Sugar: The World Corrupted: From Slavery to Obesity

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Author :
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 1681777207
Total Pages : 352 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (817 download)

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Book Synopsis Sugar: The World Corrupted: From Slavery to Obesity by : James Walvin

Download or read book Sugar: The World Corrupted: From Slavery to Obesity written by James Walvin and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2018-04-03 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The modern successor to Sweetness and Power, James Walvin’s Sugar is a rich and engaging work on a topic that continues to change our world. How did a simple commodity, once the prized monopoly of kings and princes, become an essential ingredient in the lives of millions, before mutating yet again into the cause of a global health epidemic? Prior to 1600, sugar was a costly luxury, the domain of the rich. But with the rise of the sugar colonies in the New World over the following century, sugar became cheap, ubiquitous and an everyday necessity. Less than fifty years ago, few people suggested that sugar posed a global health problem. And yet today, sugar is regularly denounced as a dangerous addiction, on a par with tobacco. While sugar consumption remains higher than ever—in some countries as high as 100lbs per head per year—some advertisements even proudly proclaim that their product contains no sugar. How did sugar grow from prize to pariah? Acclaimed historian James Walvin looks at the history of our collective sweet tooth, beginning with the sugar grown by enslaved people who had been uprooted and shipped vast distances to undertake the grueling labor on plantations. The combination of sugar and slavery would transform the tastes of the Western world. Masterfully insightful and probing, James Walvin reveals the relationship between society and sweetness over the past two centuries—and how it explains our conflicted relationship with sugar today.

Sugar

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Author :
Publisher : Robinson
ISBN 13 : 1472138112
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (721 download)

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Book Synopsis Sugar by : James Walvin

Download or read book Sugar written by James Walvin and published by Robinson. This book was released on 2017-07-13 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An 'entertaining, informative and utterly depressing global history of an important commodity . . . By alerting readers to the ways that modernity's very origins are entangled with a seemingly benign and delicious substance, How Sugar Corrupted the World raises fundamental questions about our world.' Sven Beckert, the Laird Bell professor of American history at Harvard University and the author of Empire of Cotton: A Global History, in the New York Times 'A brilliant and thought-provoking history of sugar and its ironies' Bee Wilson, Wall Street Journal 'Shocking and revelatory . . . no other product has so changed the world, and no other book reveals the scale of its impact.' David Olusoga 'This study could not be more timely.' Laura Sandy, Lecturer in the History of Slavery, University of Liverpool The story of sugar, and of mankind's desire for sweetness in food and drink is a compelling, though confusing story. It is also an historical story. The story of mankind's love of sweetness - the need to consume honey, cane sugar, beet sugar and chemical sweeteners - has important historical origins. To take a simple example, two centuries ago, cane sugar was vital to the burgeoning European domestic and colonial economies. For all its recent origins, today's obesity epidemic - if that is what it is - did not emerge overnight, but instead evolved from a complexity of historical forces which stretch back centuries. We can only fully understand this modern problem, by coming to terms with its genesis and history: and we need to consider the historical relationship between society and sweetness over a long historical span. This book seeks to do just that: to tell the story of how the consumption of sugar - the addition of sugar to food and drink - became a fundamental and increasingly troublesome feature of modern life. Walvin's book is the heir to Sidney Mintz's Sweetness and Power, a brilliant sociological account, but now thirty years old. In addition, the problem of sugar, and the consequent intellectual and political debate about the role of sugar, has been totally transformed in the years since that book's publication.

Sugar

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Author :
Publisher : Hachette UK
ISBN 13 : 1472138112
Total Pages : 352 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (721 download)

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Book Synopsis Sugar by : James Walvin

