April Merleaux's Sugar and Civilization: American Empire and the Cultural Politics of Sweetness is an ambitious examination of the connections between America's empire and its sugar industry during the first third of the twentieth century. Merleaux, an associate professor of history at Florida International University, tracks the rhetoric and actions of many parties—growers, refiners, manufacturers, retailers, nutritionists, consumers—involved in what she calls the “U.S. sugar empire,” which included the mainland United States alongside Cuba, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and the Philippines. Presented with both detail and breadth, Merleaux's book struggles at times to explain the relationships it identifies. Nonetheless, the book should appeal to researchers concerned with empire, state capitalism, and the cultural politics that attended to both.

Merleaux is at her best when plotting her narrative. She begins at the end of the Spanish-American War; it is 1898 and the United States now claims some authority over several key sugar-producing islands. Appropriately, citizens celebrate with candy replicas of the USS Maine, the ship whose sinking made possible their glory. This relationship between sugar and American dominion guides Merleaux's narrative across three more decades, as the complications of a new empire and a new sugar economy unfold together. The story of sugar, Merleaux insists, is one of tariffs and colonialism, of caste systems of gender and race. It is the story of modernizing America, a place consumed by the complementary sciences of race, trade, and nutrition.

Merleaux uses the rhetoric around sugar's nutritional value to stand in for larger debates about trade, race, and gender. First among these is the conflict between growers of beet and cane sugar, which Merleaux presents as an economic and ideological struggle between the mainland United States and the territorial islands. Writers and policymakers portrayed beet sugar, grown in the temperate U.S. West, as the sugar of civilization, more suitable to the delicate white stomach: thus, a picture of black children had only to feature their eating cane sugar to confirm that they were uncivilized. Other conversations about sugar, Merleaux argues, also relied on and helped form ideas about race, gender, and labor. Using government, scholarly, and archival sources, Merleaux reveals elites whose opinions on the healthfulness of sugar were related to their ideas about the poor and minorities. She shows workers, too, whose experiences with sugar reflected both oppression and autonomy.

Merleaux's broad story, compressed into 239 pages, leads her into many historiographical conversations. She traverses histories of borderlands, empires, food, consumption, technology, race, gender, labor, and capitalism. She speaks most directly to Sidney Mintz's classic, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (1985). Where Mintz addresses the British Empire in an age of liberal trade, though, Merleaux focuses on the growth of sugar production in the empire of a protectionist United States. This different story is reason enough for Merleaux's book on sugar, but Merleaux has put in extra effort to demonstrate that her ideas are new. Merleaux mints at least five turns of phrase, including “the significance of the numerically insignificant,” “populist anti-imperialism,” and “the Jim Crow candy hierarchy” (pp. 17, 33, 127). For all their ambition, these new terms often confuse the narrative rather than enhance it.

Take, for example, one of Merleaux's most important definitions, meant to “broaden” our understanding of empire (p. 14). Merleaux redefines empire as “an arrangement in which political sovereignty is exercised unevenly across space and in which some people and geographies are differentiated as being outside of the law or subject to an alternate set of local arrangements” (p. 20). Merleaux does not explain which definition of empire she is altering or what historians gain by changing it. If the word as it stands provides a useful way to think about the U.S. sugar industry, why change it? If not, why use it? More importantly, Merleaux never defines this definition's key term, “sovereignty.” Does it mean influence, authority, power, a Westphalian connection between force and territory? This is a crucial moment; it would have been helpful for Merleaux to be clear.

Rather than needing new phrases, Merleaux's book would benefit from more careful use of existing language. Too often, she lets tired metaphors stand in for her own analysis, an issue of style that inhibits explicit descriptions of the relationships she observes. Sugar plays a “starring role” in empire, for which its investors “set the stage”; it “reinforced” hierarchies; sugar politics were “tied to” the status of oppressed peoples (pp. 1, 11, 19, 71). At other moments, Merleaux provides superlative descriptions of relationships where specificity is needed. A tension in colonialism, she tells us, is “nowhere more obvious” than in debates over the sugar trade: even if this is true, it does not describe how one affected the other (p. 5). Merleaux can be direct; she sometimes explains how “sugar was different” and outlines the specific consequences of the politics of sweetness (p. 185). Often, though, it is unclear how sugar and empire were related—whether they had a special influence on each other or were just two items among many that Americans discussed in gendered, racist terms.

Thankfully, most of Merleaux's book is measured and straightforward. She excels at establishing context and explaining Progressive Era mindsets, including the belief that people could ingest civilization and the ubiquity of scientistic ideas about race. Overall, Sugar and Civilization is a welcome addition to the growing literature that takes food seriously as both trade good and cultural symbol. Merleaux's highly researched story will add insights to the work of advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and historians.