A (2:39)

It's really great to be here.

B (2:41)

Could you please start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and telling us why you decided to write this book.

A (2:47)

Sure. I'm an assistant professor of history and American Studies at the University of Virginia. And by training and disposition, I'm a historian of science who was trained in various interdisciplinary programs. And this book started as my dissertation at MIT in their program in history, anthropology and STS. And I began that program in 2007, which meant that in 2000, the fall of 2008, I was actually at a conference presenting a paper about a bit of this sort of sugar science stuff when the global financial markets all crashed and seized up and the sort of economic crisis began. And so for the next year or two, we were all thinking a lot about global capitalism. And maybe I should have just written a dissertation about the financial crisis. But as a historian, I sort of looked back to previous periods to try to understand how we had gotten here, right? And there were a couple of books that had really influenced me since I was an undergraduate when I thought about 19th century capitalism, especially American capitalism, neither of which have anything to do with sugar. So one of them is the novel the Confidence man by Herman Melville. And the other is the Education of Henry Adams, the autobiography of Henry Adams, who was the grandson of President John Quincy Adams. So there's two things about these books that matter. So Henry Adams said he was born in, like, I forget exactly when, the early 1830s. And within a few years he says there's railroads and there's telegraphs. And the book is really the story of his, like, confusion, as he puts it, of being born in the 18th century and living in the 20th, right? This sort of annihilation acceleration of time and space that is a really common feature of 19th century history. And the Confidence man is a novel about one night on a Mississippi riverboat and all these sort of weird characters who meet each other and kind of don't trust each other, and it's not clear whether they're all the same person. Um, it's a kind of famously unreadable novel, but what it really captures is this 19th century sense of dislocation in terms of trust, right? Because capitalism was now throwing people and things together from much further around the world much faster than it ever had before. And whereas you, you previously might have had some really, like, intimate knowledge of where you're goods came from, where your neighbors came from, where your food came from, you didn't anymore. So that sense of kind of dislocation and confusion and mistrust really had stuck with me. And then I started reading books about commodities, right? Most famously, which I talk about in the Introduction, William Crone's Nature's Metropolis, which. The kind of core of that book, which is about the rise of Chicago is these three really kind of masterful stories of how grain and trees and animals were turned into commodified objects. And I started to see ways in which this sort of 19th century sense of dislocation could. Could be told through these commodities. And it turns out that sugar is a very emblematic. Is very emblematic of a lot of these new commodities that are coursing through the 19th century. But it's also very unusual in ways that we'll talk about.

B (6:42)

Yeah, I think we definitely will talk about it. But before we get into some of the ways in which it's more unusual, I want to make sure we all know exactly what we're talking about here. Because if we go into this 19th century moment from the book, it's clear that there are some debates about what sugar actually means. So can we clarify, Is sugar, cane sugar the same as sweet beet sugar? Why was this something that 19th century people were concerned about?

A (7:07)

Yeah, that's kind of the question, what is sugar? Is kind of the question that animates this. That animates this book, or to put it a little bit differently, like who gets to say what sugar is and what's valuable about it. So if you want to understand this, what's happening in the 19th century, I think we need to take listeners back a little bit and sort of very quickly go over the sort of some parts of the broad sweep of sugar in modern history, because it is this kind of classic commodity, right. That really drove the expansion of many European empires. It's the reason that many of the slave plantation colonies in the Americas were so valuable. It's where the best estimates are that something like 80% of the people from Africa who were enslaved were sent to New World sugar plantations in particular. But for most of its. Actually, for all of its history up until the 19th century, what made sugar valuable and how you knew that it was valuable was a sort of combination of sensory factors, right? Like how it tasted, what it looked like, how it smelled, how it felt between your hands. And the story that I tell in the book is really like, how that starts to. How and why that. That that starts to change. And the. The place that I start that is with this question of is beet sugar the same thing as cane sugar?

B (8:41)

Okay, that's helpful context to understand. And I think the big picture question of kind of what is sugar? And who gets to decide is going to be a continued theme through our discussion. But that doesn't quite answer my question about sugar cane or sweet beet. I mean, I am not an expert on those topics, but were people in the 19th century, why did they care? Why was this part of that debate about what sugar was?

A (9:03)

Yeah, okay, so thank you for asking me to clarify. So, please, before 1800, sugar was something that you got from cane, like definitionally so in the, you know, the 18th century French Encyclopedia, the entry for sugar actually begins, as everyone knows, sugar is something that comes from the cane. The way that you get it out of a cane is you cut down the canes and you squash them or mill them or get the juice out of them. And then you, to put it very simply, boil the juice and then cool it and do that a number of times until the sugar crystallizes out of it. Now, we would say that what you were getting is sucrose, but as we'll discuss later, that isn't. That's a sort of retroactive as a modern way of looking at it. So sugar was this thing that you got by cutting down the cane juice and boiling it and cooling it. And then in 1747, this Prussian apothecary publishes the results of some experiments in which he says, I have gotten true sugar from a European vegetable, which is the beet, or we now think of usually called the beet. It's actually this kind of even less sexy vegetable than a beet that's like a beet mostly fed to animals. But this claim, part of what I'm trying to do early on in the book is kind of recover the radicalism of this idea that the stuff that you could get by slicing and boiling and cooling a European vegetable was the same substance that you could get from the tropics.

