In The Sweet Taste of Empire, Kim F. Hall takes up Sidney Mintz’s invitation to look closer at the persistent relationship between sugar and whiteness and at how sugar connected and still connects the pleasure of confectioners in England with the agonies of enslaved sugar workers in Barbados and Jamaica. This book could usefully be read together with April Merleaux’s Sugar and Civilization: American Empire and the Cultural Politics of Sweetness, which also engages with the nexus of racism, sensory pleasure, and imperial power. Where Merleaux is interested in North American power in the nineteenth century, Hall focuses on the Caribbean and England in the early modern period. Hall’s primary intended audience is her colleagues in the field of early modern studies. These scholars have begun to attend to food and have long included race in their analyses, but Hall argues that they have not yet fully engaged with the ways in which language, particularly that about food, perpetuates racism and obscures the lived experiences of the past.

Hall engages with scholars in her field throughout the seven chapters of the book, building on and critiquing previous attempts to explain sugar’s role in English and Caribbean societies. Ultimately, Hall wants readers to recognize the dangers of repeating terms from the past that were weighted with racial strategies. To consider refined sugar pure, Hall argues persuasively, is to recapitulate the systems that willfully obscured knowledge of the violence and mess of its production. Using early modern culinary texts, she demonstrates that this obfuscation was not through lack of knowledge but was instead a collective choice to create a foodstuff as both marketable and indicative of white superiority and even innocence of the very depredations that produced the commodity.

The book begins and ends with discussions of Kara Walker’s monumental but ephemeral 2014 public art project, A Subtlety: The Marvelous Sugar Baby. Hall argues that the audience’s misbehaviors at the site, even as they were anticipated by the artist herself, are indicative of the persistent problem of cultural elision of the pain of production from the pleasures of sugar. To correct for this purposeful misremembering, Hall shows her readers what people did with sugar in the Early Modern period, both intellectually and materially. Where Mintz wrote about the role of sugar in nourishing an industrial working class and thus enabling industrialization, Hall writes about the other ends of the economic spectrum. She writes about both the labor of the elite who used confections to establish their social superiority and the labor of the enslaved who produced the material in conditions of extreme oppression. In writing about both types of “sugar worke,” as it was termed, she connects them through the construction of sweetness as a quality that obscured and thus enabled the violence and mess of its production.

Hall engages with early modern texts on banquets and confections as serious writing because they constructed social roles, including racial identities. The inclusion of a Black man in a banquet pageant in England, for example, was not incidental or even “just” an expression of the host’s wealth but was in direct alignment with the commodification of Black bodies in the slave trade. Displays of sweetness by and for white audiences were predicated on Black pain. Hall points out the many references to sweetness and sugar in Shakespeare as part of the normalization of this language. And as sugary sweetness (in contrast to other kinds) became part of the regular language and, more slowly, foodways, it brought with it the brutality of the labor that produced it. Hall shifts focus from early chapters about sweetness to later chapters about the violence of the system of slavery to make this point. While it is not a history of the sugar trade, it may be interesting to business historians because it interrogates demand by explaining how sugar was used by consumers to express racial and economic status, as well as to perform gender roles.