Sugar and the Indian Ocean World Trade and Consumption in the Eighteenth-Century Persian Gulf

Over the decades, historians have paid much attention to sugar’s significant roles in not only changing people’s eating habits but also creating types of work that were suited for the Industrial Revolution. Since Sidney Mintz’s pioneering study of the modern history of sugar, Sweetness and Power (1985), scholars have tried to portray the dynamic relationship between sugar production and consumption as a prelude to the modern industrial West. Not surprisingly, the majority of scholarship has focused on Europe and its expanding economy across the Atlantic Ocean. However, not only does this narrow focus obscure the important fact that sugar has circulated all over the world for the last four centuries, but it also causes a serious fragmentation and oversimplification of our understanding of the history of its global circulation. This book fills this gap by focusing on the eighteenth-century sugar trade and consumption in the Persian Gulf, a neglected but compelling stage within the history of sugar. Existing historiography of the region still stresses eighteenth-century imperial and economic decline, but Sugar and the Indian Ocean World argues that the vitality of the Gulf trade endured, and demonstrate this by illuminating the remarkable developments and changes in the relationship between trade and consumption that occurred in the Indian Ocean.
 

(Written by DAITO Norifumi, Associate Professor, Historiographical Institute / 2026)