Ulbe BosmaNobel Conference 61

Ulbe Bosma

Senior Researcher at the International Institute for Social History in Amsterdam

 2,000 Years of Sugar: The History of a Commodity 

When you scoop a teaspoon of sugar into your cup of tea or coffee do you ever think about its origins or history? You may know that sugar cane can only be grown in tropical environments. You may also know that sugar was produced by enslaved Africans on tropical islands in the Caribbean beginning in the sixteenth century. These are critical facts for understanding the history of sugar, but there is also much more. Sugar has a wider global history beyond the Atlantic world in terms of its production, trade, and consumption. 

Ulbe Bosma, who hails from the Netherlands, began his study of sugar not in the Caribbean, but in Indonesia. Bosma’s earliest historical research focused on Karel Zallberg, a journalist involved in anti-colonial politics in Batavia, Java in the Netherlands Indies, now Indonesia. Bosma’s later work on the Dutch East Indies focused on identity and culture as well as labor exploitation and migration. His fascination with the Netherlands Indies led him to sugar. In 2013 Bosma published a book on the industrialization of sugar production in India and Indonesia beginning in the eighteenth century under European colonialism. The Sugar Plantation in India and Indonesia, 1770-2010 shows the divergent paths India and Java pursued in producing sugar. The British largely failed to produce industrialized sugar in India after the abolition of slavery, but the Dutch succeeded, by bringing the plantation system to Java. 

Bosma’s interest in commodities, labor, and migration led him to write a global history of sugar. The World of Sugar: How the Sweet Stuff Transformed our Politics, Health, and Environment over 2,000 Years (Harvard, 2024) takes a sweeping look at the history of sugar around the world from the perspective of production, sale, transportation, and consumption. It is a history of culture, business, economics, identity, race, slavery, and capitalism. From Brazil, Cuba, and Jamaica, to India, Taiwan, Java, Egypt, and the United States, Bosma shows us how sugar shaped our world in fundamental ways. Sugar changed our habits of consumption when the Hershey bar came on the market. It led American banks to establish branches in the Caribbean to supply capital to big sugar. And it spurred French engineers to head to Egypt to import their technical expertise. 

Unlike many historians, Bosma brings his research on sugar into the present. In his work on southeast Asia and the global history of sugar, he shows how the exploitation of sugar laborers continues. He also explores how “corporate sugar” has flooded our diets with cheap sugar and marketing campaigns. By putting our world’s current dilemmas about sugar production and consumption into a historical context, Bosma gives us new ways of thinking about sugar past and present. 

Bosma is one of the leaders of the Commodity Frontiers Initiative, a network of scholars committed to studying the role of commodities in our world. Bosma has been a teacher and researcher in Paris, France and Bonn, Germany as well as the Netherlands. He has been awarded a major grant from the European Research Council to support commodities research. Bosma has appeared on BBC radio and published in Time Magazine. He is currently Senior Researcher at the International Institute for Social History in Amsterdam and professor of “International Comparative Social History” at the Free University of Amsterdam. He has a Ph.D. in history from the University of Leiden.