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).