Download or read book Sugar written by James Walvin and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2017-07-13 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An 'entertaining, informative and utterly depressing global history of an important commodity . . . By alerting readers to the ways that modernity's very origins are entangled with a seemingly benign and delicious substance, How Sugar Corrupted the World raises fundamental questions about our world.' Sven Beckert, the Laird Bell professor of American history at Harvard University and the author of Empire of Cotton: A Global History, in the New York Times 'A brilliant and thought-provoking history of sugar and its ironies' Bee Wilson, Wall Street Journal 'Shocking and revelatory . . . no other product has so changed the world, and no other book reveals the scale of its impact.' David Olusoga 'This study could not be more timely.' Laura Sandy, Lecturer in the History of Slavery, University of Liverpool The story of sugar, and of mankind's desire for sweetness in food and drink is a compelling, though confusing story. It is also an historical story. The story of mankind's love of sweetness - the need to consume honey, cane sugar, beet sugar and chemical sweeteners - has important historical origins. To take a simple example, two centuries ago, cane sugar was vital to the burgeoning European domestic and colonial economies. For all its recent origins, today's obesity epidemic - if that is what it is - did not emerge overnight, but instead evolved from a complexity of historical forces which stretch back centuries. We can only fully understand this modern problem, by coming to terms with its genesis and history: and we need to consider the historical relationship between society and sweetness over a long historical span. This book seeks to do just that: to tell the story of how the consumption of sugar - the addition of sugar to food and drink - became a fundamental and increasingly troublesome feature of modern life. Walvin's book is the heir to Sidney Mintz's Sweetness and Power, a brilliant sociological account, but now thirty years old. In addition, the problem of sugar, and the consequent intellectual and political debate about the role of sugar, has been totally transformed in the years since that book's publication.

Sweetness and Power

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Author :
Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 1101666641
Total Pages : 320 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (16 download)

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Book Synopsis Sweetness and Power by : Sidney W. Mintz

Download or read book Sweetness and Power written by Sidney W. Mintz and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1986-08-05 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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. "Like sugar, Mintz is persuasive, and his detailed history is a real treat." -San Francisco Chronicle

How Sugar Corrupted the World

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Author :
Publisher : Robinson
ISBN 13 : 9781472138125
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (381 download)

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Book Synopsis How Sugar Corrupted the World by : James Walvin

Download or read book How Sugar Corrupted the World written by James Walvin and published by Robinson. This book was released on 2019-02-07 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

The Company

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Author :
Publisher : Anchor Canada
ISBN 13 : 0385694091
Total Pages : 505 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (856 download)

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Book Synopsis The Company by : Stephen Bown

Download or read book The Company written by Stephen Bown and published by Anchor Canada. This book was released on 2021-10-26 with total page 505 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER A thrilling new telling of the story of modern Canada's origins. The story of the Hudson's Bay Company, dramatic and adventurous and complex, is the story of modern Canada's creation. And yet it hasn't been told in a book for over thirty years, and never in such depth and vivid detail as in Stephen R. Bown's exciting new telling. The Company started out small in 1670, trading practical manufactured goods for furs with the Indigenous inhabitants of inland subarctic Canada. Controlled by a handful of English aristocrats, it expanded into a powerful political force that ruled the lives of many thousands of people--from the lowlands south and west of Hudson Bay, to the tundra, the great plains, the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific northwest. It transformed the culture and economy of many Indigenous groups and ended up as the most important political and economic force in northern and western North America. When the Company was faced with competition from French traders in the 1780s, the result was a bloody corporate battle, the coming of Governor George Simpson--one of the greatest villains in Canadian history--and the Company assuming political control and ruthless dominance. By the time its monopoly was rescinded after two hundred years, the Hudson's Bay Company had reworked the entire northern North American world. Stephen R. Bown has a scholar's profound knowledge and understanding of the Company's history, but wears his learning lightly in a narrative as compelling, and rich in well-drawn characters, as a page-turning novel.

Candy Experiments

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Author :
Publisher : Andrews McMeel Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1449418376
Total Pages : 202 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (494 download)

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Book Synopsis Candy Experiments by : Loralee Leavitt

Download or read book Candy Experiments written by Loralee Leavitt and published by Andrews McMeel Publishing. This book was released on 2013-01-03 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Candy is more than a sugary snack. With candy, you can become a scientific detective. You can test candy for secret ingredients, peel the skin off candy corn, or float an “m” from M&M’s. You can spread candy dyes into rainbows, or pour rainbow layers of colored water. You'll learn how to turn candy into crystals, sink marshmallows, float taffy, or send soda spouting skyward. You can even make your own lightning. Candy Experiments teaches kids a new use for their candy. As children try eye-popping experiments, such as growing enormous gummy worms and turning cotton candy into slime, they’ll also be learning science. Best of all, they’ll willingly pour their candy down the drain. Candy Experiments contains 70 science experiments, 29 of which have never been previously published. Chapter themes include secret ingredients, blow it up, sink and float, squash it, and other fun experiments about color, density, and heat. The book is written for children between the ages of 7 and 10, though older and younger ages will enjoy it as well. Each experiment includes basic explanations of the relevant science, such as how cotton candy sucks up water because of capillary action, how Pixy Stix cool water because of an endothermic reaction, and how gummy worms grow enormous because of the water-entangling properties.

