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.

The World of Sugar by Ulbe Bosma offers an ambitious and sweeping account of the global history of sugar. Readers interested in sugar’s role in shaping economies, environments, and societies will find it a captivating synthesis of its past and present trajectories. In this commentary, I engage critically with the book, focusing on the areas most closely aligned with my own research on the Brazilian sugar industry. I highlight key points related to labour, race, and resistance in order to broaden the debate on the sugar frontier.

The history of sugar is that of a commodity that has played a central and contested role in the development of global agro-industrial capitalism. In my introduction to this “Suggestions and Debates” collection, the theoretical underpinnings of The World of Sugar will be explained. Reference is made to the agenda of the Commodity Frontiers Initiative, which was published in the Journal of Global History in 2021, and of which I was a co-author. Inspired by the work of Friedmann and McMichael, a key element of this agenda is the notion of successive commodity regimes, separated by systemic frictions and phases of intense innovation to overcome them. Moreover, the argument is made that The World of Sugar can be read as an invitation to explore new directions in global labour history. My introduction concludes with an exhortation to overcome the limitations of single-commodity histories and to give more attention to the agency of workers in shaping the trajectories of global capitalism.

The World of Sugar, Ulbe Bosma’s compelling historical narrative on how sugar became a global commodity, and the accompanying introductory article in the International Review of Social History raise many fascinating points for further reflection and debate. In this commentary, I wish to highlight several points that resonate strongly with my own work at the Transnational Institute (TNI), a global think tank based in Amsterdam that connects social movements with academics and policymakers. These points of reflection are informed by TNI’s mission and practice of “scholar-activism”: the fact that we seek not only to interpret the world, but also to change it for the better, in particular for those exploited and oppressed classes and social groups. As my work principally involves collaboration with transnational agrarian movements, I pay particular attention to areas of Bosma’s analysis that carry implications for rural working people and for agrarian and environmental justice. This includes the role of sugar in the global land rush, the rise of sugar cane as a “flex crop and commodity”, and the ways in which “rural sugars” can be supported in peasant- and smallholder-based economies and livelihood strategies.

In this article, which has a strong methodological focus, we establish the labour relations that characterized the urban population of the Swedish town of Västerås in 1820. Several sources are combined: the so-called Tabellverket (an early form of demographic statistics) and observations made in, primarily, local court records. To assign labour relations as defined by the Global Collaboratory on the History of Labour Relations project, the preliminary picture based on the Tabellverket is complemented by systematically adding information from court records analysed in the Gender and Work project. This information captures both what people did and also, to some extent, what labour relations they were involved in. Subsequently, all the information is collated to estimate the labour relations characterizing the whole population in the selected town. The result of this experiment is a much more encompassing and richer picture of the labour relations within the selected community, one that acknowledges both women’s work and multiple employments. In a broader perspective, the case study contributes to our understanding of the gradual increase of commodified labour in the world.

The article begins by understanding Karl Marx’s theory of primitive accumulation (PA) as a historical process integrated by both internal and external components. Situating itself within the Marxist tradition that views PA as an originating, historical process that experienced closure by the end of the colonial period, it draws on history and theory to delineate how the external dimension of PA, British colonialism, unfolded in Punjab. Operating in cahoots with local actors, this colonial form of the “original sin” succeeded in subordinating the pre-capitalist modes of production to capitalism and established a new private property order as well as permanent agricultural settlements, using political, legal, ideological, and coercive means. It makes a distinctive contribution to the debates around PA by arguing that the external of PA (in British Punjab) differed radically from its internal (in England): the accumulation project involved mass sedentarization as opposed to mass expropriation. The article concludes by examining how the dialectics between dissolution and conservation form the dominant feature of colonialist PA in Punjab and how that can help us redefine PA in colonies.

This article contributes to the understanding of the scales of global capitalism by addressing labour relations from a historical perspective. Firstly, it suggests that the problem of the deadly cost of the expansion and shifting of commodity frontiers can be resolved only with an approach that scrutinizes humans’ consumption habits and lifestyles. Secondly, it proposes to explore the making of commodity frontiers through the respective sites of immobilization as well as workers’ means of escaping such immobilization. Thirdly, it explores the nexus of health, food, and labour by considering the agricultural production of commodities as toxic frontiers against which workers’ unions have historically organized to protect their safety. Finally, it sheds light on the ways in which the global scale of capitalism has met the micro scale of particles owing to the toxicity of twenty-first-century commodity frontiers.

The commodity frontiers framework describes well the movement of sugar cultivation across the Mediterranean, Atlantic, and Caribbean. But it is less effective when explaining the evolution of sugar in nineteenth-century Tamil Nadu. In Tamil Nadu, the high costs of cultivation discouraged many peasants and landowners from planting sugar cane. As a consequence, despite British pressure to plant more cane, there was little increase in the crop before the twentieth century. In Tamil Nadu, sugar made from palmyra juice was a viable and popular substitute for cane sugar and this further discouraged the expansion of cane cultivation. The jaggery made from palm juice satisfied the demand for sweetener from most consumers in the region. From the mid-nineteenth century, palm jaggery was the raw material for making white sugar and distilling arrack in the sugar mills that were built in the region. Regional conditions shaped the development of sugar cultivation and manufacturing in Tamil Nadu. It is not a story of interaction between the local and the global as is found in the commodity frontiers framework. The region is a scale of activity that possesses great explanatory power, as the case of nineteenth-century South India shows.

The history of work is marred by the fact that the meaning of “labour” or “work” changed with the arrival of modern society, making it difficult to draw comparisons across time. There has been a shift from understanding work as any activity that may secure continued living and well-being, to seeing it as paid, full-time, specialized employment. This transformation has obscured the work of some groups in society (notably women but also others) and work in the form of multiple employments (which often means multiple labour relations). The methods and sources presented in this Special Theme offer valuable tools for historians seeking to address and navigate these issues.

This review essay focuses on the intimate, yet contingent, historical relationships between capitalism, democracy and the welfare state in the OECD region. Six landmark studies, published over the past decade, are reviewed: Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson’s Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty and The Narrow Corridor: How Nations Struggle for Liberty; Thomas Piketty’s Capital and Ideology; Torben Iversen and David Soskice’s Democracy and Prosperity: Reinventing Capitalism through a Turbulent Century; Peter H. Lindert’s Making Social Spending Work; and Ayşe Buğra’s Social Policy in Capitalist History. All these books reveal the independent effect of historical political factors on the rise of the welfare state across advanced capitalist democracies. Contrary to received wisdom, the central argument put forward is that there is no trade-off between capitalism and democracy and, more importantly, that the welfare state has become an existentially important lubricant buttressing both advanced capitalism and liberal democracy.

Forced labour in the Middle Congo was characterized in the interwar period by, on the one hand, a declining role of the notorious French concession companies, and, on the other hand, the growing importance of forced recruitment and forced labour orchestrated by the colonial state. The article attempts to analyse and understand the overall setup of overburdening created by these conditions. Based on new French and Congolese archival resources, it discusses the effects of this overburdening, linking it to the responses shown by local populations, notably through flight and evasion. In a last step, the discussion focuses on the role of intermediaries and their impact on the violence that was locally experienced. The analysis includes a wider perspective into the changes and continuities during the years of World War II, and on the challenges for the forced labour system due to its official abolition in 1946 and the decline of clandestine practices of continuity until 1948.