The World of Sugar

Traversing 2,500 years of global history, Ulbe Bosma shows how sugar, once a luxury reserved for Eastern emperors, stoked a mania in the West, transforming diets and ecosystems, destroying and creating cultures, and shaping the history of bondage and freedom. A major source of calories only since 1900, sugar has suddenly revolutionized our world.

“An extraordinary achievement.” —David Edgerton, Literary Review

“A remarkably researched, comprehensive, and indispensable book for everyone who wishes to understand how sugar and the sugar industry have shaped the world in which we live.” —Gary Taubes, author of The Case Against Sugar

For most of history, humans did without refined sugar. Then, suddenly, it was everywhere. How did sugar find its way into almost all the food we eat, fostering illness and ecological crisis along the way? 

The World of Sugar begins with the earliest evidence of sugar production, tracing its origins in India around the sixth century BC and showing how its introduction to Europe in the Middle Ages spawned a brutal quest for supply. European cravings were satisfied by enslaved labor; two-thirds of the 12.5 million Africans taken across the Atlantic were destined for sugar plantations. By the twentieth century, sugar was a major source of calories in diets across Europe and North America. 

Sugar transformed life on every continent, creating and destroying whole cultures through industrialization, labor migration, and changes in diet. Sugar made fortunes, corrupted governments, and shaped the policies of technocrats. And it provoked freedom cries that rang with world-changing consequences. In Ulbe Bosma’s definitive telling, to understand sugar’s past is to glimpse the origins of our own world of corn syrup and ethanol and begin to see the threat that a not-so-simple commodity poses to our bodies, our environment, and our communities.