B (10:56)

And why did this matter? Like, when you talk about it in the book, it's not buried on page 17 as a tiny little paragraph in a newspaper like this seems to really have caught people's attention. There's caricatures and cartoons of it.

A (11:09)

Yes, this is a great point. The reason it mattered is because the sugar consumption of Europe by this point was enormous. So sugar had for most of its certainly career in Europe been something that was relatively expensive. Right. So from the kind of middle ages and the early modern period, sugar is something that can be afforded only by the aristocracy or maybe the mercantile elite. But of course it's very valuable. And so there's an opportunity to sell more of it. And as production, as enslaved people are producing more and more of it on European plantations, In the New World, the quantities of sugar that's available are going up and the price of sugar that's going down. And basically, European eaters are getting addicted to sugar. So by the end of the 18th century, sugar is a sort of commonplace item on European tables. And so, for instance, just to give you some statistics about how dramatic that rise was, in 1670, people in England ate £2 of sugar per person. By 1730 it was £12, and by 1800 it was £24 a person. England was ahead of the curve of the rest of Europe, but not by that much. So it has an enormous, like, geopolitical and economic significance as a commodity. So you asked why this sort of discovery was important, and the truth is that it was kind of not. It was not that important in 1747 to announce this. There were no sort of beet sugar factories started up. But it becomes very important at the turn of the 19th century when Britain blockades Napoleonic Europe from its access to colonial sugar, and the revolution in Haiti cuts France off from what had been the most profitable and productive sugar colony in the world. So suddenly there's all these Napoleonic subjects who are starving for sugar. And so Napoleon in particular is very intrigued by the prospect of producing an indigenous, so to speak, European sugar and. And kind of lavishly funds experiments and factories and research into ramping up this. This production. And. But the story that I. That I try to tell is that nobody bought it, basically, or it was European consumers were not. Not excited to switch their sugar from cane sugar to peach. One more important thing, though, to say about beet sugar, so I call the chapter that it's in Freedom from the New World. And the reason is that it wasn't. The attitudes towards this new sugar were not solely about how it tasted, which sort of difficult to reconstruct a historical taste from 225 years ago. But it seems like it tasted sort of like regular sugar, but somewhat sort of like cane sugar, but distinct. And so there are sort of public relations campaigns to get Europeans to like the idea of, say, putting this in their coffee. But it's wrapped up in other questions as well about empire and about slavery and abolition. So for those who were opposed to slavery, the idea of producing sugar in Europe held out the promise that that European countries could be free from is gonna sound again, it's a weird way to put it, but free from their colonial possessions, right? Like free from the plantarocracy, free from the sort of political and economic domination of. Of slavery, right? But the planter class, for obvious Reasons saw this as a, as a threat and sort of tried to undermine the validity of this new sugar.

B (15:36)

Hmm. Okay, so we've got some high stakes going on, which is very helpful to understand. This is not just a scientific question. This is not some nerdy, I don't know, snob who's like, I don't like the smell. Like, there's a bunch of things tied up in this that I think are probably going to continue as we go. But perhaps the place I'd like us to go to next is maybe not what listeners might expect at this point. I'm actually not going to ask us yet to go to, for example, the Caribbean plantations where the use of enslaved labour is producing this. Instead, I'd like us to go, please to Scotland, which cold, damp, not where sugarcane grows. And yet you have a whole chapter on Glaswegian manufacturing. Why is that an important part of the story?

A (16:24)

Okay, so there's very broadly over the course of the 19th century, there's a rivalry between beet sugar and cane sugar. So beet sugar, it does not exist, Right? The beet sugar industry does not exist. In 1800, all the sugar in global trade is cane sugar. But by the middle of the century, just about, or certainly sort of the last third of the century, the amount of beet sugar that's being produced as a result of these kind of early Napoleonic experiments and the abolition of slavery in the Americas, beet sugar rises really dramatically. And so, yes, somewhere in around the kind of latter third of the 19th century, there's as much beet sugar in global trade as there is cane sugar. And partly in response to this pressure from this expanding European industry, the cane sugar industry across the world starts to industrialize. Right now, industrialize is a weird word to use because early modern sugar plantations were the most industrial, some of the most industrial places in the world, which is to say they were technologically very sophisticated, they were highly kind of time sensitive, or the labor and machinery and agriculture was like coordinated tightly by the clock in a way that was like really not true anywhere else in certainly in the like European Eurocentric world. So they were kind of already industrialized in a kind of analytical sense of industrialization. But over the course of the 19th century, the early modern sugar plantation, which is powered by wind or water or animal power, and it's really kind of integrated with the agriculture around it starts to look like something that we would think of as industrial, right? Much larger factories, machines made out of steel, often electric, like steam powered or electrically powered, with chemists and engineers supervising them. And we'll get into those people later. But so that's the sort of like broad sweep of the story in the 19th century. But the machines came from somewhere and the place that they came from was, as you said, mostly Glasgow in Scotland, which is the sort of capital of heavy engineering, certainly of the British Empire, but really of much of the world. And I found this kind of an interesting question, right, as you said, you're not growing any cane sugar in or any sugar cane, I should say, in Glasgow. So how do you make machines there for this very, as I said, kind of high pressure, precise, time sensitive, agriculturally integrated manufacturer? How do you design and produce those machines in a place where you have no access to the kind of circumstances of their use? So I wanted to sort of bring into this story of the change in the Atlantic sugar economy, the place where the sort of infrastructure came from, if that makes any sense. When did making plans get this complicated? It's time to streamline with WhatsApp, the secure messaging app that brings the whole group together. Use polls to settle dinner plans, send event invite and pin messages so no one forgets mom 60th and never miss.

