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 economic importance and its intimate relationship with colonialism offer an important context for probing the nature of colonial societies. This book questions some major assumptions about the nexus between sugar production and colonial societies in the Caribbean and Southeast Asia, especially in the second (post-1800) colonial era.

“The book is an invaluable contribution to the study of the political economies of these regions and offers fresh perspectives on metropolis-colony interactions. It challenges the Euro/US-centric historiography…[it] introduces the reader to a variety of archival sources.”  ·  The Newsletter of the International Institute for Asian Studies

Ulbe Bosma is Senior Research Fellow at the International Institute of Social History. He is published on colonial Indonesia in Dutch, English and Portuguese and is co-author of a general history on the Dutch creole societies in Asia (forthcoming).