The different ideals of sugar production

As I was reading the introduction portion of the text for Monday's class, I came across numerous aspects of the life of a slave and servant on a plantation. One of the many things that interested me was the fact that their entire lives were focused on the production of sugar. Mintz stated that the plantation workers did not have time to do anything else but harvest sugar for the plantation owners. This resulted in their purchasing items that were made elsewhere in the world. This intrigued me because I know that in most slave/servant societies, the families don't usually have the extra money to spend on items for their household, so they have to make the items themselves. This alone showed how much power the plantation owners had over their workers and also the importance that the New World placed on the production of sugar, primarily for trade.

Another interesting point that I found was the differing uses for sugar as evident from widely different areas of the world. In the New World, sugar was used as a capitalist commodity that would be sold and traded with other regions of the world. It was rarely used by the workers themselves because this would result in a loss of economic gain for the plantation owners. Mintz went so far as to describe instances of how individuals might obtain sugar cane for personal use. This differed from how other areas of the world acted. Mintz stated that in India, people would produce sugar for personal use and for giving to their neighbors. This was a drastically different way of thinking than that of the New World. It shows how the European ideas of capitalism reached the New World but did not entirely reach India at the time.

Finally, I found it interesting the way in which sugar has flourished as a capitalist commodity. In the introduction and in chapter 1, Mintz describes the reasoning why sugar intake increased and how capitalism helped this to happen. He says that it is because humans have a natural attraction to sweet stuff. This is shown in his description of the infants in the US and in how the earlier societies acted upon the finding of sugar. Now, nearly everything has sugar in it and this has helped sugar flourish to be a major commodity and trade throughout the Early Modern era through to today's time.