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B (21:24)

Experian. Yeah, it definitely does and raises some really tricky questions around like you are in Scotland. It is cold and wet. How do you know what kind of machine will fit in the plantation or how the tropical weather is going to impact it or I mean one could think of a number of questions that would be very hard to answer. So how does that work? Given that, one would assume that the kind of people making the machines are the experts on how to make them, but they don't have the expertise necessary to do it. So how do these sorts of questions around kind of who is the expert and who gets to decide and how these sorts of design process decisions are made, how does that work when you've got factories in Glasgow and plantations in the Caribbean?

A (22:10)

So I sort of just described like the visible or physical changes to the sugar manufacture in the Caribbean over the course of the 19th century, as we'll get to later. The sugar changes too, right? And goes from being this product that's very variable depending on where it comes from and who makes it in say 1800 to by 1900 being something that's really much purer and more standardized. And what I found in this, in doing the research for this part of the book is that standardization is a bit like a water balloon in a way, right? So if you squeeze it in, if you squeeze one part of it, the other side bulges. And so the price or the trade off, I should say, of having of producing highly standardized sugar on these new, very sophisticated industrial machines is that the other side of that exchange in Glasgow became very customized and very bespoke and very individualized and required a lot of careful human work basically on the part of these companies that specialize in producing sugar machines to understand what their customers, that is the, the plantations and factories wanted. That meant customizing designs to the specifications of a factory. It also meant sending engineers along with the machines to help, to help build them, because instructions themselves were not going to allow a local engineer without prior experience to sort of rebuild, reconstruct the thing from a kit. And it required these companies also to keep track of what happened to these machines over their very long life because they were enormous capital investments. And as the industry industrializes over the 19th century, the factories get much bigger, like orders of magnitude or several orders of magnitude larger and more efficient, but also more expensive to the capital requirements go way up in large part because these machines are such huge investments, but they last a long time. In my research, I found a picture of then Prince Charles, like hiking in the Caribbean in like the 1960s or the 1970s, and coming across in the, you know, in the forest, 100 or 125 year old piece of steel sugar machinery from a company in Glasgow that, you know, still, the company's name was still visible on it. So these things lasted a really long time. And they might break, in which case the manufacturer in Glasgow might get a letter or a telegram, right, from. From their customer in Cuba or Puerto Rico or Jamaica saying, this thing that you sold us 10 years ago just broke. We need you to make and send us another one right away. Sometimes they would send information about the thing that had broken. Sometimes they would say things like, oh, it's just the thing that you sold us 10 years ago. You surely have records of what it is. And sometimes they would send other kinds of evidence. So I have a photo in my book of a tracing of the gear teeth of a part that had. That had broken and needed replacing. And I include the. It looks like a mistake, but my own gloved hand in the archives is in the photograph just to show the scale of this drawing that some engineer has done before sending back to Glasgow. So there's all these, as I said, kind of bespoke customized ways in which these Scottish companies needed to manage not only their products, but also manage their knowledge.

B (26:33)

That's definitely a very complicated system for getting a machine fixed and built. And obviously as well shows that there's quite a lot of knowledge and expertise in the Caribbean to make all of this happen. They're not just kind of ordering out of a catalogue like IKEA and sort of expecting the people in Glasgow to do all the work. So can you tell us more about who it is on the plantations that are making decisions about how this should all work and what is needed to get to, quote, unquote, good sugar? I mean, what even is that? Who's deciding?

