Sidney Mintz

Published in 1985, "Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History" traces how sugar, transformed from a luxury spice into a staple of the modern diet, connected Caribbean slave plantations to the rise of European industrial capitalism. The book is a foundational text in the anthropology of food and political economy.

Mintz conducted extensive fieldwork in Puerto Rico, Jamaica, and Haiti, studying the lives of rural agricultural workers and the history of Caribbean plantation economies. His research across the region informed his broader arguments about how global commodity chains shaped local communities.

Mintz spent much of his career at Johns Hopkins University, where he was a longtime professor in the Department of Anthropology. He helped establish Johns Hopkins as a leading center for the anthropology of the Caribbean and the political economy of food.

Mintz was a pioneer of the anthropology of food, demonstrating that everyday commodities like sugar carry the full weight of global histories of labor, empire, and capitalism. His work showed that studying what people eat can reveal how global systems of power penetrate the most intimate aspects of daily life.