BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. This is a Thinking Allowed podcast from the BBC and for more details and much, much more about Thinking Allowed, go to our website at bbc.co.uk. Hello. After last week's programme, I rather felt we'd, well, somewhat overdosed on the subject of woke. But two emails from listeners made me think again. Jan Chamier sent me this headline from the 26th September edition of The Sun. Richie Sunak must bite the bullet and derail woke HS2.
Well, what better illustration could there be of our contention that the word had now become, in some hands, nothing more than a meaningless term of abuse? And then came the email from Ashwampura, which movingly captured the manner in which a person who was the subject of woke might actually welcome the type of solicitous attention its critics derided.
"'Lorry, while I'm certainly not woke—' i feel more seen now for my racial and cultural background for the story of my family and more aware of my own blind spots in terms of gender and class than i ever was as a young man for me The woke movement has improved my life more often than it has been an irritation.
Now, a couple of words in that touching email increasingly seemed relevant to me as I read a new book with a gloriously comprehensive title, The World of Sugar, How the Sweet Stuff Transformed Our Politics, Health and... environment over 2,000 years. For the more I read, the more personal blind spots I discovered.
But I can now hope to remedy some of these deficiencies because I'm joined by the author of that wonderfully detailed volume. He's Albert Bosmer, Professor of International Comparative Social History at the Vrie Universitat Amsterdam. Ulrich, your book really is a sweeping tour de force of global history, which, fascinatingly, places sugar at the heart of the genesis of both modern capitalism and globalisation. Do you suggest it to commodity which is as significant as oil? Expand on that for me.
In the 18th century, 17th and 18th century, sugar dominated the transatlantic trade from the Americas to Europe and to North America. In Asia, sugar was also widely traded. an extremely important commodity in the 16th and 17th and 18th century and in the 19th century we see a staggering growth of sugar consumption in Europe and the United States.
And with that, sugar became the fuel for human bodies, whereas oil became the fuel for vehicles in the 20th century. And sugar was the most widely traded, internationally widely traded commodity in the 19th century. century. It had also many geopolitical repercussions. Sugar was the cause of many wars. It was the cause of revolutions.
like oil was in the 20th century. And of course, one peculiar capacity of sugar is that it are pure carbohydrates. So they are extremely efficient. Sugar is an extremely efficient... transmitter of calories to human bodies. Tell me a little bit more about that early history and the way in which sugar was transformed from a luxury good into a product of mass consumption. Until 1870, most of the world's sugar was produced in Asia, in India and China and Egypt.
And Caribbean sugar and European history of sugar was a kind of appendix of this wider Eurasian history of sugar. For thousands of years, peasants in Bengal probably discovered how to squeeze... sugar cane and obtained juice from it, boiled the juice into a kind of thick mass, sugary mass. It was absolutely not the nice stable sugar as we have it today.
This history of crystalline sugar is actually quite recent. It's only in the fifth or sixth century after Christ that scientists in India or in Persia, we do not know exactly, discovered how to Let's boiling sugar juice crystallize.
to get this nice white particles, which we call sugar today. Sugar was very difficult to make. It was also very costly. So initially, white sugar, our white table sugar, was only used by the very wealthy very rich is very powerful of this world so the emperor of china or the caliph of baghdad or cairo or the mogul of india and what they did was they made beautiful statues which they paraded for their guests
can use sugar perfectly for sculpting purposes it's still done today in fact another wonderful quality of sugar was that if you dissolve a bit of sugar in water and you give it to patients of diarrhea who are seriously weakened, these people will recover then. So this is something which hospitals in Cairo, for example, discovered in the 11th century. So gradually, via display of the great people of this earth...
via hospitals, sugar became known in Europe as well. Finally, what you see, and that also starts in China in the 13th century, in India, and a bit later in Europe, is that sugar enters the country. It becomes part of the recipes. First, of course, only of the very wealthy of this earth, but gradually also the urban.
elites began to use sugar as part of their diets. And then we talk about the 14th, 15th century in Europe. So we're talking about the Europeans beginning to love sugar, so its demand had to be met. That's, I think, where you want to say the story of slavery and sugar plantations begins. When Europe started to love sugar, it obtained its sugar in Egypt. And in the 15th century, all kinds of calamities befell on Egypt.