Eating the Empire

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Author :
Publisher : Reaktion Books
ISBN 13 : 1789142458
Total Pages : 286 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (891 download)

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Book Synopsis Eating the Empire by : Troy Bickham

Download or read book Eating the Empire written by Troy Bickham and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2020-04-13 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When students gathered in a London coffeehouse and smoked tobacco; when Yorkshire women sipped sugar-infused tea; or when a Glasgow family ate a bowl of Indian curry, were they aware of the mechanisms of imperial rule and trade that made such goods readily available? In Eating the Empire, Troy Bickham unfolds the extraordinary role that food played in shaping Britain during the long eighteenth century (circa 1660–1837), when such foreign goods as coffee, tea, and sugar went from rare luxuries to some of the most ubiquitous commodities in Britain—reaching even the poorest and remotest of households. Bickham reveals how trade in the empire’s edibles underpinned the emerging consumer economy, fomenting the rise of modern retailing, visual advertising, and consumer credit, and, via taxes, financed the military and civil bureaucracy that secured, governed, and spread the British Empire.

Planet Palm

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Publisher : The New Press
ISBN 13 : 1620975246
Total Pages : 354 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (29 download)

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Book Synopsis Planet Palm by : Jocelyn C. Zuckerman

Download or read book Planet Palm written by Jocelyn C. Zuckerman and published by The New Press. This book was released on 2021-01-05 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist, Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism In the tradition of Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation, a groundbreaking global investigation into the industry ravaging the environment and global health—from the James Beard Award–winning journalist Over the past few decades, palm oil has seeped into every corner of our lives. Worldwide, palm oil production has nearly doubled in just the last decade: oil-palm plantations now cover an area nearly the size of New Zealand, and some form of the commodity lurks in half the products on U.S. grocery shelves. But the palm oil revolution has been built on stolen land and slave labor; it’s swept away cultures and so devastated the landscapes of Southeast Asia that iconic animals now teeter on the brink of extinction. Fires lit to clear the way for plantations spew carbon emissions to rival those of industrialized nations. James Beard Award–winning journalist Jocelyn C. Zuckerman spent years traveling the globe, from Liberia to Indonesia, India to Brazil, reporting on the human and environmental impacts of this poorly understood plant. The result is Planet Palm, a riveting account blending history, science, politics, and food as seen through the people whose lives have been upended by this hidden ingredient. This groundbreaking work of first-rate journalism compels us to examine the connections between the choices we make at the grocery store and a planet under siege.

Sweet and Low

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Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN 13 : 1466806842
Total Pages : 353 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (668 download)

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Book Synopsis Sweet and Low by : Rich Cohen

Download or read book Sweet and Low written by Rich Cohen and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2007-03-20 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sweet and Low is the amazing, bittersweet, hilarious story of an American family and its patriarch, a short-order cook named Ben Eisenstadt who, in the years after World War II, invented the sugar packet and Sweet'N Low, converting his Brooklyn cafeteria into a factory and amassing the great fortune that would destroy his family. It is also the story of immigrants to the New World, sugar, saccharine, obesity, and the health and diet craze, played out across countries and generations but also within the life of a single family, as the fortune and the factory passed from generation to generation. The author, Rich Cohen, a grandson (disinherited, and thus set free, along with his mother and siblings), has sought the truth of this rancorous, colorful history, mining thousands of pages of court documents accumulated in the long and sometimes corrupt life of the factor, and conducting interviews with members of his extended family. Along the way, the forty-year family battle over the fortune moves into its titanic phase, with the money and legacy up for grabs. Sweet and Low is the story of this struggle, a strange comic farce of machinations and double dealings, and of an extraordinary family and its fight for the American dream.

