ABOUT THIS BOOK

A surprising look at how modern capitalism changed sugar from a natural food to a scientific commodity.

Sugar is everywhere in the western diet, blamed for epidemics of obesity, diabetes, and other modern maladies. Our addiction to sweetness has a long and unsavory history. Over the past five hundred years, sugar has shaped empires, made fortunes for a few, and brought misery for millions of workers both enslaved and free. How did sugar become a defining modern food and an essential global commodity?

In Unrefined, David Singerman recasts our thinking about this crucial substance in the history of capitalism. Before the nineteenth century, sugar’s value depended on natural qualities: its color, its taste, where it was grown, and who had made it. But beginning around 1850, a combination of plantation owners, industrialists, and scientists set out to redefine sugar itself. Deploying the tools and rhetoric of science, they transformed not just how sugar was produced or traded but even how people thought about it. By changing sugar into a pure chemical object, these forces stripped power from workers and enabled—and obscured—new kinds of fraud, corruption, and monopoly.

Taking us to unexplored spaces in the world of sugar, from laboratories and docks to refineries and the halls of Congress, Singerman illuminates dark intersections of the histories of corruption, science, and capitalism.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

David Singerman is assistant professor of history and American studies at the University of Virginia.

REVIEWS

"This robust and perceptive book traces the startling pathways through which sugar was turned into a standardized commodity. Using powerful stories and striking imagery, from beet fields and cane plantations to factories and commodity markets, Singerman demonstrates the artful combinations, violent collisions, and unlikely schemes that made sugar seem the most uniform of all goods, even while it exhibited an astonishing range of subtle distinctions. This book will be indispensable for anyone concerned with the history and politics of food, science, and how capital shaped the world of goods."

— Simon Schaffer, emeritus professor of the history of science, University of Cambridge

"Singerman has written an astonishing history of the making of sugar. With a keen eye for telling and absurd detail, he scrutinizes all the forms of knowledge, labor, and power crystallized in a substance so complex that it often appears irreducibly natural. Unrefined is pure brilliance.”

— Augustine Sedgewick, author of 'Coffeeland: One Man’s Dark Empire and the Making of Our Favorite Drug'

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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