Paradoxical white: Imperial and postcolonial sugar

Abstract

This paper explores the theme of whiteness in the modern history of a leading global commodity. It argues two things. First, that the history of industrially produced white sugar is deeply imbricated with late colonial discourses about race and ethnicity. Second, and somewhat paradoxically, that white sugar came to share in a ‘modernity of whiteness’ that carried it apparently effortlessly into the postcolonial, erstwhile Third World, in the delineation of whose ‘difference’ it had earlier been deeply complicit. Its primary focus is hence on two issues: the imperial history of sugar in the late colonial era and the commodity’s subsequent, postcolonial transformation.