There were raids, there were climate change, the plague, the bubotic plague came. So the Europeans had to look for other locations where sugar could be procured. And of course, that could not be done in the temperate climate of Europe. So this is the moment that sugar crossed the Atlantic. and that the atlantic sugar plantations emerged and the tragedy of this story is that about two-thirds of the 12 and a half million people who made the middle passage from africa to the americas ended up
as sugar plantations. And you want to say that the actual lives they led on these plantations was even worse? than for those who worked on tobacco and coffee production, for instance. Cutting of sugar cane is one of the most arduous jobs you can think about. The cane stalks are sharp, a lot of injuries on feet and legs, but also the rats. There are snakes in these fields. And during the harvest season,
Sugar has to be processed very, very quickly because catecane can only be kept for about 48 hours because fermentation sets in very quickly. People in the mills and in the boiling houses work for 18 hours. fell asleep and then the sleeves and with that their arms came in between the cogs which milled the the cane so the most terrific accidents happened and of course people fell into the boiling sugar mass the working conditions were really
horrific, worse than of any other crop. And if that was not enough, The Caribbean were a war zone in the 17th and 18th centuries. So the Spanish and the French and the Dutch and the British were warring and were trying to capture each other's sugar islands. That means that a fleet with food for a sugar island was captured. by pirates or by buccaneers. People were starving.
These two factors combined led also to a constant demand for new enslaved people from Africa, whereas, for example, in North America, the enslaved population reproduced itself. So at a certain point, it was no longer... necessary to kidnap people from Africa. That was absolutely not the case in sugar plantations.
possibility of relief from these appalling conditions, as you so graphically described, came with the abolitionist movement in the late 18th century onwards, when sugar, I believe, became one of the main targets in which... British people, especially women, regularly organised boycotts of West Indies sugar. And then we did see, of course, the abolition, formal abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1834.
But you point out that this didn't actually do away with slave-grown sugar. What happened then? The protest and the boycott by the British women of slave sugar was a beautiful example of fair trade movement early on in the 19th century. And what these women said is, well, let's get sugar from India.
said india was the largest sugar producer in the world at that time and became a british colony and so far until eighteen thirties the west indies planters had managed to keep all the sugar that did not come from the west indies out of england so there were stiff tariffs on sugar that came from india so this was abolished in 1834 but india could not supply the sugar that was needed for the working classes in England at a time. So sugar prices have stayed high.
and the british government felt compelled to allow sugar from cuba and from brazil where it was abused abundantly and also cheaply unto the british market that was in the eighteen fifties but this sugar was still made by enslaved workers so by 1860s this whole optimism that that the humanity could do away with slave produced sugar had had vanished and half of the british proletariat working
classes consumed sugar that was produced by enslaved workers. There was a lot of optimism in the early 19th century that the industrialization would do obey with arduous manual labor. There was even one utopian thinker who spoke about iron slaves with cement machines driven by steam power even though steam power brought about a far more efficient way of crushing cane and of boiling
The crane cutting actually continued to be a manual affair well into the 20th century. Let's turn away from the workers for the moment because let's turn to the sugar dynasty. It's a major element in your book you document. a long history of these sugar dynasties, as well as the corporations that in many cases have remained influential over very long periods. And they had profound influence on the actual policies of states. Tell me about their impact.
Yeah, you have a couple of them are very famous. You have the Havermeyer family in New York, Tate and Lyle, and Bucher McConnell in the United Kingdom, the Rabetzke family in Germany. Almost every country has a couple of them.
these families and they were capable of concentrating the power of the sugar industry they were famous for building cartels or infamous for building cartels in fact monopolizing the market and convincing the governments of their countries that their sugar sector had to be protected because sugar became a very large economic sector in in europe united states these dynasties had profound effect on
governments in keeping up over production of sugar and how did they do it for example in in germany and france by convincing the governments that taxes that people had to pay on sugar, that these taxes had to be given back as soon as sugar was exported. And as a result, for example, the British families got their sugar.
much more cheaply on the kitchen table than, for example, in Germany where the sugar was produced. So what you see, that is through these protectionist measures, situations of overproduction continue. an expansive global capitalism and increasingly powerful nation-states.
artificially cheapened sugar so this in turn facilitated sugar's introduction in massive quantities into industrially produced food and beverages tell me a little bit about how that presence of sugar has expanded into our own lives, where it is present in our own lives. You can flood the market with a certain commodity, with sugar in this case, but that still does not mean that people will consume it. So the eating habits of people had to change.
