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Citation: Caleb Owen. Memorial Essay: The World History Legacy of Sidney Mintz. The H-Net Book Channel. 07-12-2017.https://networks.h-net.org/node/1883/pages/124125/memorial-essay-world-history-legacy-sidney-mintzLicensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

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Memorial Essay: The World History Legacy of Sidney MintzPage published by Caleb Owen on Monday, May 9, 2016

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Citation: Caleb Owen. Memorial Essay: The World History Legacy of Sidney Mintz. The H-Net Book Channel. 07-12-2017.https://networks.h-net.org/node/1883/pages/124125/memorial-essay-world-history-legacy-sidney-mintzLicensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

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On December 27, 2015, cultural anthropologist Sidney W. Mintz passed away. Professor Mintz made many important contributions to various fieldsand disciplines, including anthropology, world history, food studies, among others. To honor Professor Mintz's legacy, the Book Channelcommissioned an essay from Richard Warner, Associate Professor and Department Chairperson of History at Wabash College, to reflect on ProfessorMintz's contributions to world history. Dr. Warner is the current President of the World History Association and was recently featured on theBreaking History podcast, which is available on H-Podcast. The following essay was edited in collaboration with H-World, with special assistancefrom network editor Christoph Strobel. --Caleb Owen, Book Channel Editor.Over the past generation or so, the field of world history has taken some exciting turns. We can date the rise of the “New World History” to the early1980s with the advent of the World History Association and its Journal of World History. The early years were spent in attempts to revise thedominant world civilizations narrative, as can be seen through the life of William McNeill. A parallel pattern of growth relates to the increasinginfluence of disciplines outside of history on this new world history. Arguably among the most influential interdisciplinary figures in this newinterdisciplinary track was Sidney W. Mintz, an anthropologist of the Caribbean who focused on the sugar business. Over the long run, Mintz not onlybecame the “father of food anthropology” but also exerted powerful influence on world history, as he shifted the discussion of the early modern sugarenterprise into a global framework. Mintz, the son of eastern European immigrants, grew up in New Jersey. His mother worked as a seamstress and organized with the IndustrialWorkers of the World (IWW, or the Wobblies). His mother no doubt influenced the development of his Marxist analysis of history. His father alsoprovided inspiration for his academic career, as he left his job in the clothing industry to run a diner. Mintz credited his experience with hisrestaurateur father as foundational for his lifelong interest in the production and consumption of food. Interestingly, like his father, he would do mostof the cooking in his own home. Mintz understood food as a scholar and an accomplished chef long before the current “foodie” mania.After earning a bachelor of arts degree in psychology at Brooklyn College and serving in the last part of World War II in the US Army Air Corps,Mintz became a graduate student at Columbia University, studying under famed anthropologists Julian Steward and Ruth Benedict. Among hisgraduate student colleagues was Eric Wolf, who also went on to influence the study of world history with his Europe and the People without History.Mintz’s fieldwork in Puerto Rico launched his lifelong interest in the lives of sugar workers of present and past. He merged his training as a culturalanthropologist with a materialist Marxist perspective, and soon was linking the lives of sugar workers to the rise of global capitalism in the earlymodern period. The book Caribbean Transformations and a series of articles he authored in the 1970s treated this theme. Then in 1985 he publishedthe work for which he is best known, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History.It would be difficult to overstate the influence of Sweetness and Power on both food studies and world history. Thirty years after publication, thebook still works well in the classroom and occupies space on the shelf of every food historian. Essentially, Sweetness and Power shifted the paradigmaway from the supply side of Atlantic system economics toward consideration of the importance of demand and consumption of the product. Thiscame on the heels of some important historical work by Philip Curtis and a corps of graduate students from the University of Wisconsin’s programcalled Comparative Tropical History (sometimes jokingly referred to as Comp Swamp). This team of researchers thoroughly worked out thedemographic history of Atlantic slavery, which breathed new life into the study of slave trade and labor in the Caribbean and Brazil. Their workdemonstrated the sharp rise of the slave trade across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as well as the considerable loss in African lives. Thevast majority of Africans were enslaved to work in the sugar business, which was growing impressively.The principal world historical legacy of Mintz is the refocusing of this story to feature the impact of global consumption. Until 1500 Europeans whoconsumed sugar belonged to the highest social classes. With the energetic rise of Caribbean and Brazilian sugar, powered by African slave labor,sugar flooded the European market at lower prices. The addictive taste for sugar by the European working class therefore encouraged the rapidgrowth of the Atlantic slave trade and all of its accompanying misery for African slaves. Sweetness and Power detailed the political economy of theearly modern Atlantic world from both sides of the production and consumption divide. Added to that was a growing trade in tea, first in the illegalmarket and then legally, which Mintz identifies as a parallel consumption-driven market. The same can be said for porcelain, though this product didnot dip as far down into the lower levels of economic class in Britain. As is suggested by these examples, with his training as an anthropologist, Mintz complemented his global systems analysis with attention to the livesof ordinary people on the ground, both the lives of African slaves and the lives of ordinary Europeans who drove the market. He most certainly was acolleague of Wolf in this way. The final chapter of the book raises questions about the meaning of sugar, or rather the multiple meanings of thesubstance. In teaching the book I have always found that far more questions were raised than answered by that chapter—which makes it all the morepowerful in the classroom.Besides its long-term impact on world history per se, Mintz’s work places him as a “father” of food studies generally. As a subject of research as wellas popular interest, food has really taken off in the past twenty years. There are many examples of “commodity biographies” as a genre: books onsalt, chocolate, maize, potatoes, and so on. Then there are books that are also tied to a historical theme, such as national identity in Jeffrey M.Pilcher’s ¡Que vivan tamales!. Like Pilcher’s book, Sweetness and Power demonstrates the power that one particular food (maize in the case ofPilcher, sugar for Mintz) can have on human history. Mintz is therefore credited with the invention of the “food systems” approach to the subject. AsFood Studies matures as a field, especially within History, this sort of theoretical approach will produce more mature scholarship.Within the field of world history, Mintz’s contribution is parallel to the introduction of other disciplinary perspectives on the past. Now that thedebates over the role of the West in world history are largely finished, other changes are occurring in world historiography with this new emphasison interdisciplinarity. This is of course not news for the discipline of history as a whole, since the influence of the Annales school, social history, andenvironmental history have brought broader disciplinary viewpoints to bear. World history has generally been dominated by economics and politicsas organizing categories, and this is now changing. The influence of non-historians—such as the scientist Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs and Steel), thesociologist Immanuel Wallerstein (world-systems history), and the collection of disciplines that work together to make up “Big History” (from the BigBang to the Future)—is ample evidence for this shift to interdisciplinarity. Some survey textbooks have adopted new disciplinary outlooks in theirnarrative, including Felipe Fernández Armesto's World: A History, in which he uses environmental science, and Bonnie G. Smith, Marc Van DeMieroop, Richard von Glahn, and Kris Lane’s Crossroads and Cultures, which provides a culturally defined analysis. In his ability to put togetheranthropology with history, Mintz was one of the first scholars to push the boundaries of disciplines in world history writing.For many of us, the legacy of Mintz will continue to resonate for some time to come. This is probably truest for those of us who had the pleasure ofmeeting him, as I did in the late 1990s when he taught in a National Endowment for the Humanities seminar that I worked for at the University ofCalifornia Santa Cruz. As with my late friend Jerry Bentley, Sid Mintz seemed less interested in my historical work than in the fact that I worked for adecade as a professional chef. Both of them were fond of reminding others that while large structural questions are interesting to study in history, inthe end we are telling stories about the lives of ordinary people and their localized lives in a globalized world.

