Sugar’s Bitter Backstory: A UVA Historian Explores the Hidden History of an Essential Consumer Commodity

In his new book, Unrefined: How Capitalism Reinvented Sugar, David Singerman, assistant professor of history and American studies at the University of Virginia, explores how one of the world’s most familiar foods became a powerful force in shaping modern capitalism. 

Published this fall by the University of Chicago Press, the book traces the politics and the economics of sugar’s transformation in the 19th century from an agricultural product valued for its colors and nuanced flavors to a homogenized chemical commodity.

Singerman reveals how this shift enabled new forms of fraud and monopoly and how it reshaped the way consumers, workers and governments think about food and how they define “value.” From the sweltering plantations of the Caribbean to New York’s industrial  refineries to the halls of Congress, Unrefined explores the hidden connections between sweetness, science, and systems of power.

In the excerpt below, Singerman focuses on the late 1880s and the early years of the industrialization of sugar production, an era that brought with it new opportunities to defraud those faced with an industry undergoing change on an unprecedented scale.

“Sugar had always been bought and sold based on relatively stable relationships between its properties and its price. Coarser, wetter, browner sugar was cheaper and less desirable, while whiter and finer sugar was purer and more expensive,” Singerman said. “By the 1870s, these relationships were falling apart. The industrializing U.S. was importing increasingly vast quantities of sugar, Caribbean factories were becoming technologically sophisticated, and the old associations of quality and price no longer held. Uncertainty about sugar provided an opportunity for clever sugar refiners to defraud the government out of tax revenue, but they exposed other refiners to a classic Gilded Age hoax.”

From: Unrefined: How Capitalism Reinvented Sugar

They all agreed, even after everything unraveled, that they had never seen sugar like it. In New York the crystals were praised as “defined and glitteringly beautiful.” The Havemeyers tried to recreate them and failed. In Chicago skeptics said that there was “no discounting” them, “no gainsaying.” In England it was “the finest sugar the dealers had ever seen.” Months afterward, a journalist still admitted to seeing “sugar that is unlike and superior to any other sugar known in the market.” You could not buy it, not for ten dollars a pound.

That was a lot of money for sugar. For ten dollars you could refine an entire ton of raw sugar from Cuba or Puerto Rico. An ordinary pound of refined sugar, in the middle of the 1880s, cost about six and a half cents at the grocer. For each pound of refined sugar sold at retail, a little more than one-half of one cent of its price was absorbed by the refining process, soaked up in the filters and bone­ black. After covering their costs, refiners pocketed about three­ quarters of a cent more as profit.

But when the towering new Havemeyer plant, the most efficient in the world, came on line in the summer of 1883, it could produce twice as much sugar as the nearest competitor for a much lower cost, just over four­ tenths of a cent per pound. On American shelves, the price margin between raw sugar and refined sugar fell that year, and fell the next, and the next again. At those prices, Henry Havemeyer could make money, but, as he happily acknowledged, no one else had a hope.

No hope, that is, until December 1885, when a chemistry professor from Germany disembarked in New York City and made struggling refiners a dazzling offer. He would teach them how to turn raw cane sugar into refined sugar not for ten bucks a ton, but eighty cents. All they had to do was pay him a million dollars. Could he really cut the cost of sugar refining by 90 percent? His offer seemed too good to be true, yet also too crazy to fake and so specific, some refiners figured, that it must have been the result of a calculation. Why say eighty cents, one investor asked, not unreasonably, when saying a dollar would be much simpler? The audacity of his precision inspired confidence, and so did the way he promised to make refined sugar. He would use electricity.

The professor’s name was Henry Friend. His victims later described him as an unsurpassed confidence man, which was transparently a way to justify their own error. He really had chosen a scheme that perfectly fit its moment. The professor alighted in New York the same year that Thomas Edison built the city’s first direct­ current power station and made its night incandesce. The electricians—­ people who could harness lightning—­ seemed poised to transform society. But the nature of electricity remained a mystery to the brightest physicists. Not even Edison could tell you what an electric current really was. And yet the public believed electricity’s potential applications to be infinite. There was no easy way to tell where plausibility ended and credulity began. “In America, as everybody knows,” sniped one English killjoy, “anything and everything may be done by electricity.” When acquaintances and investors described Friend’s presence as “electric,” “magnetic,” even “chain lightning,” they were speaking to audiences that devoured stories of miraculous electric treatments for incurable ailments and applauded inventors who zapped huge voltages through their fingertips.

Friend took advantage of the mania for electrification. He also followed a well­ lit Gilded Age path for a swindler. Plenty of con men before him, such as the cosmopolitan French oleomargarine adulterator Alfred Paraf, had found “manufactured food” to be easy pickings. The industry’s innovations and novelties had made American consumers uneasy about mapping ideas of natural and artificial onto those of real and fake. Long before the government figured it out, Friend intuited that the sugar industry was not so precise or scientific as it seemed.