People, until the early 19th century, they had a few spoons of sugar per week, but not a kilo which people consume today in many countries in the world. So the taste of the people rather quickly changed over the course of... the 19th century and one of the ways for example was that the army leaderships put more and more sugar in the soldiers rations because they realized that sugar was a perfect way of enhance the endurance
of soldiers. So young men became accustomed to relatively high intakes of sugar. It happened in Germany, in France, in the United States, and even a bit later in Japan.
was that in the course of the 19th century many people moved from the countryside to a city detached in fact from the food base didn't know where the food came from and often this food was polluted it was sometimes even poisoned of low quality but then the food industry came in produced packaged foods but this industrially manufactured food and that's still the case today often contains a lot of sugar it gives a nice taste of course and it's a way to preserve food food can be kept on
shelves much longer and then the third step in this whole history is that we began to start to drink beverages the soda fountains came in well the famous coca-cola and other beverages over the past 150 years
we became mass consumers of sugar. And just from, let's say, a few spoons full of sugar a week to almost a kilo a week in some countries. As early as the 1600s, you point out, European doctors were drawing... a link between an elite penchant for sugary sweets and the shocking dental hygiene of Queen Elizabeth yet centuries later here we are health risks which we now know to include obesity and diabetes were scarcely on the public agenda. Why? Why didn't we learn more about these risks?
It's interesting that already in the 1860s, the British higher classes, they consumed a lot of sugar, discovered that sugar was not good for their bodily weight. So there was one British undertaker, it was a high-end... undertaker because he also worked for the royal house got pretty obese and his doctor said you have to stop consuming sugar and so he did that and he got his normal weight back
So he did not become his own customer immediately. And he wrote a thesis on it, and it was a diet guideline. And this became quite popular in the 19th century. But at the turn of the 20th century, employers, government...
and medical doctors discussed the fact that the immigrants who came from the countryside into the city were often too weak. They were undernourished. They lacked calories. Physical labor was still very important. Let's say, for example, in construction work so at that time sugar was a legitimate part of our diet but as i said all kinds of new consumption articles came in that's one thing and the other hand we are no longer performing the physical labor
that people performed a century ago. So after the Second World War we see that medical doctors and nutritionists begin to warn against the use of sugar. But at that time, the sugar industry had become very powerful, a very large economic sector and perfectly capable. of countering the threats from the nutritionists and the medical doctors and they contribute to research that deflected our attention from sugar to fat. And then the final thing is that beverage industry is very smart.
advertise the beverages as delights, as something which go very well with a sportive life. Governments, and that's the final factor, are inclined to consider your health as a personal responsibility. And that's my argument with government as an historian. I say, okay, look at how we came to this.
situation of overconsumption and overproduction of cane sugar. That is a historical development and I would say it's a collective problem which we have to address politically. We cannot leave it to the individual consumer because our sugar is almost everywhere. I want to sort of bring things up to date because I've got a BBC news clip from February of this year which reported on the ongoing debate surrounding reparations for slavery. Now the BBC reporter Laura Trevely
who's a member of the aristocratic Trevelyan family who owned six sugar plantations in Grenada, visited the island having been shocked to learn that her ancestors had been compensated by the UK government when slavery... was abolished in 1833, but freed African slaves got nothing. When I went to Grenada and I saw for myself the plantations where slaves were punished, when I saw the instruments of torture.
that were used to restrain them when I looked at the neck braces, at the manacles, at this system of dehumanization that my family had profited from as absentee slave owners of these sugar plants. I felt ashamed. The Trevelyan family has decided to apologise. In a public letter, they write, Slavery was and is unacceptable and repugnant. Its damaging effects continue to the present day.
Our ancestors' involvement in it They go on Through a donation by Laura Trevelyan, we have been able to contribute to the setting up of the Reparations Research Fund at the University of the West Indies to look into the economic impacts of enslavement. the legacy of slavery and of the sugar plantations, is still very much with us today. But sugar does exist in nature, so our desire for it is, I suppose, to an extent, I suppose, it could be said to be also natural.
