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

This long and complex but very readable book has been many years in the making, and its claims are correspondingly ambitious, namely that sugar offers us the key to a whole new understanding of the peasant economy of late imperial China, its local connections to the global economy, and its responses to the demands of the modern world.

Has Mazumdar, then, done for sugar in China what Sidney Mintz did for sugar in the industrializing West?¹ No, her ambitions are different. For Mintz, sugar is special, its historical role unique. He argues for its specific contribution to European industrialization, showing how the shifting imperatives of sugar production and marketing shaped industrial production processes and networks of power. And beyond that Mintz charts the emergence of what we might think of as a sugar culture in Britain, tangled around the moral issues of slavery, around the transformation of mercantile greed into industrial investment, and around rum and empire, Bertha Rochester and Jane Eyre, and jam and industry.

Mazumdar's strategy is quite different. This is a book for people interested in social formations, not in discourse or symbolic systems. Sugar in China was not grown by slaves. Though its cultivation sometimes caused unease among conscientious officials who noticed farmers turning their rice fields over to cane, it never occasioned the same wrenching moral and political dilemmas as did the plantation system. And although sugar came to be quite widely used even in modest Chinese households, it did not invade the diet of the poor, raising issues of sobriety and wholesomeness and coloring the performance of class.² Like tea, cotton, and mulberries for sericulture, sugar produced in China both for domestic consumption and for the world market was grown and processed on small-holdings. It is not a unique but a typical case; if it is special, it is because until the nineteenth century China had no serious competitors for its silk and tea, whereas Chinese sugar had to compete on world markets from the outset. Sugar, therefore, serves Mazumdar as the ideal commodity for investigating the nature of the late imperial social formation and of its participation in a global economy.³

The paradox Mazumdar addresses is familiar. From the late Ming until about 1900 China was one of the world's largest sugar producers and exporters. For over three centuries output grew in response to world demand. In Guangdong and Taiwan, the two regions that are the focus of Mazumdar's analysis, sugar became a major crop in many localities. But it continued to be both grown and processed throughout this period by small-scale farmers in the context of a mixed-crop economy. Throughout the nineteenth century, Western sugar-refining technology was increasingly industrialized, so that prices fell as quality improved. However, since world demand continued to outstrip Western production, in theory there was still room even in the early twentieth century for expanding Chinese sugar exports. Yet, in Guangdong, sugar growers and merchants simply gave up and turned to other crops. But in what was by now the Japanese colony of Taiwan, smallholder sugar-cultivators were successfully integrated into a new system of industrial-scale refineries producing cheap, high-quality white sugar for Japan.

So how does one explain the long-term success of smallholder sugar production in China, together with its sudden collapse on the mainland and its transformation in Taiwan? Mazumdar sets out to destroy a monstrous regiment of ogres here, chief among them: post-Song technological standstill; late imperial social and economic involution; the neoclassical research on peasants as rational economic actors responding to markets; and the Marxist scholarship on rural class struggle and on proto-capitalist agriculture.

The explanations Mazumdar proposes are rooted in Robert Brenner's concept of "social property relations." This approach, Mazumdar explains, transcends simple class contradictions to...