A (27:02)

Yeah, that's really important and connects to one of the sort of larger themes about knowledge that I want to make with this book. So I mentioned several times that sugar was valued on these kind of, you know, multi sensory. On a sort of multi sensory basis. How it. Yeah. How it tasted, how it smelled, how it felt, where it was from, what it looked like, both in the certain of, like the size of the crystals and what color it was. I also mentioned that to get. To make sugar from the juice, right, or to get crystals out of the juice, you boil it and you cool it and you boil it and you cool it. This whole thing was you have to add some things to help it crystallize and to help sort of like precipitate off impurities that you don't want that will either spoil the crystallization or spoil the flavor. These plantations were obviously owned by Europeans, some of whom were very knowledgeable about sugar production itself, others of whom were less interested in it. But one Consistent theme when you read the accounts of planters and overseers is that it really drove them crazy that they did not really understand how to make sugar. That the. The process of making sugar and the skill in doing it and the art in doing it lay in the hands of almost always of enslaved people, sometimes of free artisans, but almost always of enslaved people. They knew just when to sort of like stop the boiling process or the cooling process just went to sort of pull the crystals out of the mass, how much of an additive to insert and when that is, how much to add to the kettle where the boiling was happening. And one of the arguments that I make is that the introduction of chemists and chemical knowledge into these factories was an effort not just to kind of make the production of sugar more efficient, which is usually how it's portrayed, or to. Yeah, not just to make it more efficient, but basically to de skill the labor process. Right. And to take power over this process from the hands of workers in general, but more specifically enslaved people. And there's this kind of like an intellectual change that I chart over the course of the book that I suggest has its origins here, which is the change from thinking about sugar in these sensory terms, as I mentioned, to thinking about it and its value in modern chemical terms. So there's nothing inherent or natural about the idea that the valuable thing in sugar is the sucrose. Right. There's lots of other things that have historically given a value and that might give it value. And the idea that purity is only a chemical term seems like a kind of claim about nature, but it's actually a historical claim. So after I bring readers to Glasgow, I sort of bring them back to the Caribbean and trace the ways that European chemists and chemical knowledge was sort of brought in to overcome the knowledge of the workers who already were in the factory. But I also show that there were some crucial. Basically the final crucial crystallization step in the sugar making process. It was basically not possible to automate that or mechanize that. And that continued to drive sugar planters, sugar chemists and engineers crazy for, like, well into the 20th century.

B (31:02)

All right, well, as you've said then, you've taken readers from Glasgow to the Caribbean. The next place we go is New York. Why are we focusing the second part of the book on New York from 1875 to about 1900?

A (31:17)

So I've mostly been talking about. By way of answering your question, I've mostly been talking about raw sugar. So for reasons that are much too complicated to get into in an interview that's only as long as ours is. And also in the hope of not putting your listeners to sleep, there is a distinction, a kind of economic and geographic distinction between raw sugar and refined sugar. So the way to think about it is that raw sugar is what is produced on a factory, like close to where the sugar cane is grown, right? And it's put into a stable form, or I should say stable enough as we'll get to later, that it can be shipped to an urban center in what we now call the global north, where it is put through a refinery and turned into refined sugar, which is for the most part what people purchase directly to eat. This is. There's sort of an economic rationale for why the system is organized this way. It's sort of a 17th century frac French tax dodge. As I said, we don't have to get into it, but it's important to understand that there's that distinction between the raw sugar that's produced on plantations, which for the most part people are not buying directly, and then refined sugar produced by a refinery that might be in New York, might be in Philadelphia, might be in London, might be in Paris or Barcelona or wherever. And so in the latter parts of the book, I focus on sort of the political economy of sugar refining and the relationship between the refiners and the plantations, but also the state, in this case the American state. And that is a relationship that I argue was sort of profoundly shaped by this shift in where the value of sugar seemed to come from. Right. That it shifted from this sort of sensory sense of value to a chemical one.

B (33:31)

Let's start talking then about some of those interactions with government officials. One piece, I suppose, of the government that's worth us emphasizing is the U.S. treasury, because sugar tariffs seem to be a really big deal for them at this point. Why was this a priority for the government? And why was it hard to actually do something about this priority?

A (33:53)

Yeah, it's funny. It's funny to talk about tariffs with such enthusiasm because for most of the time that I was working on this project, I had to kind of like apologize to people that it was about tariffs. But in the year 2025, people are very interested in tariffs for reasons that we can leave as an exercise to the listener. Before the federal income tax, most of the federal government's revenue came from tariffs, that is, taxes levied on imported goods, or certainly a large portion of that revenue came from it. And by the last quarter of the 19th century, the sugar tariff is overwhelmingly the largest, not only the largest single tariff, but Also, like the largest single source of revenue for the United States government, this is not by design. This is mostly by accident, which is to say that to pay for the Civil war, right, in 1861, Congress raised tariffs on a bunch of things. And then as the US Developed and industrialized and grew in the following decades, its consumption of sugar, both in absolute terms and in per capita terms, rocketed up. And so, as a result, just as American eaters became addicted to sugar, the federal government became addicted to sugar too. The trouble was that the tariff was more or less levied on the basis of the purity of the sugar. So problems with how that or the purity of the value of the sugar. And so arguments about seemingly sort of mundane and technical arguments about what the source of that value was and who should assess it and how it should be assessed became very big and important questions because there was so much money riding on it.

B (35:52)

And why was it hard for them to implement these tariffs the way they wanted to?

