ASRC 3010

Sweetness: How Sugar Built the Modern World

Course Description

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2015-2016.

Rice, wheat, and maize are examples of crops that sustained the civilizations in which they were cultivated for centuries. Sugar is different. Not only is sugar cane a relatively recent transplant, originating in Melanesia and South Asia, taken to the Middle East, and then cultivated extensively in the tropical regions of plantation America beginning in the 17th century. The sugar that it produces began as a luxury commodity and gradually became a household staple over the course of three centuries. This course examines key aspects of the transformation of sugar cane from plant to luxury commodity and then to staple, with particular emphasis on the impact that its cultivation and manufacturing had on the ecology, demography, diet, history, culture, economies, and politics of the Caribbean Basin. Sugar manufacturing in this region generated the enormous wealth that slave and indentured labor produced in and for transatlantic commerce for the three centuries that gave rise to the modern, western world. Given the importance of sugar at the time, sugar plantations were sites of some of the most ambitious experiments in science, industry, labor, and trade that the world had ever seen.

When Offered Spring.

Breadth Requirement (GHB)
Distribution Category (HA-AS)

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