The Sugar Trade: Brazil, Portugal, and the Netherlands, 1595–1630 by Daniel Strum (review)

Daniel Strum has provided us with a thoroughly researched and lavishly illustrated study of the sugar trade in Brazil, Portugal, and the Netherlands during the momentous years between 1595 and 1630 when the Atlantic economy was born. Since sugar was one of the first global industrial commodities that spanned continents and oceans, it is an admirable subject for a world history approach.¹

The Sugar Trade is a perceptive combination of economic, business, and cultural history that explores such diverse facets of the trade as sugar’s international industrialization and commodification, Western European shipping and ship building, credit, coins, pirates, culinary demand for sugar, and the establishment of commercial trust and enforcement through government and private organizations. As Stuart Schwartz, the leading expert on sugar in the Atlantic world, writes in the book’s introduction, The Sugar Trade is “not just a study of the sugar trade, but an excellent introduction to a history of the Atlantic world, and to an essential aspect of the global economy and Brazil’s role as a colony within it.” I would add that even though Strum was educated mostly in Brazil, that continental-sized country plays a smaller—though essential—role in his study than one might have anticipated. But the details on the sugar trade in Europe are groundbreaking.

Although the slave trade and sugar mill production have been well researched, Strum makes a remarkable new contribution to understanding the sugar trade itself, which has been largely overlooked. Building on Christopher Ebert’s 2008 economic history of the Brazilian sugar trade in the early Atlantic economy in the 1550–1630 period,² Strum broadens and deepens the inquiry and pays much greater attention to the European side of the trade. We see the evolution of private and state institutions, particularly in Amsterdam and Porto, in creating a smooth-running market that embraced four continents in their social, economic, political, and religious dimensions. But this is not a heroic version of the rise of capitalism and rationalism, since violence and chance play a large role. The Iberian Inquisitions’ privateers and colonial and religious wars are as important in shaping world markets as the genius of profit-maximizing investors. Strum particularly focuses on merchant networks, especially those of the Portuguese converted Jews (marranos/New Christians) with their diaspora in Amsterdam, Porto, Lisbon, Bahia, Pernambuco, and, to a lesser extent, Hamburg. In fact, this is his specialty; his 2009 PhD dissertation in Jewish history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem was titled “The Portuguese Jews and New Christians in the Sugar Trade.”

Strum has an unusual perspective on the sugar trade because of his education. He had an undergraduate degree in economics and law in São Paulo, Brazil, where he currently teaches in the economics department. Hence he pays close attention to legal arguments, arrangements, and institutions as well as investigating key issues in economics: institutions such as the stock exchange in Amsterdam, banks, maritime exchanges, mercantile courts, and informal arrangements to ensure trust, repayment, and long-distance information. His training in Jerusalem has made him sensitive to questions of religion and ethnic diasporas and means of cross-cultural exchanges. Fortunately, he has a deft historical sensibility.

He has geographically and temporally expanded the inquiry of his dissertation in this volume by gracefully incorporating the insights of forerunners such as Charles Boxer, Fernand Braudel, Leonor Freire Costa, Jean-Louis Flandrin, Jonathan Israel, Sidney Mintz, Stuart Schwartz, Eddy Stols, and Jan de Vries. He also spices his narrative with historical cases drawn from close readings of notarial records and commercial correspondence in Portuguese (and Brazilian), Dutch, Spanish, and English sources that advance our understanding of early modern trade. Although its title makes the volume sound like a rather narrow economic or business history, The Sugar Trade is in fact far richer. Because of the troubled period it covers and because the small countries that are his main focus...