Could you imagine a world in which the mass production of sugar hadn't happened and what that world might have looked like? First of all, sugar is actually sweeter than nature. So it's something, of course, we did without for most of human history. And it's only about 150 years that sugar emerged as a mass consumption article. Indeed it is not difficult to imagine a diet without sugar.
But that's not the same as imagining a history without sugar, because sugar has been too fundamental in the emergence of global capitalism, in the emergence of global trade. And if there was not the slave trade to the Americas... conditions there I think that the British East India Company and the Dutch East India Company would have managed to transport sugar from Asia to Western Europe and a bit later the wheat sugar industry would have come in so I think sugar
Capitalism and the role of sugar in capitalism was too important to be completely wiped out if one chapter of it, the ugly chapter of American slavery, could have been deleted. It's a very double thing. On the one hand, we don't need... it as such and on the other hand it has become such an important element of our history.
A perfect summary. Ulbert Bosmer, thank you so much. If you'd like to comment on anything in today's programme, I'd be delighted to hear from you at thinkingaloud at bbc.co.uk. Julie Andrews' lyrical portrayal of Sugar's very special ability to counter... unpleasant circumstances.
But as I now recognise after reading a new research article, this is a very restricted account of sugar's function in everyday life. And that article, which will appear in a forthcoming edition of Medicine Anthropology Theory, draws on a... a PhD thesis entitled Bittersweet, Living with Sugar and Kin in Contemporary Scotland. And its author, who now joins me, is Imogen Bevin, who's Research Fellow in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh.
Edinburgh. Imogen, one of the first things you want to suggest is that sugar consumption is not simply an individual choice. What do you mean by that exactly?
There is a dominant narrative both in public health, in the media, that we choose what we eat. We could quite easily eat less sugar. We just need to not buy sugary things. But when I was studying this ethnographically, individual choice didn't really capture people's experiences. People were getting children through a car journey with sweets.
They were grabbing an energy drink to get them through the workday. They were busy celebrating other people's birthdays. They weren't sort of sitting, choosing or reading labels, which is a very particular kind of social activity in itself. What they were doing was engaging in social relationships, managing social situations.
is embedded in these relationships. Sugar was an ethically ambiguous substance for people I spoke to, not because of sugar's history in terms of colonialism and slave trade, but because it is bad for bodies, and in particular children's bodies.
People talked a lot about the dangers of sugar, but at the same time there's a message both in advertising and public health that some sugar is fine in moderation. It's not only safe, but you actually should have some sugar, otherwise you're being cruel to your children, as one parent put it, or somehow puritanical.
But most people found it impossible to actually measure how much sugar they were eating, even if they did have time for that in the very busy lives that people lead. So let's turn to the details of your study. You explored sugar consumption in a North Edinburgh neighbourhood that involved... I think, 13 months of fieldwork in primary schools, homes and community groups. What were you hoping to find out with your research?
I wanted to learn about people's wider eating practices in this community and within this the role of sugar. So how people think about sugar, how they consume it, how they also work to avoid it. The processes through which they attribute values to sugar. So I was immersed in people's everyday lives, eating with them at home, going food shopping.
shopping on family outings and I was observing children's lives at school. Your research suggests that in Scotland sugar creates closeness or kinship between children, parents and grandparents. Tell me more about that. Sugar is an essential part of many family rituals across the life course, birthdays, christenings, weddings, Christmas.
People talked about how a sweet tooth might run in the family, how a child might have got this from a father, from a grandparent, for example. And women sometimes had the idea that children were exposed to too much sugar in the womb through their own eating, and this was how they developed the same liking for sugary things.
But most importantly for parents, I found that in Scotland, managing sugar or monitoring sugar consumption has become a key part of how you raise children. And the work of controlling sugar was picked up more usually by women. It wasn't that men didn't feel strongly about sugar, but mothers seemed... to feel the most responsibility over it and the most guilt over it.
