The Sugar Trade - Daniel Strum (Book Review)

Este resenhista, Christopher Ebert, reclama que o autor tenho usado o livro dele sem dar o devido crédito.

Paulo Roberto de Almeida  

BOOK REVIEW

Daniel Strum, The Sugar Trade: Brazil, Portugal and the Netherlands (1595–1630). Translated by Colin Foulkes, Roopanjali Roy, and H. Sabrina Gledhill (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013). 537 pp. $100.00. ISBN 978-0804787215.

The Sugar Trade - it must be said at first - is very odd for an academic work. It is an extremely large, hard-cover volume, lushly furnished with gorgeous, full-color illustrations, and weighing almost ten pounds. It appears to be a hybrid of a detailed scholarly monograph and a coffee-table book. Some of this confusion in presentation is a result of its origins in the History Prize of the Brazilian construction giant, Odebrecht, which in most years pays to produce one or more similar volumes. Odebrecht has in this case also produced the English translation in cooperation with Stanford University Press, the volume that is reviewed here.
The size of the book raises issues about its accessibility and appropriateness for classroom use. That said, the work contains considerable scholarly merit, and the illustrations are appropriate to the material and often very instructive in their own right. As Strum admits in his acknowledgements, the project envisioned by the corporate sponsors was to write a book accessible to both specialists and non-specialists. This means that some chapters will be either too specialized, or not enough, for individual readers. However, most chapters function well at a level appropriate to a specialized scholarly audience.
The work follows on the publication of two other works that treat the same subject, one by Leonor Costa, and the other by me. (1)
The work does not offer a new synthesis or a revision of these works, but rather adds to a developing consensus about the importance of the early sugar trade from Brazil as an important spur to the formation of disparate but inter-linked merchant groups in long-distance trade. The business solutions that they sought to facilitate this particular trade at both the wholesale and retail levels were an important part of the story of early-modern capitalism.
Sugar from Brazil also prompted either the expansion or new development of auxiliary industries in a number of towns, from shipbuilding to refining. Brazilian output and trade also made sugar in its many forms a critical component of European elite diets, setting the stage for the massive rise in consumption that characterized later phases of European and Atlantic history.
Given the very high level of research support he was offered by Odebrecht, Professor Strum has been able to trace these developments at a level of detail hitherto lacking in the scholarly literature.

The book is organized into ten major chapters. Beyond the introduction, the first two chapters synthesize at a high degree of generalization the political events that frame Strum’s arguments.
The second chapter then describes the movement of sugar from the Eastern Mediterranean to Africa and then to Brazil. These parts of the work do not present a new story or rely on new material to any significant extent and will offer little to a specialist reader.
The third chapter, “Into the Mouth”, continues promising work on early consumption of sugar by Eddy Stols, and presents a very interesting case study of early modern consumption, and a chapter that can stand alone. (2)
It is richly enhanced by the illustrations that show how sugar consumption had conquered the artistic imagination as well, especially of Golden Age Dutch still-life painters.
Chapters four and five deal with routes, ports, and shipping in general. While interesting and well written, they add little to previous works on the topic, especially those by Costa and Ebert, and they have more of a synthetic quality. Here again, though, the illustrations are marvelous and wonderfully complement the text. It is in chapters six through ten that the meticulous archival research that Strum did with his international team really yield an impressive level of analysis. These chapters deal respectively with shipping arrangements, systems of payment, extension of credit, merchant organization, and information exchange. They are extremely well contextualized and informed by a wide reading in the relevant scholarship, and they should function as a standard reference for some years to come for scholars interested in the development of early-modern capitalism. The level of complementarity between the text and illustrations reaches an especially high level in these chapters. The images of coins, letters, texts and other material manifestations of complex financial instruments are often quite fascinating.
These final five chapters point to the larger significance of the Brazilian sugar trade, which operated in many respects on medieval Mediterranean principles. At the same time, it both overlapped temporally and contributed to a new phase in handling long distance commerce, one which was dominated by the burgeoning global financial capital, Amsterdam.
As Strum concludes: “In order to overcome [. . .] challenges and ensure that their operations were more secure, effective and profitable, merchants used a range of well-established and newly developed techniques, instruments, mechanisms and institutions, both formal and informal.” Strum’s meticulous documentation of these developments, as well as the accompanying illustrations, will reward historians of capitalism more generally.

Christopher Ebert
Brooklyn College


1. Leonor Freire Costa, O transporte no Atlântico e a Companhia Geral do Comércio do Brasil (1580-1663) (Lisbon: Comissão Nacional para as Comemorações dos Descobrimentos Portugueses, 2002), 2 vols.; Christopher Ebert, Between Empires: Brazilian Sugar in the Early Atlantic Economy, 1550-1630 (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2008). It is unfortunate that Strum used my dissertation for this work, as the book based on it had appeared well before he launched this project.

2. Eddy Stols, “The Expansion of the Sugar Market in Western Europe,” in Tropical Babylons: Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World, 1450-1680, ed. Stuart B. Schwartz (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).