A (35:56)

It hadn't always been hard, or it hadn't always seemed hard, right? So there was this system which I talk about in the book called the Dutch Standard. If you imagine about 20 jars, little like, almost like the size of spice jars in your kitchen, all in a row, numbered sequentially, each filled with successively sort of lighter colored and finer grained sugars, that's what this looked like. And what a customs official would do when a cargo of sugar arrived in a port like New York or Baltimore was take what he believed to be a representative sample of the sugar and compare it with this set of jars that he had in his office and decide which of them matched. And then the tariff was assessed based on which of these numbers basically was the closest match. The trouble as I have sort of alluded to, is that the sugar that was coming from the Caribbean, from these modernizing factories was itself changing, right? And so these jars not only contained sugars, they also kind of embodied a sense of a particular relationship between color and texture and value. And the trouble was that the sugar that was coming from these factories sort of disrupted the stability of that relationship. A sort of key word to understand or key termination is going to be centrifugal sugar, which is just to say that after being boiled and cooled, the sugar was dried in this, on the factory, on the plantation, dried in this machine called a centrifuge, which is like. Or centrifugal, I should say, basically an enormous salad spinner, right? So it's a metal basket that spins around, and the idea is that the sugar stays inside and the syrup that the crystals are suspended in gets flung outside of the basket. And this, instead of drying sugar sort of in the sun for, or in clay molds for weeks, this allowed you to dry tons of sugar in in just a few minutes. So there's more sugar and it is of a higher quality and chemical purity and it's more consistent. But these sort of existing, very obviously sort of subjective instruments are not well suited to judging the quality and assessing a tariff.

B (38:41)

So this sounds like the solution would be a new bit of technology. And sure enough, we turn the page and we get something called the Polariscope. Does that reduce these problems?

A (38:54)

Again, it sort of depends who you ask. So the Polariscope is a very classic looking piece of 19th century scientific. Yeah, it's like a scientific gizmo. You can imagine a sort of horizontal tube about 2ft long, suspended or stuck on another vertical tube that's about a foot long. And it would sit on a table or a desk, and you put a tube with a sugar solution in the middle of this one and you shine some light through it, polarize light through it. And we can get into the details a little bit later. But it lets you measure the sucrose content of a sugar sample. So this does seem like it would be useful for evaluating the purity of sugar if that purity is defined in, in chemical terms. And the Treasury Department, by the end of the 1870s, which is administering these increasingly hopeless tariffs, sort of decides to adopt this. This is an instrument has been developed in the early 1800s by a French physicist, actually, again for the purpose. One of the purposes was to help adjudicate the difference between cane sugar and peach sugar, but decides to adopt this. The Treasury Department decides to adopt this instrument for use in customs houses. But not everybody likes this idea. And in particular, what not everyone is convinced of, to put it mildly, is that this instrument will help reduce the possibility for corruption and fraud. Because the. The uncertainty of the sugar itself, the sort of inherent subjectivity of the measurements, and also the increasing ability of the people who made sugar in the Caribbean to sort of manipulate the sugar to undermine or slip through the American tariff net was becoming a huge problem by the end of the 1870s. So, for example, you might make sugar that looked very dark, so would register very low on this Dutch scale, but then actually had a very high sucrose content, so that it was very valuable to a refiner. And the Treasury Department is so embarrassed by its inability to figure this out that they actually use the word. They actually say that they are Literally say that they are embarrassed, right, in their annual reports to Congress. And it certainly seems like adopting this instrument, the Polariscope, should help more objectively adjudicate these disputes. But there are a lot of challenges to that view.

B (41:56)

All right, this is very helpful for understanding the Polariscope and kind of the way in which it seems to solve some of these problems. But your beginning of the answer to my question about the Polariscope was sort of, it depends who you ask. So what are the downsides here?

A (42:10)

So one advantage of the Dutch standard, right, is that it's there on a desk and everybody can see the sugar and everybody can see the Dutch standard. And so it's easy for someone to. To sort of object to the valuation and say, no, you're wrong. It's actually not number seven, it's, you know, it's number 10 or whatever. The claim that the Treasury Department at various points makes about the periscope and also that the largest refiners in the country make about the Polariscope when they are advocating for what they claim is this more rational kind of approach to tariffs, is that it will be objective, right? That it's science, it's chemistry. You put it in the hands of an expert, and the expert will tell you exactly how much sucrose is in your. Or how pure your sample is and how much your thing eats away. The objection that a number of the country's most prominent chemists make and some of the smaller refiners make, and also some kind of like rogue ex treasury agents who go around kind of distributing pamphlets in Gilded Age America. The thing that they point out is that it may be more objective, but you also have put it all in the hand. You have put the whole process in the hands of an expert who is themselves unaccountable, right? So no one else can see what the chemist is doing when he peers down this tube and adjusts some knobs and claims to give you the answer. Because it's now like out of the realm of visual judgment, right, Looking at some jars and now in the realm of sort of this expert chemical. This expert chemical procedure. So one problem is that it's actually not any more objective in the sense that when the chemist looks down, he's still trying to make two things look the same. They just happen to be sort of two views through different eyepieces that have to be the same color or the same pattern. So that's one kind of fundamental problem. The other problem is that it's now much easier to bribe this chemist if that's what you want to do and get them to measure your sugar a little bit low for the purpose of lowering your tax bill. Or even better, get your sugar to measure a little bit low and get your competitor sugar to measure a little bit high so that you pay lower taxes and they pay higher taxes, thus wiping out all of their profits. So this question about whether this scientific instrument is actually less prone to corruption and more objective is really at the heart of the disputes here.