And in terms of producing closeness and distance, perhaps the clearest example of this was in one family I spoke to where the grandparents had become primary carers for their grandchildren who had gone to live with them. And they'd quite quickly realised they could no longer keep giving out so many sweets and soft drinks.
things that pertain to a grandparent relationship. They'd kept that relationship with the other set of grandchildren. Another mother described her mother-in-law trying to help with potty training by saying I'll get you a big chocolate if you go on the potty and her trying to counter that with I'll buy you some big boy trousers. but finding it really hard to confront the mother-in-law over this and come to an agreement. You note that sugar...
is bitter sweet. It's got both dark and light sides. Tell me about home baking, about birthday cakes as examples of this so-called light side of sugar. It says sugar has this negative public. linked to ill health, to poor choices, to bad parenting. But there are other moments where sugar's brighter sides shine through. And one thing that people really did want to show me was home baking and children's birthday cakes. Sugar that's been transformed in the home took on a lot more positive value.
There's sort of emotional attachments to the home and to women's labour, which can then be transported out to other places and situations. So I saw lots of cakes travelling into schools for bake sales, to raise money for school trips. So cake becomes not only about ritual, about generosity, care, charity.
everyday acts of doing good in the community. Let's turn to what you call the dark side of sugar, the acknowledged health risks of consuming too much. I mean, how did your interviewees navigate these risks?
People in this community were highly conscious that sugar is bad for you, and children themselves were often aware of this negative public value of sugar. And people talked a lot about weight gain, diabetes, dental decay. But alongside this, there was an almost worse risk, which was that of demonising sugar.
that children might think too much about sugar and diet and become anxious to stop being children, as one parent put it. And this could lead to sort of disordered eating, body image problems. So these were other concerns that people had, that children are supposed to have innocent childhoods. And you also found that sugar...
is used to teach children values. What kinds of values? To teach children about sharing, about kindness, and to teach children about moderation and balance and self-control, about what pleasures are acceptable or not, also about personal responsibility.
family and togetherness and about belonging and heritage. So one family I met made a black bun every year. This is quite a dense cake with dried fruit and pastry, not necessarily because everyone enjoyed eating this cake, but because it taught about the importance of family and about Scottish heritage.
Take a piece to grandparents, to important family friends. During COVID, when people couldn't see each other, people actually posted pieces of Christmas pudding, for example, to one another. A last example, maybe Sugar's used to teach about...
creativity and to foster imagination. If you think of all the sort of fairy tales and children's stories that involve sugary treats, Hansel and Gretel, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and there are lots of school activities around sort of imagining your own unusual chocolate bar or baking dragon snacks in fairyland. You use the term living with sugar.
because that's intended to sort of in a way convey the paradoxes of sugar. Living in a society where sugar is always omnipresent, overabundant, always available, always being advertised, always being supplied at work, from relatives, where it's the... cheapest option but also perceived as the less good option I think makes life quite difficult for parents.
Because they're navigating this environment where sugar is both harmful and harmless. It's unnecessary, but it's also really needed. I think these are the paradoxes. And so I used living with sugar to describe this kind of balancing task, fragile balancing task of controlling sugar. permitting sugar sometimes in the right contexts and working out essentially what is the right balance between health and pleasure essentially so sugar consumption isn't a black and white matter
And in some ways, it would be really impossible, I think, to regulate it, not only for parents, but also for policymakers. And one policymakers said to me, even you can't ask people to take their cake outside. Well, thank you, Imogen, very much for your contribution to this programme, and thank you as well, Ulbe. But, you know, that hardly seems enough, thanks. What else could I possibly do? Aha!
If only I could offer you both a suite. That was a Thinking Allowed podcast from BBC Radio 4. You'll find a treasure trove of other Thinking Allowed programmes on BBC Sounds. Have you ever wondered who you really are? It clicked in my mind suddenly. I was like, why have I never done this? I'm Jenny Kleeman, a writer and journalist. In my new series, The Gift, from BBC Radio 4...
I've been uncovering extraordinary truths that emerge when people take at-home DNA tests. He said, what do you know? You don't even know that your father's black. So I'm like, Jeff, we got him. And he's like, what are you talking about? And I go, we got him. Obviously, it was a completely unintended consequence of a gift. Join me as I investigate what happens when genealogy, technology and identity collide. Listen to The Gift on BBC Sounds.