Key Takeaways:

• Traces sugar’s evolution from rare luxury to cheap staple, showing how it reshaped diets, class habits, and daily rituals in Europe and the Americas. Goodreads+1
• Connects sugar production to slavery, colonial plantations, and the rise of industrial capitalism, arguing that a single commodity can reorganize global labor and trade.
• Explores how sugar consumption became tied to respectability, energy, and comfort, making it psychologically and culturally sticky even as health concerns grew.
• Provides a model for “commodity history” that later scholars applied to coffee, chocolate, bananas, and other foods central to modern eating.