Ulbe Bosma Book Talk: The World of Sugar

The Institute at Brown for Environment and Society (IBES) and the Ruth J. Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery & Justice warmly invite you to a book talk and discussion of The World of Sugar: How the Sweet Stuff Transformed Our Politics, Health, and Environment over 2,000 Years (forthcoming in May 2023 from Harvard University Press).

The event will center on a discussion of the book between the author, Prof. Ulbe Bosma, and Prof. Anthony Bogues, Director of the Simmons Center at Brown University. Moderated audience Q&A will follow.

About the Book:

The World of Sugar begins with the earliest evidence of sugar production. Through the Middle Ages, traders brought small quantities of the precious white crystals to rajahs, emperors, and caliphs. But after sugar crossed the Mediterranean to Europe, where cane could not be cultivated, demand spawned a brutal quest for supply. European cravings were satisfied by enslaved labor; two-thirds of the 12.5 million Africans taken across the Atlantic were destined for sugar plantations. By the twentieth century, sugar was a major source of calories in diets across Europe and North America. In Bosma’s definitive telling, to understand sugar’s past is to glimpse the origins of our own world of corn syrup and ethanol and begin to see the threat that a not-so-simple commodity poses to our bodies, our environment, and our communities.

About the Author:

Ulbe Bosma is Senior Researcher at the International Institute of Social History (IISH) and Professor of International Comparative Social History at the Free University of Amsterdam. His main fields of interest are the histories of labour, international labour migration, and commodity frontiers. His endowed chair covers empirical research into labour and labour relations from a comparative social historical and geographic perspective. Bosma was a visiting professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris, a fellow at the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Studies, and from 1993-2007, he was coordinator of the Sephis programme, sponsoring historical research in the Global South. He has published many books and articles on colonial and postcolonial history.

Dr. Mindi Schneider from IBES will moderate the event.

Host or Publisher Mindi Schneider, Institute at Brown for Environment and Society (IBES)