How did a simple commodity, once the prized monopoly of the wealthy, become an essential ingredient in the lives of millions, before mutating yet again into the cause of a global health epidemic?


Prior to 1600, sugar was a costly luxury, but with the rise of the European colonies in the Americas in the seventeenth century, sugar became cheap, ubiquitous and hugely popular - an everyday necessity.

Today, sugar is regularly denounced as a dangerous addiction, on a par with tobacco, and the cause of global epidemics of obesity and diabetes. While consumption remains higher than ever, sugar has become a pariah.

Only now is the extensive ecological harm caused by sugar plantations being fully recognised, but it is the brutal human cost, from enslaved Africans to indentured Indians, that has struck us most forcibly in the recent past.

Walvin shows that we can only fully understand our contemporary dietary concerns by coming to terms with the relationship between society and sweetness over a long historical span, dating back two centuries to a time when sugar was vital to the burgeoning European domestic and colonial economies.


An 'entertaining, informative and utterly depressing global history of an important commodity . . . By alerting readers to the ways that modernity's very origins are entangled with a seemingly benign and delicious substance, How Sugar Corrupted the World raises fundamental questions about our world.'

Sven Beckert, Laird Bell Professor of American History at Harvard University, and author of Empire of Cotton: A Global History