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Order now and get $10 off on Sephora orders of $50 or more on the Uber Eats app. Order now. Offer ends October 30th. One order per customer. Additional terms apply. See app for availability. Delivery fees may apply. Bribing chemists Opening up a whole new front of ways in which this industry can focus on making money. So thank you for sharing that with us. Putting the Polariscope then to the side for a moment. Well, I'm sure we'll come back to it, but there's some other aspect here about kind of regulation of sugar that I think we haven't discussed yet that we probably should, which is temperature of sugar. And this seems to be important sort of scientifically in general. I don't know how much we need to go into being chemists ourselves. But this is clearly important enough beyond just the chemistry lab, because this goes all the way to the U.S. supreme Court. So what is going on with the temperature of sugar? Why do we have these justices getting involved?

A (47:13)

Yes, so that is a really good question that I spend a lot of time trying to figure out. So the temperature in question is the temperature at which the Polariscope reading is being made. Right. Because it turned out to be a significant open scientific question, right. By the end of the 19th century was whether the properties of sugar that are relevant to the polariscope were affected by a change in temperature. I think I do have to give listeners a tiny bit of detail about the Polariscope or I'm going to be dancing around it for the next few minutes. So I'll do my best to be very brief, but basically, sugar is, is one of a class of molecules that rotates the direction of the polarization of light. So not the direction that light is moving, not like bending it like a prism, but if you sort of like open your hand and, and like stick it out so your hand is, your sort of fingers are lined up vertically and your thumb is sticking straight up, right? The light is moving it along the direction of your fingers. But in polarized light, the light is vibrating up and down along the direction of your thumb. And what sucrose will do as you pass light through it is it will rotate your hand so your thumb is pointing in a different direction. And it will do this in a sort of predictable, specific proportion. Right? So for every gram of sugar, that of sucrose that the light passes through, the rotation will be. Or the direction will be rotated a little bit. And the question was, and that's what the polariscope measures is the change in the direction of the polarization of the light, which is how you can work backwards and figure out how much sugar you put in the thing or how much sucrose was in the sugar that you put in the thing. All right, now that I've done my super brief chemistry lesson, we can say that the question was, does the temperature affect this property of the sugar? Which it so happened that the sort of, the range within that, within which that mattered, the temperature range within that mattered, and the sort of alteration range within that mattered, within which that mattered, was significant enough to potentially, like, change the value of the tariffs that were being levied. And this is coming on the top of several decades of conflicts about the Polariscope and sugar tariffs. Sort of the tariff is like one of the biggest political questions in the US of the late 19th century, should it be high enough to, like, afford a lot of protection to domestic industries? And the sugar refining industry is one of the most politically powerful. So it's constantly kind of screwing Americans out of their money by keeping their tariffs high. And it's a very, like, politically unpopular business to be in. And they're also being accused of bribing the Secretary of the treasury, bribing customs officials, all this kind of thing. So the question is, for the Treasury Department and for the sugar industry is, does the. How does the temperature affect this property of. Of sugar in a way that is, like, relevant to the tariff? And it goes up to the Supreme Court because the Treasury Department issues regulations that says that, yes, it does, and here's how much the chemist should adjust to it. And the American Sugar Refining Company, otherwise known as the Sugar Trust, which is the. Effectively, the monopoly on sugar refining in the eastern United States, sues. And so the. So the sues on sort of technical, regulatory, administrative law grounds that I truly will not even try to bore your listeners with. But it's part of this larger conflict between the US Government and the sugar industry, which is trying to form a monopoly to protect its profits in an era of falling prices.

B (51:43)

So the key word here, I think, really is monopoly, because there's so much detail in the Supreme Court documents. I think at one point you even mentioned that, like, the Justices themselves are not super psyched at the level of detail they're being flooded with. But one would sort of expect, especially in this time period, as you said, it's politically unpopular. The tariffs are a really big amount of money. So the fact that it's going all the way up to the Supreme Court to some extent, sort of makes sense that there's scrutiny in this industry. I was perhaps more surprised as I continued reading and of course, as we continue moving through the 20th century, that there aren't more cases that go through the Supreme Court that this monopoly doesn't seem to get broken up. The monopoly, in fact, seems to be pretty robust. How was that done?

