An entertaining informative and utterly depressing global history of an important commodity By alerting readers to the ways that modernitys very origins are entangled with a seemingly benign and delicious substance How Sugar Corrupted the World raises fundamental questions about our worldSven 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 TimesA brilliant and thoughtprovoking history of sugar and its ironiesBee Wilson Wall Street JournalShocking and revelatory no other product has so changed the world and no other book reveals the scale of its impact David OlusogaThis study could not be more timely Laura Sandy Lecturer in the History of Slavery University of LiverpoolThe story of sugar and of mankinds desire for sweetness in food and drink is a compelling though confusing story It is also an historical storyThe story of mankinds 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 todays 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 lifeWalvins book is the heir to Sidney Mintzs 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 books publication