The Mediality of Sugar probes the potential of reading sugar as a mediator across some of the disciplinary distinctions in early twenty-first century research in the arts, literature, architecture, and popular culture. Selected artistic practices and material cultures of sugar across Europe and the Americas from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century are investigated and connected to the transcontinental and transoceanic history of the sugar plants cane and beet, their botanical and cultural dissemination, and global sugar capital and trade under colonialism and in decoloniality. The collection contributes to the vision of a Transnational and Postdisciplinary Sugar Studies.

Sugar yesterday was what oil is today: a commodity of immense global importance whose tentacles reached deep into politics, society and economy. Indonesia's colonial-era sugar industry is largely forgotten today, except by a small number of regional specialists writing for a specialist audience. During the period 1880-1942 covered by this book, however, the then Netherlands Indies was one of the world's very greatest producer-exporters of the commodity. How it contrived to do so is the story presented in this book. Author G. Roger Knight, associate professor of history in the University of Adelaide, has researched the history of Indonesia's sugar industry for more than twenty-five years, using unpublished archival sources in both the Netherlands and Indonesia. His search has taken him into government records, family histories and - above all - the extensive surviving papers of the Dutch sugar companies who operated in Indonesia during the late colonial era. The result is a picture of the industry that offers important new insights into its history and its place in the framework of global commodity production over a period extending over three quarters of a century.

A look at sugar in 19th-century American culture and how it rose in popularity to gain its place in the nation's diet today. American consumers today regard sugar as a mundane and sometimes even troublesome substance linked to hyperactivity in children and other health concerns. Yet two hundred years ago American consumers treasured sugar as a rare commodity and consumed it only in small amounts. In Refined Tastes: Sugar, Confectionery, and Consumers in Nineteenth-Century America, Wendy A. Woloson demonstrates how the cultural role of sugar changed from being a precious luxury good to a ubiquitous necessity. Sugar became a social marker that established and reinforced class and gender differences. During the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-centuries, Woloson explains, the social elite saw expensive sugar and sweet confections as symbols of their wealth. As refined sugar became more affordable and accessible, new confections—children's candy, ice cream, and wedding cakes—made their way into American culture, acquiring a broad array of social meanings. Originally signifying male economic prowess, sugar eventually became associated with femininity and women's consumerism. Woloson's work offers a vivid account of this social transformation—along with the emergence of consumer culture in America.