Historical Materialist Anthropology and The World of Sugar: Cross-Disciplinary Research Agendas: Suggestions and Debates: The World of Sugar and the Commodity Frontiers Initiative

Abstract

Ulbe Bosma’s book on the global history of sugar offers fundamentally new insights into the nexus of technology, corporate capital, government policies, and ideologies of progress in the making of commodity frontiers. From the perspective of historical materialist anthropology, it is important to broaden the research agenda even further. With reference to Maussian historical personae in the making of global capitalism, for example, a long history of raiders of state budgets emerges from Bosma’s work. Incorporating Sidney Mintz’s work on Sweetness and Power on a critical extension of world-system theory reveals, for the case of colonial and postcolonial Mauritius, that economic subsystems and local responses to slavery and indenture have a permanence for kinship structures, social policies, real estate markets, trade union legislations, and postcolonial development policies in special economic zones. Such a widened focus allows for the incorporation of the Caribbean Plantation School theorists into our analysis of sugar commodity chains within a comprehensive world systems perspective beyond the commodity frontiers agenda.