A stirring tale of the miserable sugar slavery that helped sweeten ordinary lives

FERGUS MULLIGANreviews Sugar: a Bittersweet History By Elizabeth Abbott Duckworth Overlook463pp, £20

MY MOTHER worked for a time in the Cadbury chocolate factory near Liverpool, a city whose prosperity is rooted in the slave trade, and the cloying, sickly sweet smell from the factory was detectable for miles. Cadbury was an enlightened employer, and staff could eat as much chocolate as they liked.

To us it sounded like heaven, until she explained that new staff members gorged themselves on chocolate for about a week but then never touched it again. If they were to dip into this book, they might appreciate that aversion therapy.

Reading this graphic tale of the global havoc sugar has caused and continues to cause, you might wonder why sugar is not a banned substance; it seems to have done as much harm as opium or heroin.

Millions were enslaved to produce it, wars were fought over it, environments devastated, cultures destroyed. Yet, sugar is a major health hazard – the primary cause of obesity, type 2 diabetes and heart disease. As early as 1674, doctors had connected sugary urine with what they called “the Pissing Evil”. Still we love it and consume vast quantities in chocolate, sweets, junk food and fizzy drinks.

This book is largely a history of sugar slavery. Portugal led the way in 1493 when it shipped 2,000 Jewish children aged two to 10 to Saõ Tomé as sugar slaves; two-thirds died in the first year. The grim human trade really got going when Europeans seized 13 million Africans for the sugar plantations of the Caribbean. Abbott recounts their story in detail, how they were beaten, raped, starved and worked to death in their thousands. The music of the negro is the whip, said one slave owner, and the phrase “the crack of dawn” derives from the crack of the overseer’s whip to rouse slaves.

Plantation owners were cruel, greedy and, at the same time, timorous, for they needed and feared their slaves equally. Plantation houses were luxurious but often built like a fortress to resist slave uprisings, which were suppressed with exceptional brutality.

A successful but little-known revolt on Haiti in the 1790s produced a self-liberated black republic which lasted for 13 years until it too was suppressed. Other resistance took the form of satirical songs, spoiling the crop, theft, injuring livestock, up to and including arson and murder. The author quotes an extract from Voltaire’s Candide about a slave who lost his arm in a mill accident and whose leg was then cut off when he tried to escape. His final comment is chilling: “It is at this price that you eat sugar in Europe.”

By now the world was addicted and, for poor labourers and their families, sugar was like an opiate: it tasted good, energised, deadened appetite and satisfied hunger. The Nazis even managed to put a racial slant on sugar, promoting beet over cane which was produced, they said, by inferior races.

The sugar lobby today is a powerful one. Even Bill Clinton bowed to it, Abbott says, but it struggles to answer accusations about the damage its products cause. There is one positive byproduct of sugar, ethanol – a marvellous biofuel made from sugar cane or sugar beet, which thrives in the Irish climate. But of course, we closed all our sugar factories several years ago.

It might seem curious to write such a large book on a seemingly mundane topic, but Abbott has done well in telling what she calls her relentlessly sad and bad story.

Her style is vivid and she’s done her research, right back to her sugar plantation Antiguan ancestors. It’s a good read – but it might stay your hand next time you reach for a chocolate biscuit to enjoy with your coffee.

Fergus Mulligan is the author of The Trinity Yearand a contributor to the recently published Dictionary of Irish Biography