Sugar and Civilization explores the cultural meaning of the commodity of sugar, starting with the Spanish–Cuba–American War of 1895 through to 1940. Merleaux discusses how sugar made from sugarcane and sugar beets influenced the daily lives of whites, blacks, and Mexican Americans in the United States. She argues that America’s imperial, commercial, and immigration polices revolved around sugar. In so doing, it became a trope for American imperialism, civilization, modernity, and nationalism.
Before Merleaux examines what sugar meant within the American empire, including its sugar-producing territories in the Caribbean and Pacific, as well as domestically, she discusses how the origins and expansion of the American sugar empire occurred. The war with Spain in the late 1890s resulted in the United States claiming the tropical sugar-producing islands of Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines. Hawaii was added to these producers after East Coast sugar refiners encouraged American policymakers to seize it. Because it is a source of carbohydrates, some congressmen encouraged farmers in midwestern and western states, such as Michigan and Colorado, to grow sugar beets to satisfy the growing number of American consumers. Merleaux believes that the objectives of American populism, especially its tenets to reserve agricultural land and work for Americans, to the exclusion of Mexican and Chinese immigrant workers, explains the development of the beet sugar industry.
Merleaux proceeds to examine how the categories of race and ethnicity informed the notions of civilization and of the primitive through the consumption of sugar. Employing various printed advertisements, the personal papers of politicians, the writings of certain American intellectuals, as well as the literary productions of white and black Americans, Merleaux shows how refined white sugar became a preference for white consumers, while brown or unprocessed sugar, and even raw sugarcane, were the choices of African Americans and Mexican Americans, as well as Chinese and certain European immigrants. Consuming these low-quality sugars revealed their cultural, and biological inferiority, according to the white producers and American political elites.
Examining the sociocultural meanings of sugar within and outside of the United States, Merleaux argues that the Mexican political class saw white and brown sugar in the same way as the Mexican lower classes. As a result, when Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants in the United States demanded non-white sugar, or piloncillo, because it reminded them of their Mexican homeland, it confirmed the racial attitudes that white Americans held toward Mexicans. Her cultural analysis of the meaning of sugar among black Americans revealed a similar conclusion. She discovered that blacks also did not prefer to consume refined white sugar, especially after being discouraged from doing so by what she labels the “Jim Crow candy hierarchy.” Here, their taste for sweetness was informed by the marketing strategies of regional and national confectioners. These schemes became efficacious after black American sharecroppers stopped growing sugarcane and making molasses, and started to buy candy and other confections from nearby grocery stores. Underlining these developments were the ubiquitous racial stereotypes of black Americans at that time. Race and ethnicity also informed the status and occupation of black workers in the confection industry that emerged in the U.S. south. Merleaux concludes her examination of the meaning of sugar by comparing how, unlike the experiences of Mexicans and black Americans (and the white attitudes and perceptions toward these segments of the population), Asians and Asian Americans benefited from a more flexible conception of race, as the producers and sellers of sugar portrayed them in a more favorable light.
After Merleaux examines the role of sugar production on U.S. child labor laws and policy, she ends her study by exploring the commercial and imperial relationship the United States had with its tropical producers during the 1930s and early 1940s. That relationship was influenced by revolution in Cuba, the independence of the Philippines, the status of the domestic sugar beet industry and its child laborers, and American tariff policies. In so doing, she returns to her previous argument that American policymakers and refiners employed refined white sugar as a trope for the racial and ethnic hierarchy that became a prominent element of American imperialism.
Sugar and Civilization is an important contribution to the literature of the history of food in the United States. Her approach and analysis is reminiscent of the seminal work of Sidney Mintz, entitled Sweetness and Power (1986), a study that she readily admits in her introduction and first chapters informed her book. Merleaux shows how sugarcane and sugar beets meant more than just sweetness. It became a commodity that supported the notions of white or European ethnocentrism as well as white biological superiority. As such, it would inform the imperial design of the United States as well as its racial hierarchy. Because sugarcane was the commodity that American political elites sought to satisfy the nutritional requirements of their citizens, as well as to satisfy their taste for sweets, one senses that Merleaux has depreciated its economic role in spreading American colonialism while creating the dynamic forces that resulted in the emergence of capitalist agriculture. This is an important omission throughout her study. In American Sugar Kingdom (1999), Cesar J. Ayala shows how capitalist agriculture was responsible for the underdevelopment of such sugar producers as Cuba and Puerto Rico. As the local class of political elites in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and elsewhere allowed arriving American capitalists to purchase existing plantations, refurbish old ones, or build the largest and most modern mills in the world, one can argue that the political class of those societies also were responsible for the production of the racial and ethnic hierarchy of American producers and sellers, as well as politicians. In brief, the material condition of the people and workers that emerged in the sugar-producing territories of the U.S. sugar empire confirmed the notion of white supremacy. Even the nature of sugar lent itself in this construct. The fact that the sucrose level of sugarcane rapidly declines after it is cut meant that Americans were compelled to employ their networks of businesses and financial institutions abroad in order to take advantage of this tropical commodity, according to Alan Dye in Cuban Sugar in the Age of Mass Production (1998). In so doing, Americans showed tropical peoples, particularly the political class of those societies, and themselves, that they were emissaries of modern civilization. In locating the origins of the imperial ideology of racial and ethnic superiority in the United States, Merleaux failed to explore how factors outside of the United States contributed to her important cultural study. The Louisiana Planter and Sugar Manufacturer, the most important trade paper for U.S. and foreign sugar producers, could have given her the empirical evidence to better center and give the sociocultural meaning of sugarcane within these multiple contexts. Nonetheless, Merleaux’s study ought to be read by scholars of food, race, and ethnicity in the Americas.
