Sugar and Society in China: Peasants, Technology, and the World Market (review)

This long-awaited book comprises three overlapping projects. First, it is a history of China’s production and consumption of sugar, especially after 1500. Second, it is a history of the social relations of rural production in South China, emphasizing the persistence of household production, the importance of extra-market coercion in extracting wealth, and the importance of lineages in reproducing this system. Third, it suggests that these relations explain the absence of sustained per capita growth in China.

Mazumdar’s survey of sugar cultivation and use tells us much about Chinese foodways, medicine, and biotechnology. Though less detailed than Daniels’ work, it skillfully assembles and weighs conflicting scraps of data, many of them new.¹ It is particularly good at placing Chinese practices within larger networks, which already spanned much of Asia a millennium ago, and spanned the world by 1650.

Mazumdar’s outline of South China society before the Qing (1644–1912) resonates with other works (especially by Chinese and Japanese scholars) on the entire coastal area from the Yangzi delta southward, but she places unusual emphasis on private violence and protection. Her discussion of how preferences for family-based production shaped technological choices is provocative, and improves on explanations that rely too heavily on “population pressure.”

For the Qing period, in which almost all laborers were free, and markets grew steadily, Mazumdar is less persuasive. South China sugar growing was different from either highly specialized slave plantations or idealized “perfect competition,” but we need a baseline for assessing how important those differences were. After all, early-modern Europe did not closely resemble blackboard exercises from elementary economics either. Mazumdar rightly notes that finding extensive market activity, and close correlations in price fluctuations across broad spaces, does not by itself show “capitalist” dynamics; but the debate can go no further without criteria derived from actual comparisons rather than deviations from models.

In that regard, it is unclear what Mazumdar’s work actually shows. Though conceding that Chinese peasants produced higher sugar yields than did specialized profit-seeking plantations, she maintains that they had less incentive to cut costs; but no attempt is made to show that they actually used inputs inefficiently. She often asserts that the world market did not transform Chinese sugar production, but never explains why that stimulus should have been necessary, since China’s domestic sugar market must have been the world’s largest until well into the nineteenth century. Mazumdar’s arguments about the limitations of China’s market economy are an opening brief, not a closing one. But whether or not her hypotheses prove correct, she has told us much that is new and interesting.