Scan barcode
mrswythe89's review against another edition
4.0
Good stuff. I made lots of notes but am lazy to write them up in detail! They were mostly in the vein of "find out more about x", though. I was a bit doubtful about the argument that everything ever was caused by the sugar industry, though I can believe it was a massive force in history. I knew some of this from the London, Sugar and Slavery exhibition at the Museum of London, Docklands, but not in so much detail, so this was very much worth reading.
megatsunami's review against another edition
4.0
3.5 stars. I'd give this book 5 stars if its title were "Slavery on Sugar Plantations in the Caribbean," because I truly found it to be a well-written and interesting read, which unfortunately only covered a narrow subset of its topic. The author did exhaustive research and quotes from a wide range of sources, and she really has an ear for a good anecdote, quote, fact, or story to illustrate her point. But the book falls short of covering the title topic. I'd estimate about 3/4 of the book covers the sugar industry in the Caribbean (including its relationship to sugar consumption and abolitionist movements in Europe), while only a couple of chapters are given to the history of sugar since 1900, sugar's health impacts, etc. I was hoping to learn more about the health material as well, but this wasn't the book.
chelsea_not_chels's review against another edition
2.0
Okay, but everything except the sugar industry in the Caribbean prior to the abolition of slavery was crammed into less than one-quarter of the book, and for the first three quarters, the focus was more on the slave trade and slave life than sugar. Slavery was, of course, a huge part of the spread of the sugar industry, but it wasn't ALL of it, and the other parts deserved more attention than they got.
More...