70 pages • 2 hours read
Marc Aronson, Marina BudhosSugar Changed the World
Nonfiction | Book | YA | Published in 2010A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Themes
The Complexity of History
Aronson and Budhos write about complexity as something historians and teachers should embrace. They criticize high schools for splitting topics like the Declaration of Independence, the French Revolution, and abolitionism in “completely separate units […] as if these crucial historical themes were not inextricably linked” (128).
This view heavily influences Sugar Changed the World. Aronson and Budhos describe the narrative of their book as a “much larger story about a remarkable substance […] a story of the movement of millions of people, of fortunes made and lost, of brutality and delight” (6). As such, this is very much a world history, focusing on Africa, the Americas, the Middle East, Europe, and India, but also touching on East Asia and Polynesia. For the story of sugar to be accurately told, Aronson and Budhos believe it must cover many different parts of the world and historical trends.
This view is not specific to Sugar Changed the World. Throughout the text, Aronson and Budhos call attention to how different societies and different historical trends acted upon each other. For example, they argue that the Crusades were not just a political and military event, but also a cultural one that introduced new information to Europe and transformed European life and thought (24-25). Also, when discussing the so-called Triangle Trade, they argue that the trade network over the Atlantic that existed by the 18th century was more complex than a triangle (37). Through examples such as these, Aronson and Budhos suggest that focusing on connections and relationships between historical trends, rather than separating them, is the best way to approach history and the education of history.
History is Personal
In beginning Sugar Changed the World with their own personal anecdotes, Aronson and Budhos are making the case that their families’ lives and their own lives have been changed by the trends they discuss in the book: “We realized that our two family stories […] were just the beginning of a much larger story about a remarkable substance” (6). Through this approach, Aronson and Budhos encourage the readers to think about how history has changed their own lives.
Throughout Sugar Changed the World, the authors also often relay stories of the actions of individuals. For example, they use the personal story of Thomas Thistlewood, a European migrant to Jamaica, to discuss the typical background of slave overseers and how they acted. Likewise, they draw on the biography of the Indian activist Bechu in Guyana to discuss the abuses plantation owners inflicted on Indian indentured workers (112-113).
In pointing out that history is personal, the authors are also encouraging readers to take a more dynamic view of history. Even exploited people are active shapers of history–both their own history and world history in general. It is true that people like slaves and indentured servants were subjected to brutal treatment, but they were not passive. Aronson and Budhos highlight the ways in which they were active, whether by transforming Hawaii and the former colonies into multicultural societies, developing cultural innovations like jazz or bomba, using technological innovations to lift themselves out of serfdom, or participating in world-changing revolutionary movements like the Haitian Revolution or satyagraha.
Positivity Out of Negativity
The idea that even disempowered people actively shape history leads into another theme of Sugar Changed the World: that even a history full of negativity can bring about positive impacts on the world. While the authors call the story of sugar a “grim and brutal” one (128), they argue that it did contribute to the modern world in helpful ways, like making society more aware of human rights rather than viewing humans as property.
This mention of the positive impacts is not to diminish the personal horrors suffered by slaves and indentured servants. Aronson and Budhos make the scope of their hard lives clear. Further, they make it clear that even the indentured servants had difficult lives: “And though they might not be shackled and whipped like slaves, their lives were completely controlled by the terrifying overseers” (109). Still, Aronson and Budhos argue throughout much of Sugar Changed the World that these horrors also prompted people to fight against age-old ideas of slavery and of people as subjects to monarchs and nobles: “Sugar turned human beings into property, yet sugar led people to reject the idea that any person could be owned by another” (125). As Aronson and Budhos point out, the Age of Sugar fueled an ongoing conflict of human rights against property rights (81). This struggle involved people like Thomas Jefferson, who supported ideas of human rights yet did nothing to end slavery. However, it also encouraged people and movements like the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, the Haitian Revolution, the abolitionist William Wilberforce, and Mohandas Gandhi.