A (52:32)

So the story of many industries in the late 19th century in the US is mergers, even referred to as, like the great merger movement in American business. Companies are combining horizontally and even sometimes and combining vertically. So there's lots of great economic historical work on this. But the relevant context for sugar is that, as I mentioned, the trend over 500 years, right, is for the production of sugar to go up and the price of it to go down. And sugar refining, by this point, is a low margin High volume business. So a refiner does not make very much money on every pound of refined sugar. And I should say that what the, what a refiner does is just take the, take the raw sugar and basically like boil it and clarify it and cool it again. And often do that multiple times to go from say 95% purity to 99% purity. But the price is always falling and the margins of efficiency that you need to make money are very slim. So as an industry, it is constantly losing money and refineries are constantly going out of business. And as a result, there are very powerful incentives in that sector to combine and to form a cartel or a monopoly to constrict production and keep prices high. Now, the refiners are always claiming that they're less that, that they're in more trouble than they are. But that is pretty clearly the dynamic that keeps happening. And the trouble that is that by the 1890s, state governments and then the federal government start cracking down on various forms of combinations or trusts. And if you look on, say, you know, if you look, if you look at American political cartoons from the period, there's all of these, there's many cartoons of like Mr. Moneybags type figures with like top hats and monocles and mustaches and waistcoats with the names of industries on them, right? Like lording it over Congress, like the Sugar Trust, the Steel Trust, Standard Oil. My favorite is the Herring Trust, which I guess controlled the market in herring. But this is the sort of like, this is the, the context in which the Sugar Trust is both, like, very politically powerful, is able to keep tariffs high to protect itself, but is also struggling as an industry to find a form of monopoly that will survive legal scrutiny.

B (55:20)

That definitely seems like a tricky balance to strike, though. Clear incentives for why they'd want to do it. How did they figure out how to maintain this monopoly?

A (55:29)

So as I said, the way, one key, the key thing that a monopoly can do is restrain production, keep sugar off the market for the purpose of keeping prices high. And so whenever the Sugar Trust will often buy a new refinery and then shut it down, basically the other thing that's happening at this time is that the sugar is still changing, right? As it's coming into the market and it's getting standardized around. We can call it a. For simplicity, for simplicity's sake, we should say that it's coming in the standard, the standard of raw sugar that's coming into certainly the United States, but generally in world trade is at 96% sucrose content, right? That is for every 100 pounds of raw sugar, 96% of it is sucrose, and the other 4% is stuff that the refiner will want to get rid of. And here we have to sort of talk about, just for a second, what standard means, because most of the time, standard means that something is the same, or very often standardization means making something the same. So to say that sugar was a standardized product at 96%, one interpretation of that, which I think has sort of misled other historians, is that, like, it was all the same. It was all 96% pure. But when you actually look at the records of sugar companies, and in my case, when you look at the records of this laboratory that screened all of the sugar that was coming into New York harbor, you actually see that there was huge variation. I mean, not huge by normal standards, of huge. Right. But between, say, like 94.5% and 96.5%, depending on, again, where the sugar had come from, what month it was coming into the harbor, the conditions under which it had been produced, this sort of thing. So these are not huge distinctions, but as I said, the sugar refining business operated on very small margins, and especially when you take the tariff into account, there was a very small range of sort of purity in which it was actually profitable to buy sugar, pay taxes on it and refine it in your facility, and then. And then sell it, even at a price that you were able to control. So these tiny differences over the course of a year, depending on the season, again depending on the temperature, sometimes it was like depending on the temperature at which the measurement was made. This goes back to your question about why the temperature mattered. Part of it was an attempt to sort of like, rule out what was the seasonal variation in the sugar and what was the seasonal variation and what was the actual. Sorry, what was the variation in the sugar and what was the sort of just seasonal variation in when you were making the measurement. So the industry develops these very precise schedules called allowances, of exactly how much you will have to pay for every fraction of a percent that the sugar is better or worse. So if you're selling me a cargo of sugar and you. We agree to a price on the basis that it's 96%, and then if it arrives and it's 95.8%, right, then I owe. I, you, I, I owe you a little bit less money, or if it arrives and it's 96.3%, you owe me a little bit more money, or I owe you a little bit more money, and that amount is very Precisely is, like, written into the sort of standard sugar contract that by the early 20th century, every refiner and every factory selling in the US market is using. And in the last body chapter of the book, I go into a way. I. I discover a conspiracy, basically, by the sugar refiners to manipulate this schedule of allowances in such a way that it helps maintain their monopoly, but in such a, like, nerdy, technical way that even when the Justice Department is suing them for an illegal combination, they don't figure this scheme out.

B (60:13)

It certainly is a pretty complicated scheme.

A (60:16)

It is a pretty complicated scheme.

B (60:18)

In addition to maintaining the monopoly, does it also actually standardize sugar?

