Sweetness and Power by Sidney W. Mintz

Author:Sidney W. Mintz
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 1986-08-04T16:00:00+00:00

With you I see, in ages yet unborn,

Thy votaries the British Isles adorn,

With joy I see enamour’d youths despise

The goblet’s luster for the false one’s eyes;

Till rosy Bacchus shall his wreaths resign,

And love and tea triumph o’er the vine.143

Alcoholism did not disappear, nor did working-class families turn into teetotalers overnight, however. Alcohol consumption remained high among working people, and some laboring families were spending a third or even a half of all their income on drink throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Still, the temperance movement definitely reduced drunkenness, particularly among the slightly better-off, more skilled workers.144 In this gradual elimination or reduction of alcoholism, tea played a critical part. Here again, it is not clear how much influence the model of upper-class behavior may have had. The temperance movement was a product of middle- and upper-class thinking and morality—but this hardly means that alcoholism was a working-class monopoly.

• • •

I have stressed sugar’s usefulness as a mark of rank—to validate one’s social position, to elevate others, or to define them as inferior. Whether as a medicine, a spice, or a preservative, and particularly in the public display epitomized by the subtleties, sugar uses were molded into declarative, hierarchical functions. Certain scholars, emphasizing the function of luxuries in modernization, have seen this complex of customs somewhat differently. Werner Sombart, for example, argued that sugar (among many other substances) affected the rise of capitalism because the female love of luxury led to its increasing production and importation to European centers.

On one point, however, we already seem to have arrived at complete agreement: the connection between the consumption of sweets and feminine dominance. . . .

This connection between feminism (old style) and sugar has been of the greatest importance for the history of economic development. Because of the predominant role of women during early capitalism, sugar rapidly became a favorite food; and only because of the widespread use of sugar were such stimulants as cocoa, coffee, and tea adopted so readily all over Europe. Trade in these four commodities and the production of cocoa, tea, coffee and sugar in the overseas colonies as well as the processing of cocoa and the refining of raw sugar in Europe are outstanding factors in the development of capitalism.145

Probably only the final sentence in this passage can be accepted unreservedly. The “predominant role of women during early capitalism” is an enigmatic—one might almost say mysterious—assertion. The alleged importance of women in transforming sugar into a favorite food is similarly puzzling. Even the causation implicit in the sentence that follows—that sugar’s availability underwrote the drug-beverage habit—is unacceptable as it stands. Yet Sombart was not wrong to look for some connection between women and sugar use, for he was driving at a serious analysis of the circumstances under which consumption occurs. In the case of sugar and the foods eaten with it, such an analysis means looking at work, and at time, as well as at the divisions between the sexes and among classes—in short, at the total sociology of consumption during the rise of a new economic order in western Europe.

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