5 ideas
Caribbean sugar plantations fused agricultural field labor with continuous industrial processing in mills and boiling houses, requiring time-discipline, division of labor, and coordinated shifts. Mintz argues they were therefore industrial enterprises in organization well before European factories, making enslaved workers among the first industrial proletarians.
Instead of studying producers and consumers as separate worlds, follow a single commodity from the site where it is made to the site where it is eaten. This reveals that Caribbean slavery and English working-class diets were two ends of one system. Each side's conditions explain the other.
Sugar, especially in tea and on bread and jam, gave English workers quick, cheap calories and the stimulation of a hot drink. It let a fast meal stand in for cooked food as the factory day lengthened and women's time for cooking shrank. Colonial slave labor thus subsidized the reproduction of the metropolitan workforce at lower cost to employers.
In medieval and early modern Europe, sugar was first a rare medicine and a spice akin to pepper. It then became a display material for elaborate sculpted 'subtleties' at aristocratic feasts, before turning into a preservative and everyday sweetener. The same substance changed its social function as it became cheaper and more available.
Mintz argues that the British working class's craving for sugar was not a simple expression of innate liking for sweetness. It was produced by those who controlled supply, pricing, tariffs, and working conditions, who made sugar cheap and available while other foods were not. The meanings people attach to foods arise within structures that others control, so what counts as 'choice' in diet reflects political and economic power.