How did a simple commodity once the prized monopoly of the wealthy become an essential
ingredient in the lives of millions before mutating yet again into the cause of a global
health epidemic? Prior to 1600 sugar was a costly luxury but with the rise of the European
colonies in the Americas in the seventeenth century sugar became cheap ubiquitous and hugely
popular - an everyday necessity. Today sugar is regularly denounced as a dangerous addiction
on a par with tobacco and the cause of global epidemics of obesity and diabetes. While
consumption remains higher than ever sugar has become a pariah. Only now is the extensive
ecological harm caused by sugar plantations being fully recognised but it is the brutal human
cost from enslaved Africans to indentured Indians that has struck us most forcibly in the
recent past. Walvin shows that we can only fully understand our contemporary dietary concerns
by coming to terms with the relationship between society and sweetness over a long historical
span dating back two centuries to a time when sugar was vital to the burgeoning European
domestic and colonial economies. An 'entertaining informative and utterly depressing global
history of an important commodity . . . By alerting readers to the ways that modernity's very
origins are entangled with a seemingly benign and delicious substance How Sugar Corrupted the
World raises fundamental questions about our world.' Sven Beckert Laird Bell Professor of
American History at Harvard University and author of Empire of Cotton: A Global History
