Ulbe Bosma

How the Sweet Stuff Transformed Our Politics, Health, and Environment over 2,000 Years

World of Sugar

“[A] tour de force of global history...Bosma has turned the humble sugar crystal into a mighty prism for understanding aspects of global history and the world in which we live.”—Los Angeles Review of Books The definitive 2,500-year history of sugar and its human costs, from its little-known origins as a luxury good in Asia to worldwide environmental devastation and the obesity pandemic. For most of history, humans did without refined sugar. After all, it serves no necessary purpose in our diets, and extracting it from plants takes hard work and ingenuity. Granulated sugar was first produced in India around the sixth century BC, yet for almost 2,500 years afterward sugar remained marginal in the diets of most people. Then, suddenly, it was everywhere. How did sugar find its way into almost all the food we eat, fostering illness and ecological crisis along the way? 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. Sugar transformed life on every continent, creating and destroying whole cultures through industrialization, labor migration, and changes in diet. Sugar made fortunes, corrupted governments, and shaped the policies of technocrats. And it provoked freedom cries that rang with world-changing consequences. In Ulbe 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.

The World of Sugar

Remco Raben

Being "Dutch" in the Indies portrays Dutch colonial territories in Asia not as mere societies under foreign occupation but rather as a "Creole empire." The authors draw on government archives, newspapers, and literary works as well as genealogical studies that follow the fortunes of individual families over several generations.

A History of Creolisation and Empire, 1500-1920

Being "Dutch" in the Indies

Jan Lucassen

Gert Oostindie

These transfers of sovereignty resulted in extensive, unforeseen movements of citizens and subjects to their former countries. The phenomenon of postcolonial migration affected not only European nations, but also the United States, Japan and post-Soviet Russia. The political and societal reactions to the unexpected and often unwelcome migrants was significant to postcolonial migrants' identity politics and how these influenced metropolitan debates about citizenship, national identity and colonial history. The contributors explore the historical background and contemporary significance of these migrations and discuss the ethnic and class composition and the patterns of integration of the migrant population.

Europe, Russia, Japan and the United States in Comparison

Postcolonial Migrants and Identity Politics

Being Dutch in the Indies portrays Dutch colonial territories in Asia not as mere societies under foreign occupation but rather as a Creole empire. Most of colonial society, up to the highest levels, consisted of people of mixed Dutch and Asian descent who were born in the Indies and considered it their home, but were legally Dutch.

Ulbe Bosma details how the British and Dutch introduced the sugar plantation model in Asia and refashioned it over time.

Industrial Production, 1770-2010

The Sugar Plantation in India and Indonesia

Gerard Termorshuizen

Angelie Sens

Aandacht voor de journalistieke bijdrage van mannen en vrouwen aan de Nederlandstalige pers in Nederlands-Indië. O.a.: Beata van Helsdingen-Schoevers, Soewarsih Djojopoespito, Beb Vuyk en A.H. Führi-Mierop.

de Indisch- en Indonesisch-Nederlandse pers, 1850-1958

Journalistiek in de tropen

Anthony Webster

Jaime de Melo

This book examines the role of mercantile networks in linking Asian economies to the global economy. It contains fourteen contributions on East, Southeast and South Asia covering the period from 1750 to the present.

Commodities, Ports and Asian Maritime Trade Since 1750

In this book Ulbe Bosma explores the experience of immigrants in the Netherlands over sixty years and three generations. Looking at migrants from all countries, Bosma teases out how their ethnic identities are informed by Dutch culture, and how these immigrant identities evolve over time.“Fascinating, comprehensive, and historically grounded, this essential volume reveals how the colonial past continues to shape multicultural Dutch society. . . . It is an important counterpart to work on France, Britain, and Portugal.”—Andrea Smith, Lafayette College

Ulbe Bosma

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