Sidney Mintz: Sweetness and Power
Rachel Yonteff
Sidney Mintz, in his book “Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History” explores how sugar’s meanings and uses have changed over time and how consumption is shaped by production. He argues that in order to understand sugar as a commodity, we must look deeper to its social structure—how consumer demand is shaped by production systems, colonialism, and capitalism. Further, he ultimately argues that commodities like sugar hide the violent systems, notably slavery, colonialism, and global capitalism, that produced it. This framework resonates deeply with our research, where we have tracked the material traces of the Cartwright and Duckett families. From manumission papers, to marriage and death records, to mortgages and newspaper clippings, we’ve traced seemingly bureaucratic objects that in reality crystalize massive systems of racialized labor extractions, just as Mintz does with sugar. Like sugar, these documents we’ve traced only truly make sense when considered with the wider structures of power and exploitation that produced them: plantation economies built upon the commodification of Black life. Mintz’ analysis thus illuminates how seemingly simple objects in reality carry the imprint of exploitative labor systems and the violence of slavery, while simultaneously showing how enslaved and formerly enslaved people navigated, resisted, and redefined these structures.
Further, Mintz’ observations on sugar offer a fascinating lens through which we can consider the transformation of the Tidewater/D.C economy from the era of slavery to modern day. Just as Mintz notes, the changing meaning of sugar reveals how shifting production reorganizes social life, the post-emancipation Tidewater region saw a similar reconfiguration—as slavery was abolished it gave way to wage labor and new forms of racial governance that replaced the forced labor system. The end of slavery did not dissolve the exploitation that Mintz describes, but instead caused it to be rearticulated through systems like sharecropping, convict leasing, debt peonage, and the growth of the bureaucratic state that oversaw black mobility, property ownership, and labor.
“Sidney Mintz,” photograph in Sam Roberts, 30 December 2015.
The archival material we’ve used for this project show how Black families like the Cartwrights and Ducketts negotiated this shifting landscape of freedom through marriage, church networks, and emerging legal rights that allowed them to assert autonomy within a system designed to circumscribe it. Thus, Mintz’ framework, outlines a continuity: the region's transformation from a slave based economy to a modern capitalist one did not eradicate the commodification of black life but instead transformed its mechanisms, embedding the same exploitative race based structures that governed the slave based economy into institutional framework that continues to shape the lived realities of Black communities in the D.C area to this day.