Sugar Changed the World: A Story of Magic, Spice, Slavery, Freedom and Science

When I first started reading Sugar Changed the World, I thought it was just going to talk about sugar canes and where they come from but it showed me more than that. The only thing I knew about sugar canes was that I had heard that they were once grown on where I'm from. I loved how this book started out with the prologue from the writers themselves telling us how they got interested in sugar. I found it cool that both of the writers had families involved in the sugar business.

The book describes very vividly how the slaves, from all around the world were treated and how their owners thought of them as properties, not humans. This book thought me to really appreciate how my life is, because some of the slaves that were being shipped to labor had no choice and they also had to leave their villages, friends and their family behind. It talks about how after the Honey Age finished, people started to plant sugar canes and found out that if you go through this process of cutting and boiling the sugar canes for a certain amount of time, you would eventually get what we know to be sugar. This book showed how the slaves where mistreated and abused. To take away the pain of working in the sugar plantations the slaves would often dance or sing little songs created by themselves. The book showed me how once most of all the Caribbean, northeastern South America and even the state of Louisiana were all sugar plantations filled with slaves.

It talks about how people in Europe wanted sugar, and they wanted even more sugar when tea was discovered. Everyone in England drank tea so everyone wanted sugar for his or hers tea. This book is very well sectioned, it tells you the sugar story from the start, from the spread of sugar starting from New Guinea to the Sugar Purchase. This book is also well written and there are maps that help you understand the slave trade and where the sugar canes are from. It gets into details of Marc's and Marina's ancestors pasts and how involved with sugar they were.

As much as I found this book very interesting and intriguing, I have to say that it has a lot of information and detail so it can be a bit difficult to understand what is happening. I would definitely recommend it to friend.