Session Abstract

This panel brings critical attention to the interplay among economy, politics, and culture in modern histories of sugar. Using a comparative framework, we ask what new questions might emerge when we juxtapose research by historians of France and its colonies, the United States and its colonies, along with the independent nations of Latin America. The period between the mid-nineteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries witnessed intensified colonial and imperial encounters and rivalries. Yet the period also witnessed surprising convergence among the trade, labor, immigration, and land policies that nations used to negotiate their place in the global economy. Dramatic increases in global sugar production in European beet and tropical cane areas meant that the commodity brought European, North American, and Asian colonial projects into dialogue with each other and with Latin America. Ironically sugar markets were integrated at the global level at the same time that individual nation-states began asserting their sovereignty through a variety of policies that shaped the sugar trade. Writing from different geographic frameworks, each panelist asks how nations negotiated questions of national economy, political sovereignty, and colonial trade through the politics of the sugar trade. Panelists ask how and whether the nation state remains the most useful lens through which to study sugar in the twentieth century. We consider the methodological tensions between local studies and larger-scale comparative ones.

Heath’s paper offers a case study of the decline of the Guadeloupean sugar industry in the late nineteenth century, ultimately asking why France continued to support sugar production in Guadeloupe when it was no longer financially viable. The paper argues that the “great depression” of the late nineteenth century and rivalry with imperial England and Germany compelled France to maintain sugar production in Guadeloupe under the guise of “national interest.”

Merleaux’s paper describes the changes in the global sugar market during World War I, when the United States stepped forward to coordinate a complex and changing geography of production and consumption. The decline of the European beet sugar industry during the war shifted attention to tropical cane producers. The United States sought efficiency and order in sugar distribution, and brought their own colonial experiences to bear on the effort to coordinate and standardize the global cane industry.

McLeod’s paper surveys a broad geography and chronology, comparing the sugar industries of post-independence Latin American nations from the mid-nineteenth through the twentieth centuries. Using a quantitative approach, this paper examines the role of sugar in export-led development in Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Peru, and Puerto Rico.

At the broadest level, the panel argues that commodities offer a rich and productive methodology for doing comparative history, and for understanding global and transnational transformations in the modern world economy. Each of the papers asks what the historical analysis of modern sugar can reveal about the broad contours of the shift from nineteenth century imperial and colonial political economy to the neoliberal, multilateral trade systems that characterized the twentieth century.