Read an Excerpt from “Unrefined: How Capitalism Reinvented Sugar” by David Singerman
Sugar is everywhere in the western diet, blamed for epidemics of obesity, diabetes, and other modern maladies. Our addiction to sweetness has a long and unsavory history. Over the past five hundred years, sugar has shaped empires, made fortunes for a few, and brought misery for millions of workers, both enslaved and free. How did sugar become a defining modern food and an essential global commodity? In Unrefined, David Singerman recasts our thinking about this crucial substance in the history of capitalism. Before the nineteenth century, sugar’s value depended on natural qualities: its color, its taste, where it was grown, and who had made it. But beginning around 1850, a combination of plantation owners, industrialists, and scientists set out to redefine sugar itself. Deploying the tools and rhetoric of science, they transformed not just how sugar was produced or traded but even how people thought about it. By changing sugar into a pure chemical object, these forces stripped power from workers and enabled—and obscured—new kinds of fraud, corruption, and monopoly.
In the following excerpt from the prologue “Outrageous Conduct in the Sugar House,” Singerman gives readers a behind-the-scenes look at the operations of a sugar house in 1894 at the Soledad plantation in Matanzas, Cuba.
Matanzas, Cuba, late April 1894, over the hump of the zafra, the cane harvest season, and nothing unusual to report. The sugar house at the Soledad plantation was bagging more sugar than usual, and of good quality too. The backlog of sticky second sugars from earlier in the month had been cleared out. A chemist from a factory in the province to their east paid a visit, eager to share his recent calculations of how his own production was going, and to peek at Soledad’s own. The factory also welcomed the inventor of a novel evaporator, who was excited about retrofitting one of Soledad’s older machines during the next grinding season. The island would produce a million tons that year, and though no one knew it yet, it was the end of the boom. Later that summer, the United States would raise the import duty on sugar, the price would crash, production would collapse, and a revolution would begin. But for now, the grinding ground on, and there really was nothing to tell the factory’s owner back in Boston, Edwin Atkins, except that one of the sugar boilers had taken a swing at the head chemist.
The boiler had been drinking, though he was not drunk per se. But it was a fight at work and over sugar. The boiler was responsible for crystallization, the most delicate stage of sugar manufacture. When the boiler felt the syrup was ready to crystallize in his pan, he would break the vacuum seal, the pressure would rise, and the sugar would begin to emerge out of solution. This was called his strike, and it took years of experience and trained senses to know when the syrup was ripe for striking.
By 1894 a factory’s chemist was interested in recording the properties of every strike, looking for relationships that might improve the sugar that came out. This interest was part of the chemist’s endless quest to monitor the factory’s materials in motion and was a way to scrutinize the otherwise inscrutable work of the boiler. The chemist at Soledad, a Canadian named Wilfrid Skaife, thought that the boilers should have been keeping notes on the precise time at which they began their strikes. So Skaife asked one of these boilers, called Pat Leonard, to keep better records of when his strikes began.
Asked him “quietly,” Skaife wrote afterward, but not quietly enough. The relentless grinding season dissolved their disagreements into the heat and noise and urgency of the factory. After all those eighteen-hour days, the sentiments of management and of labor were thoroughly supersaturated, and with his request, Skaife broke the seal. The pressure rose, grudges crystallized, and Leonard, “partly intoxicated,” right there in the boiling house, decided it was time to strike.
Skaife obviously dismissed Leonard from service in retaliation for his “outrageous conduct in the sugar house,” as he put it to Atkins, but it was not clear whether he meant the punch or the insubordination about record-keeping or both. He promised his employer that Leonard’s departure would not have an effect on operations, and that the only difference was that he had to work harder and longer. The zafra would be finished in a month, so for the moment Skaife and another boiler could divide up the extra work among themselves. But each week now brought news of some modification. The seconds had to be boiled on the light side to avoid the recurrence of last month’s mess. Then the remaining boilers had trouble getting the liquid to form grains.
Before the machinery was cool, Atkins had already contacted former boilers and begun looking for new ones to engage on favorable terms. The pair of Skaife and the other boiler couldn’t keep up the pace for a whole season, and good boilers were not unemployed for long. Skaife advised Atkins to let him hire the new men himself, “especially as a more definite idea of their work ought to be instilled in them,” as he delicately put it. But none of this was good news for Skaife. He knew Atkins was looking for a new superintendent, and Skaife wanted the promotion even if it didn’t come with a raise. He could deal with the machines, with the technical side of production, with the analysis. But now his claims that he could equally “manage men” rang hollow. Leonard might have missed, but he had shown that a boiler’s skills were indispensable. Making sugar was not as easy as the chemist thought.
Excerpted from Unrefined by David Singerman, published by the University of Chicago Press. © 2025 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.
David Singerman is assistant professor of history and American studies at the University of Virginia.
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