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Citation: Caleb Owen. Memorial Essay: The World History Legacy of Sidney Mintz. The H-Net Book Channel. 07-12-2017.https://networks.h-net.org/node/1883/pages/124125/memorial-essay-world-history-legacy-sidney-mintzLicensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

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Recommended ReadingsProfessor Warner and the editors of the Book Channel have compiled a list of additional readingson food history, consumption, and world history.Carney, Judith Ann. Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas. Cambridge:Harvard University Press, 2001.Claflin, Kyri and Peter Scholliers. Writing Food History: A Global Perspective. London and New York:Berg, 2012.Crosby, Alfred W. The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492. Westport:Greenwood Press, 1972. Curtin, Philip D. Cross-Cultural Trade in World History. Cambridge and New York: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1984.Davidson, Alan, Tom Jaine, and Soun Vannithone. The Oxford Companion to Food, Third Edition.Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.Diamond, Jared M. Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. New York: W. W. Norton,1997.Freedman, Paul H., Joyce E. Chaplin, and Ken Albala, eds. Food in Time and Place: The AmericanHistorical Association Companion to Food History. Oakland: University of California Press, 2014.Fresco, Louise O. Hamburgers in Paradise : the Stories Behind the Food We Eat. Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, 2016.McCann, James. Maize and Grace: Africa’s Encounter with a New World Crop,1500-2000. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005.Mintz, Sidney W. Caribbean Transformations. Chicago: Aldine Pub. Co., 1974.________. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Viking, 1985.Gordon, Bertram M. and Erica J. Peters. Food and France: What Food Studies Can Teach Us aboutHistory. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015.Pilcher, Jeffrey M. ¡Que vivan los tamales: Food and the Making of Mexican Identity. Albuquerque:University of New Mexico Press, 1998.Smith, Bonnie G., Marc Van De Mieroop, Richard von Glahn, and Kris Lane. Crossroads and Cultures:A History of the World’s Peoples. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2012.Vester, Katharina. A Taste of Power: Food and American Identities. Oakland: University of CaliforniaPress, 2015.Wolf, Eric R. Europe and the People without History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982.