Sugar: A Bittersweet History - Hardcover

'A richly dramatic and fascinating history of how sugar Africanized the New World' - Sun Times. 'Brilliant and assiduously researched. Abbott writes about the history of sugar with a fluid, fierce narrative power and a vengeful intelligence. Her personal stake in the story - via her own recently discovered West Indian heritage - makes the book all the more compelling' - Quill & Quire. 'Read it and you'll never stir sugar into your coffee or sprinkle it over your berries in quite the same mindless way. I promise' - Montreal Gazette. 'Elizabeth Abbott mixes anthropology with history in her confection of insights ... it is a strength of her moving and dazzling achievement that Abbott is never conventional, preachy, or platitudinous' - Guardian [on "A History of Celibacy"].

Much like oil today, sugar was once the most powerful commodity on earth. It shaped world affairs, influencing the economic policies of nations, driving international trade and wreaking environmental havoc. The Western world's addiction to sugar came at a terrible human cost: the near extinction of the new world indigenous people gave rise to a new form of slavery, as millions of captured Africans were crammed into ships to make the dangerous voyage to Caribbean cane plantations. What began as the extraordinarily expensive luxury of nobles and the very wealthy has become a staple in the modern world. Indeed, it played its own role in creating that world, fuelling the workers of the Industrial Revolution, and giving rise to the craze for fast food. "Sugar: A Bittersweet History" tells the extraordinary, dramatic and thought-provoking story of this most commonplace of products from its very origins to the present day. Elizabeth Abbott examines: how and in what quantities we still consume sugar; its role in the crisis of obesity and diabetes; how its cultivation continues to affect the environment; and, how coerced labor continues in so many sugar-producing nations. Richly detailed, impeccably researched and thoroughly compelling, "Sugar" is a comprehensive social history of a substance that has revolutionized the way we eat, and poignant testimony to the suffering endured in the name of satisfying the world's sweet tooth.