Sweetness and Power

Sidney Mintz (1922-2015) was the author of Sweetness and Power and an American anthropologist who taught at Yale University until 1974 before changing faculties to John Hopkins. Mintz spent most of his professional life studying Caribbean history and agricultural products associated with the development of the region since the European conquests. Early in his career, Mintz was preoccupied with the processes by which Westerners became consumers and with tracing consumption back to production. He worked among sugar cane workers in Puerto Rico as part of his dissertation research at Columbia University to gain intimate knowledge about the difficult labor and working conditions endured by Caribbean plantation workers.

Mintz’s education and teaching background, including his own experience conducting anthropological fieldwork in a sugar manufacturing center in Puerto Rico, made him an effective communicator of the history of Caribbean sugar production. Combining this fieldwork with his background in Marxist theory, Mintz was perfectly suited to explain sugar’s role in the emergence of a world market. The sugar market was always a factor in, and sometimes causally significant for, the massive structural changes to the English economy and the major consequences for working people that accompanied the rise of industrial

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