A (60:24)

It does. Well, in a way, right? So it exerts an influence on the sugar, is what I would say. They figure out a way to make it unprofitable. The thing that monopolies are always worried about or that cartels are always worried about is that someone within the cartel is going to cheat, right, and make a little bit more on the side to sort of take advantage of the high monopoly prices. But so, in addition to worrying that the federal government is going to break them up, these sugar refining cartels often fail because the members themselves sort of cheat on each other. And so they figure out a way to write these allowances in such a way that sort of prevents each other from doing it by disincentivizing the plantations and factories from producing sugar of a little bit higher quality. So these sort of technical contractual terms do have a, like, a very material effect on what's happening in Cuba and Puerto Rico. And you can see it in the letters that planters write to their engineers or the kind of annual chemist records that factories keep where they are trying to sort of game the system in just the right way. But the sort of running theme of the book, right, is the running sort of conflict in the book is the attempt by industry and the government to sort of treat sugar as if it is a consistent, standardizable, precisely measurable substance, when actually the substance of sugar itself remains variable and volatile. And there's sort of one particular way that I think is this way that I end the book that is probably a useful way to sort of wrap up our conversation. And that is the way that sugar, like, deteriorates. I think I might have mentioned this before, that when you load raw sugar on a ship and you send it across the ocean, it degrades a little bit or a lot. And throughout up to the late 19th century, the way in which it degraded, in which it deteriorated, was very variable. So Sometimes you would open up a cask of sugar in London that had been at, you know, at sea for weeks or months, and it would be, like, completely spoiled. And other times it would be completely fine. And this was dependent on how much moisture was in there, the conditions on the ship, even where the barrel of sugar was in relation to the other barrels in the hold. So if the barrel was, like, at the bottom of the ship, then molasses and syrup from the barrels above, it would sort of seep down into it and kind of ruin it for you. This new sugar, this new centrifugal sugar, right, that's much purer and drier and more consistent, is much more stable. And it's so stable that actually it sort of allows the initial development of a. A sugar futures market, right? Because you can put sugar into storage and expect that when you take it out a little while later, it will be the same adjusting in the way that. Adjusting with those allowances. Right, for the tiny variations that there might be. But what happens during World War I is that there is a shipping shortage. And so sugar starts piling up, especially in some warehouses in Cuba. And by the time it gets shipped to New York or Baltimore and can be sort of tested for sale, it's found to have deteriorated quite a lot. And this both prompts sugar companies to figure out ways to kind of isolate the source of contamination or deterioration on their production end. But it also makes the job of having a futures market in sugar more difficult, because the whole principle behind putting something into storage for sale much later is that it's going to be the same when it comes out, certainly in a kind of liquid commodity market. So the way that by the middle of the 20th century, the sugar exchange, which is the. The. The organization that is the New York Coffee and Sugar Exchange, which is facilitating this market and serving as a clearinghouse, they've already written these allowances into the contract, right, for tiny variations in the quality of sugar. But what they do is they finally decide to sort of get rid of the messy physical problem of measuring the quality of sugar. They decided to get rid of that problem entirely. So starting in 1946, the way that you would sort of deposit sugar in a New York warehouse was this. You would bring up your cargo of sugar, which was about 50 long tons, about £112,000, and you would put it in a warehouse and you would file a certificate that said it weighs 50 tons. And it has been tested at 96% purity. Even though it hadn't. Right. You might not have tested it at all. And then as this sugar cargo remained in storage, someone might buy it, Someone might. They might sell it to someone else, who might sell it to someone else. It might be in storage for months and months and months. And the terms of this contract included a sort of standard depreciation rate, sort of imagining how much, on average, the sugar might have deteriorated while it was in storage and how much its price would have gone down. And then after the sugar had remained in storage for months, having changed hands on paper, but not changed location physically, someone might buy it and actually want to drag it out and refine it. And in that case, then you would finally do the chemical testing and just sort of like settle it in cash, right? If it was. If it turned out to have depreciated or deteriorated more than the standard deterioration allowance suggested, then you owed a little bit less money. And if it was better quality, if it had had a better time in the warehouse, then you would owe a little bit more. But it was this kind of final way of abstracting away the messiness of actual physical sugar and transforming it into a stable commodity, a stable enough commodity that it could be bought and sold on paper.

B (67:26)

So with that, then sugar standardized on paper, but less so in reality. But the industry sort of figuring out, you know, what. We're going to live with this. That is perhaps a good place for us to conclude our discussion about the book. But I would love to know, as a final question, what you might be working on now that this is out in the world and off your desk.

A (67:47)

I'm doing something very different. So I'm talking to you from Tampere in Finland, where I am attending a conference called Play the Game about kind of ethics and democracy and sports governance. Because my new research project, which is something I've wanted to study for a long time, but have been sort of consumed by the SUGAR project. My new research project is about the contemporary history of doping in sports from the 1980s to the 2000s.

B (68:15)

Hmm. Okay. That's very different indeed.

A (68:18)

It is very different. If we had more time, we could get into the themes that turn out to be in common about the difficulties of knowing things, about knowing difficult natural facts, and the political economy of corruption. But we'll save that for. For the next interview.

B (68:37)

That's definitely a key thread. Also, we got, you know, technical instruments and the extent to which they do or don't solve problems. So, yeah, okay, some interesting similarities there. And of course, while you investigate your new project, listeners can read the book we've been discussing to find out more titled How Capitalism Reinvented Sugar, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2025. David, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.

A (69:00)

Thank you so.

B (69:13)

Much.