“An extraordinary achievement.” —David Edgerton, Literary Review“A remarkably researched, comprehensive, and indispensable book for everyone who wishes to understand how sugar and the sugar industry have shaped the world in which we live.” —Gary Taubes, author of The Case Against SugarFor most of history, humans did without refined sugar. Then, suddenly, it was everywhere. How did sugar find its way into almost all the foo...

This book explores the Dutch post-colonial migrant experience within the context of a wider European debate. Over 60 years and three generations of migration history is presented, while also surveying an impressive body of post-colonial literature, much of which has never reached an international audience. While other research focuses on one or, at most, two groups, post-colonial migrants are treated here as a distinct analytical category with a unique relationship to the receiving society...

Island Southeast Asia was once a thriving region, and its products found eager consumers from China to Europe. Today, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaysia are primarily exporters of their surplus of cheap labor, with more than ten million emigrants from the region working all over the world. How did a prosperous region become a peripheral one?In The Making of a Periphery, Ulbe Bosma draws on new archival sources from the colonial period to the present to demonstrate ho...

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.

European markets almost exclusively relied on Caribbean sugar produced by slave labor until abolitionist campaigns began around 1800. Thereafter, importing Asian sugar and transferring plantation production to Asia became a serious option for the Western world. In this book, Ulbe Bosma details how the British and Dutch introduced the sugar plantation model in Asia and refashioned it over time. Although initial attempts by British planters in India failed, the Dutch colonial administration ...

Island Southeast Asia was once a thriving region, and its products found eager consumers from China to Europe. Today, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaysia are primarily exporters of their surplus of cheap labor, with more than ten million emigrants from the region working all over the world. How did a prosperous region become a peripheral one?In The Making of a Periphery, Ulbe Bosma draws on new archival sources from the colonial period to the present to demonstrate ho...

For most of history, humans did without refined sugar. 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 br...

Sugar was the single most valuable bulk commodity traded internationally before oil became the world’s prime resource. From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, cane sugar production was pre-eminent in the Atlantic Islands, the Caribbean, and Brazil. Subsequently, cane sugar industries in the Americas were transformed by a fusion of new and old forces of production, as the international sugar economy incorporated production areas in Asia, the Pacific, and Africa. Sugar’s global economi...

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 c...