OCTOBER 24-27, 2013
The centrality of sugar to the
development of the early Atlantic world is now well known. Sugar was the ‘green
gold’ that planters across the Americas staked their fortunes on, and it was
the commodity that became linked in bittersweet fashion to the rise of the
Atlantic slave trade. Producing unprecedented quantities of sugar through their
enforced labor, Africans on plantations helped transform life not only in the
colonies but also in Europe, where consumers incorporated the luxury into their
everyday rituals and routines.
“Beyond Sweetness: New
Histories of Sugar in the Early Atlantic World” will evaluate the current state
of scholarship on sugar, as well as move beyond it by considering alternative
consumer cultures and economies. Given its importance, sugar as a topic still
pervades scholarship on the Americas and has been treated in many recent works
about the Caribbean, Brazil, and other regions. This conference thus will serve
as an occasion for the assessment of new directions in the study of sugar.
At the same time, it will
provide participants with a space in which to rethink traditional narratives
about sugar’s rise to dominance. How have our own stories about sugar been
influenced by the promotional agendas of early colonial accounts? What exactly
were the steps via which sugar became an established commodity crop in the
Americas? And if plantation owners and overseers disciplined laborers through
technologies of control, what were, conversely, the mechanisms of resistance
and rebellion? As we now know, the dynamics of power in slave societies were
complex. Even as the plantation system dominated the lives of enslaved peoples,
many of them searched for ways to mitigate or escape the regime of sugar
planting. Furthermore, although sugar monoculture covered much of the Caribbean
and tropical Americas, it was not the only form of cultivation being practiced
either by Europeans or Africans and Amerindians. The fraught legacies left
behind by these competing visions of land use and possession are ultimately
what we will seek to untangle, as we consider both the power and limits of
sugar in the early Atlantic world.
