This panel aims to complicate the tortured history of sugar by presenting three new research works highlighting 19th century efforts in France, the United States, and the Russian Empire to reform the conditions of sugar production and consumption.

As historians know well, cane sugar is entwined with European colonization of the New World, destruction of indigenous peoples, transatlantic trade in slaves from Africa, a plantation model that produced prodigious profits and even higher death rates, growing demand for sweets and liquors among widening consumer strata on multiple continents, imperial wars, epidemics, and piracy; and thus, suffering of peoples on epic scales as the cost of a luxury good. Yet by the 19th century there were those who imagined that, to coin a phrase, another sugar was possible.

Many historians remain less cognizant of modernizing and progressive networks that coalesced around sugar industries and consumption in the post-Napoleonic world. New production regions arose in Europe, making sugar from beets without need of a tropical climate. This converged with visions of agro-industrial production for domestic consumption, employing free wage-labor or an independent entrepreneurial peasantry. Some even believed this would help end both slavery and overseas colonization.

As 1820s France watched the rise of an industrialized Britain, beet sugar became central to the plans of progressive landholders who advocated French agro-capitalism: industrialization with agriculture and industry in balance. Mounira Keghida’s study finds these men were influenced by older ideas of Physiocracy. They believed that reliance on domestic resources was the key to sustainability and to avoiding peasant displacement and social upheaval. After the 1830 revolution, a beet-centered agro-industry group in parliament was, not coincidentally, also at the forefront of opposing the renewed colonialism of the French incursions in Algeria.

In the same era, in the United States, sugar was a fixture of tea-time rituals and parlors in which women of middle standing, deprived of lives in the public square, found spaces not only for socializing but for building movements and networking across regions. Michael Krondl’s work uncovers the role of these homosocial spaces in abolitionist movements to boycott slave-grown sugar; and later, the temperance movement’s encouragement of the consumption of sweetened, non-alcoholic beverages.

From the mid-19th century, the sugar beet became a staple in the Russian Empire’s efforts to modernize agriculture, giving rise to a new entrepreneurial class of “sugar barons” from diverse social, ethnic and religious backgrounds in the Ukraine. Olena Petrenko’s research examines their tense relationship with the imperial center. Vast new beet-sugar enterprises became models for how technology could increase yields and allow efficient organization of labor, fostering regional industrialization. Even greater changes came in Kyiv, “sugar capital” of the empire and site of a massive new urbanization.

Anti-colonialist French beet-sugar champions, modernizing sugar enterprises of Czarist Russia, and American abolition and temperance women organizing from tea parlors all show the changing significance of the sweet powder in 19th century societies. Three very different and spatially distant networks each imagined ways to overcome its bitter historical legacies.