Sugar and Civilization: American Empire and the Cultural Politics of Sweetness by April Merleaux (review)

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 sugar-cane, 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 sugar-cane 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...