A fascinating persuasive history of how sugar has shaped the world, from European colonies to our modern diets. In this eye-opening study, Sidney Mintz shows how Europeans and Americans transformed sugar from a rare foreign luxury to a commonplace necessity of modern life, and how it changed the history of capitalism and industry. He discusses the production and consumption of sugar, and reveals how closely interwoven are sugar's origins as a "slave" crop grown in Europe's tropical colonies with is use first as an extravagant luxury for the aristocracy, then as a staple of the diet of the new industrial proletariat. Finally, he considers how sugar has altered work patterns, eating habits, and our diet in modern times.

Sidney W. Mintz is professor of anthropology at Johns Hopkins University, whose faculty he joined after teaching for two decades at Yale. He is the author of Worker in the Cane, Caribbean Transformations, and Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom: Excursions into Eating, Culture, and the Past, co-author of The People of Puerto Rico, and editor of Slavery, Colonialism and Racism.