Reconsidering Sweetness and Power Through a Gendered Lens

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Acknowledgments

I wish to thank Richard N. Rosomoff, Lisa Kim Davis, Sidney Mintz, Amy Bentley, and the journal's anonymous reviewers for constructive comments on an earlier draft of this manuscript.

Notes

1. Sidney Mintz. 1985. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Penguin, pp. 57–58.

2. See, for instance, Lourdes Beneria and Gita Sen, “Accumulation, reproduction and women's role in economic development: Boserup revisited,” Signs, vol. 7, no. 2 (1981): 279–298; Henrietta L. Moore, A Passion for Difference (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994).

3. Richard Pares. 1960. Merchants and Planters. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 39–40, quoted in Mintz, Sweetness and Power, p. 169.

4. Barry Higman, Slave Populations of the British Caribbean, 1807–1834 (Jamaica: University of the West Indies, 1995), pp. 205–206; K. F. Kiple and V. H. Kiple, Another Dimension to the Black Diaspora (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

5. F. G. Cassidy and R. B. Le Page. 2002. Dictionary of Jamaican English. Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, p. 89.

6. Barbara Bush. 1996. “Hard Labor: Women, Childbirth, and Resistance in British Caribbean Slave Societies,” in David B. Gaspar and Darlene C. Hine (eds.), More Than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 193–217, esp. pp. 196–197.

7. Higman, Slave Populations, p. 188.

8. Mary Tolford Wilson. 1964. “Peaceful Integration: The Owner's Adoption of His Slaves’ Food.” Journal of Negro History, 49(2): 116–127.

9. Ira Berlin and Philip D. Morgan, “Introduction,” in I. Berlin and P. Morgan (eds.), Cultivation and Culture: Labor and the Shaping of Slave Life in the Americas (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993), pp. 1–45; Michael Mullin, Africa in America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994); David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine (eds.), More Than Chattel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996).

10. A recipe for peanut brittle can be found in the facsimile edition of a cookbook written by Sarah Rutledge in 1847. Sarah Rutledge, The Carolina Housewife (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1979), p. 219. Many of the sweetened foods that women prepared and sold in the outdoor markets of plantation societies were later commercialized with their industrialization as drinks, candies, and snacks in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These points are further elaborated in Judith A. Carney, Seeds of Memory: Africa's Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World (Berkeley: University of California Press, forthcoming).