Recommendations from our site
“Of global history books out this spring, there’s The World of Sugar by Dutch historian Ulbe Bosma. It covers the history of the sweet stuff, first produced in granulated form in the 6th century BC, but not a huge commodity until more than two millennia later. This is not a quirky book about a single commodity in the style of Mark Kurlansky, but very much a reckoning with sugar. As he points out early on, two-thirds of the 12.5 million Africans shipped across the Atlantic went to sugar plantations. He writes, ‘The ubiquity of sugar tells us about progress but also reveals a darker story of human exploitation, racism, obesity, and environmental destruction. Since sugar is a relatively recent phenomenon, we have not yet learned how to control it and bring it back to what it once was: a sweet luxury.'” Read more...
Notable Nonfiction of Early Summer 2023
Sophie Roell, Journalist
Our most recommended books
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The World the Plague Made: The Black Death and the Rise of Europe
by James Belich -
Resistance: The Underground War in Europe, 1939-1945
by Halik Kochanski -
Portable Magic: A History of Books and Their Readers
by Emma Smith -
The Perils of Interpreting: The Extraordinary Lives of Two Translators between Qing China and the British Empire
by Henrietta Harrison -
African and Caribbean People in Britain: A History
by Hakim Adi -
Vagabonds
by Oskar Jensen