Empty Pleasures

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Publisher : Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN 13 : 9780807879672
Total Pages : 296 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (796 download)

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Book Synopsis Empty Pleasures by : Carolyn de la Peña

Download or read book Empty Pleasures written by Carolyn de la Peña and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2010-09-27 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sugar substitutes have been a part of American life since saccharin was introduced at the 1893 World's Fair. In Empty Pleasures, the first history of artificial sweeteners in the United States, Carolyn de la Pena blends popular culture with business and women's history, examining the invention, production, marketing, regulation, and consumption of sugar substitutes such as saccharin, Sucaryl, NutraSweet, and Splenda. She describes how saccharin, an accidental laboratory by-product, was transformed from a perceived adulterant into a healthy ingredient. As food producers and pharmaceutical companies worked together to create diet products, savvy women's magazine writers and editors promoted artificially sweetened foods as ideal, modern weight-loss aids, and early diet-plan entrepreneurs built menus and fortunes around pleasurable dieting made possible by artificial sweeteners. NutraSweet, Splenda, and their predecessors have enjoyed enormous success by promising that Americans, especially women, can "have their cake and eat it too," but Empty Pleasures argues that these "sweet cheats" have fostered troubling and unsustainable eating habits and that the promises of artificial sweeteners are ultimately too good to be true.

Coffeeland

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Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 0143110748
Total Pages : 450 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (431 download)

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Book Synopsis Coffeeland by : Augustine Sedgewick

Download or read book Coffeeland written by Augustine Sedgewick and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-04-06 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice “Extremely wide-ranging and well researched . . . In a tradition of protest literature rooted more in William Blake than in Marx.” —Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker The epic story of how coffee connected and divided the modern world Coffee is an indispensable part of daily life for billions of people around the world. But few coffee drinkers know this story. It centers on the volcanic highlands of El Salvador, where James Hill, born in the slums of Manchester, England, founded one of the world’s great coffee dynasties at the turn of the twentieth century. Adapting the innovations of the Industrial Revolution to plantation agriculture, Hill helped turn El Salvador into perhaps the most intensive monoculture in modern history—a place of extraordinary productivity, inequality, and violence. In the process, both El Salvador and the United States earned the nickname “Coffeeland,” but for starkly different reasons, and with consequences that reach into the present. Provoking a reconsideration of what it means to be connected to faraway people and places, Coffeeland tells the hidden and surprising story of one of the most valuable commodities in the history of global capitalism.

Who Ate the First Oyster?

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Author :
Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 014313275X
Total Pages : 242 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (431 download)

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Book Synopsis Who Ate the First Oyster? by : Cody Cassidy

Download or read book Who Ate the First Oyster? written by Cody Cassidy and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2020-05-05 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Who wore the first pants? Who painted the first masterpiece? Who first rode the horse? Who invented soap? This madcap adventure across ancient history uses everything from modern genetics to archaeology to uncover the geniuses behind these and other world-changing innovations. Who invented the wheel? Who told the first joke? Who drank the first beer? Who was the murderer in the first murder mystery, who was the first surgeon, who sparked the first fire--and most critically, who was the first to brave the slimy, pale oyster? In this book, writer Cody Cassidy digs deep into the latest research to uncover the untold stories of some of these incredible innovators (or participants in lucky accidents). With a sharp sense of humor and boundless enthusiasm for the wonders of our ancient ancestors, Who Ate the First Oyster? profiles the perpetrators of the greatest firsts and catastrophes of prehistory, using the lives of individuals to provide a glimpse into ancient cultures, show how and why these critical developments occurred, and educate us on a period of time that until recently we've known almost nothing about.

The Devil's Cup: A History of the World According to Coffee

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Author :
Publisher : Soho Press
ISBN 13 : 1641290102
Total Pages : 241 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (412 download)

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Book Synopsis The Devil's Cup: A History of the World According to Coffee by : Stewart Lee Allen

Download or read book The Devil's Cup: A History of the World According to Coffee written by Stewart Lee Allen and published by Soho Press. This book was released on 2018-11-13 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Absolutely riveting . . . Essential reading for foodies, java-junkies, anthropologists, and anyone else interested in funny, sardonically told adventure stories." —Anthony Bourdain, author of Kitchen Confidential Full of humor and historical insights, The Devil’s Cup is not only ahistory of coffee, but a travelogue of a risk-taking brew-seeker. In this captivating book, Stewart Lee Allen treks three-quarters of the way around the world on a caffeinated quest to answer these profound questions: Did the advent of coffee give birth to an enlightened western civilization? Is coffee the substance that drives history? From the cliffhanging villages of Southern Yemen, where coffee beans were first cultivated eight hundred years ago, to a cavernous coffeehouse in Calcutta, the drinking spot for two of India’s Nobel Prize winners . . . from Parisian salons and cafés where the French Revolution was born, to the roadside diners and chain restaurants of the good ol’ USA, where something resembling brown water passes for coffee, Allen wittily proves that the world was wired long before the Internet. And those who deny the power of coffee (namely tea drinkers) do so at their own peril.

