Eating the Dead: Consumption and Regeneration in the History of Sugar

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Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank Amy Bentley, Carole Counihan, Maria Grahn-Farley, Walter Johnson, Ajantha Subramanian, and two anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier drafts of this essay.

Notes

1. Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Penguin, 1985), Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Death Without Weeping: the Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), p. 36. Much of the following commentary is adapted from Vincent Brown, The Reaper's Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).

2. Robert Dirks, The Black Saturnalia: Conflict and Its Ritual Expression on British West Indian Slave Plantations (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1987), p. 22; Anonymous, Marly; or, a Planter's Life in Jamaica (Glasgow: Richard Griffin & Co., 1828), pp. 164–165; Simon Taylor to Chaloner Arcedeckne, 23 July 1770, Cambridge University Library, Vanneck Papers, 3A/ 1770/9.

3. Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994 (1944); Dirks, The Black Saturnalia, pp. 67–68, 77, also see 56–96; Richard Sheridan, Doctors and Slaves: A Medical and Demographic History of Slavery in the British West Indies, 1680–1834 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 207–219; Kenneth F. Kiple and Virginia H. Kiple, “Deficiency Diseases in the Caribbean,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 11, No. 2 (1980): 197–215.

4. Mintz, Sweetness and Power, quotations on pp. 167, 43.

5. Elisabeth Isichei, Voices of the Poor in Africa (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2002), pp. 29–30, 35, 29–41; Mimi Sheller, Consuming the Caribbean: From Arawaks to Zombies (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 143–173.

6. Mintz, Sweetness and Power, pp. 180, 175.

7. Richard S. Dunn. “Sugar Production and Slave Women in Jamaica,” in Ira Berlin and Philip D. Morgan, eds., Cultivation and Culture: Labor and the Shaping of Slave Life in the Americas (Charlottesville, 1993), pp. 49–72; quotations, pp. 72, 62.

8. Jennifer L. Morgan. 2004. Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, p. 9.

9. Sidney W. Mintz and Richard Price. 1992[1976]. The Birth of African-American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective. Boston: Beacon Press, p. 68.

10. John Thornton. 1998. “The Coromantees: An African Cultural Group in Colonial North America and the Caribbean,” Journal of Caribbean History Vol. 32, Nos. 1 & 2: 161–178; Alexander X. Byrd, “Eboe, Country, Nation, and Gustavas Vassa's Interesting Narrative, William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. LXIII, No. 1 (January 2006): 123–148; Douglas B. Chambers, “Ethnicity in the Diaspora: The Slave Trade and the Creation of African ‘Nations’ in the Americas,” Slavery and Abolition, Vol. 22, No. 3 (December 2001): 25–39. For a sophisticated interpretation of this process see Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York, 1996), esp. pp. 59–63.

11. William Beckford. 1790. A Descriptive Account of the Island of Jamaica. London: T. and J. Egerton, p. 388.

12. James Stewart, A View of the Present State of the Island of Jamaica (Edinburgh, 1823), pp. 270, 274–276; Leslie, A New and Exact Account of Jamaica, p. 326.

13. Charles Leslie, A New and Exact Account of Jamaica (Edinburgh, 1740), p. 325; James M. Phillippo, Jamaica: Its Past and Present State (London, 1843), p. 246.

14. Thornton, “The Coromantees,” pp. 168–170; W. J. Gardner, A History of Jamaica from its Discovery by Christopher Columbus to the year 1872 (London, 1971 [1873]), pp. 385–386; Diary of Thomas Thistlewood, 5 June 1767, cited in Douglass Hall, In Miserable Slavery: Thomas Thistlewood in Jamaica, 1750–86 (London, 1989), p. 145; Leslie, A New and Exact Account of Jamaica, 326.

15. Roderick A. McDonald, The Economy and Material Culture of Slaves: Goods and Chattels on the Sugar Plantations of Jamaica and Louisiana (Baton Rouge, 1993), pp. 16–49; Ira Berlin and Philip D. Morgan, eds., “Introduction: The Slaves’ Economy—Independent Production by Slaves in the Americas,” Slavery and Abolition, XII (1991): pp. 1–27; Sidney W. Mintz, “The Origins of the Jamaican Market System,” in Caribbean Transformations (New York, 1974), pp. 180–213; Sidney W. Mintz and Douglas Hall, “The Origins of the Jamaican Marketing System,” Yale University Publications in Anthropology, No. 57 (1960): 1–26.

16. Mintz, Sweetness and Power, p. 214; For important recent analyses of the politics of death see Katherine Verdery, The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999) and Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15, No. 1 (Winter 2003): 11–40. On the history of energy usage see John F. Richards, The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Tom Phillips, “Brazil's ethanol slaves: 200,000 migrant sugar cutters who prop up renewable energy boom,” Friday, March 9, 2007, The Guardian.