cane industries in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and the Philippines in these years. Wartime management of the sugar economy by the United States thus helped to solidify new standards in the modernization and commodification of sugar across a broad geography.

This paper argues that the intensified processes of commodification during World War I were an outcome of U.S. policies towards their own island territories, but were also in dialog with the sugar trade beyond the sphere of immediate U.S. sovereignty. The efforts of U.S. administrators would later serve as a model for policymakers around the world as they coped with crisis in the sugar economy in the 1920s and 1930s.