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The Sugar Trade: Brazil, Portugal, and the Netherlands, 1595-1630. By DANIEL STRUM. Rio de Janeiro: Versal Editores, 2013. 564 pp. $100.00 (cloth).
Daniel Strum has provided us with a thoroughly researched and lavishly illustrated study of the sugar trade in Brazil, Portugal, and the Netherlands during the momentous years between 1595 and 1630 when the Atlantic economy was born. Since sugar was one of the first global industrial commodities that spanned continents and oceans, it is an admirable subject for a world history approach.1
The Sugar Trade is a perceptive combination of economic, business, and cultural history that explores such diverse facets of the trade as sugar's international industrialization and commodification, Western European shipping and ship building, credit, coins, pirates, culinary demand for sugar, and the establishment of commercial trust and enforcement through government and private organizations. As Stuart Schwartz, the leading expert on sugar in the Atlantic world, writes in the book's introduction, The Sugar Trade is "not just a study of the sugar trade, but an excellent introduction to a history of the Atlantic world, and to an essential aspect of the global economy and Brazil's role as a colony within it." I would add that even though Strum was educated mostly in Brazil, that continental-sized country plays a smaller- though essential-role in his study than one might have anticipated. But the details on the sugar trade in Europe are groundbreaking.
Although the slave trade and sugar mill production have been well researched, Strum makes a remarkable new contribution to understanding the sugar trade itself, which has been largely overlooked. Building on Christopher Ebert's 2008 economic history of the Brazilian sugar trade in the early Atlantic economy in the 1550 -1630 period,2 Strum broadens and deepens the inquiry and pays much greater attention to the European side of the trade. We see the evolution of private and state institutions, particularly in Amsterdam and Porto, in creating a smooth-running market that embraced four continents in their social, economic, political, and religious dimensions. But this is not a heroic version of the rise of capitalism and rationalism, since violence and chance play a large role. The Iberian Inquisitions' privateers and colonial and religious wars are as important in shaping world markets...