Sugar

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Author :
Publisher : Abrams
ISBN 13 : 1590207726
Total Pages : 415 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (92 download)

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Book Synopsis Sugar by : Elizabeth Abbott

Download or read book Sugar written by Elizabeth Abbott and published by Abrams. This book was released on 2011-09-27 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dramatic history of an ingredient that changed the world “offers up a number of fascinating stories” (The New York Times Book Review). Sugar explores the history behind the sweetness, revealing, among other stories, how powerful American interests deposed Queen Lili’uokalani of Hawaii; how Hitler tried to ensure a steady supply of beet sugar when enemies threatened to cut off Germany’s supply of overseas cane sugar; and how South Africa established a domestic ethanol industry in the wake of anti-apartheid sugar embargos. The book follows the role of sugar in world events and in individual lives up to the present day, showing how it made eating on the run socially acceptable and played an integral role in today’s fast food culture and obesity epidemic. Impressively researched and commandingly written, Sugar will forever change perceptions of this tempting treat. “A highly readable and comprehensive study of a remarkable product.” —The Independent “Epic in ambition and briskly written.” —The Wall Street Journal “Readers will never again be able to casually sweeten tea or eat sweets without considering the long and fascinating history of sugar.” —Booklist

The Sugar Barons

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Author :
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN 13 : 0802777996
Total Pages : 465 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (27 download)

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Book Synopsis The Sugar Barons by : Matthew Parker

Download or read book The Sugar Barons written by Matthew Parker and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2011-08-23 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To those who travel there today, the West Indies are unspoiled paradise islands. Yet that image conceals a turbulent and shocking history. For some 200 years after 1650, the West Indies were the strategic center of the western world, witnessing one of the greatest power struggles of the age as Europeans made and lost immense fortunes growing and trading in sugar-a commodity so lucrative it became known as "white gold." As Matthew Parker vividly chronicles in his sweeping history, the sugar revolution made the English, in particular, a nation of voracious consumers-so much so that the wealth of her island colonies became the foundation and focus of England's commercial and imperial greatness, underpinning the British economy and ultimately fueling the Industrial Revolution. Yet with the incredible wealth came untold misery: the horror endured by slaves, on whose backs the sugar empire was brutally built; the rampant disease that claimed the lives of one-third of all whites within three years of arrival in the Caribbean; the cruelty, corruption, and decadence of the plantation culture. While sugar came to dictate imperial policy, for those on the ground the British West Indian empire presented a disturbing moral universe. Parker brilliantly interweaves the human stories of those since lost to history whose fortunes and fame rose and fell with sugar. Their industry drove the development of the North American mainland states, and with it a slave culture, as the plantation model was exported to the warm, southern states. Broad in scope, rich in detail, The Sugar Barons freshly links the histories of Europe, the West Indies, and North America and reveals the full impact of the sugar revolution, the resonance of which is still felt today.

Murder on the Middle Passage

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Author :
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781783274826
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (748 download)

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Book Synopsis Murder on the Middle Passage by : Nicholas Rogers

Download or read book Murder on the Middle Passage written by Nicholas Rogers and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On 2 April 1792, John Kimber, captain of the Bristol slave ship Recovery, was denounced in the House of Commons by William Wilberforce for flogging a fifteen-year-old African girl to death. The story, caricatured in a contemporary Isaac Cruikshank print, raced across newspapers in Britain and Ireland and was even reported in America. Soon after, Kimber was indicted for murder - but in a trial lasting just under five hours, he was found not guilty. This book is a micro-history of this important trial, reconstructing it from accounts of what was said in court and setting it in the context of pro- and anti-slavery movements. Rogers considers contemporary questions of culpability, the use and abuse of evidence, and why Kimber was criminally indicted for murder at a time when kidnapped Africans were generally regarded as 'cargo'. Importantly, the book also looks at the role of sailors in the abolition debate: both in bringing the horrors of the slave trade to public notice and as straw-men for slavery advocates, who excused the treatment of enslaved people by comparing it to punishments meted out to sailors and soldiers. The final chapter discusses the ways this incident has been used by African-American writers interested in recreating the trauma of the Middle Passage and addresses the question of whether the slave-trade archive can adequately recover the experience of being enslaved. NICHOLAS ROGERS is Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus in the Department of History at York University, Toronto.