Another final assignment: a lot of the same reading as the sugar plantation essay (sometimes even the same phrasing), plus some tendentious theoretical speculations. This was fun.
It seemed to me that the mysteriousness that accompanied my seeing, at one and the same time, cane growing in the fields and white sugar in my cup, should also accompany the sight of . . . raw iron ore, on the one hand, and a perfectly wrought pair of manacles or leg irons, on the other.
The connection between production and consumption—what Sidney Mintz calls “the mystery of people unknown to each other being linked through space and time”—is one of the most promising veins yet mined by historians. Mintz’s story, of course, is of sugar—its production on plantations powered by slave labor, its consumption by the working class peoples of Europe, and its place in the exercise of power over the last half century. But there are many other stories to be told. Tropical commodities like coffee, henequen, rubber, and bananas have their place in the historiography, as do more temperate crops like tobacco, cotton, and citrus. The value of these tales is in taking something so mundane as to be invisible and allowing it to open a new window on the worlds of the past: history from an commodity’s perspective, as it were.
The project here is first to sketch out the twin theoretical tensions of scale and causation, and second to show how they inform one of the richest seams of commodity-chain history: Caribbean sugar plantations. In the case of sugar, the materialistic approach of Karl Marx is more useful than Max Weber’s ideological tack, while attention to both global and local scales is illuminating. Finally, we will suggest some ways the history of sugar might inform histories of another, mostly unexamined agricultural commodity: peaches.
