Knowra Sidney Mintz Sidney Mintz Sidney Mintz (1922–2015) was an American anthropologist whose studies of Caribbean societies and sugar connected food to slavery, labor, and global capitalism.
Sweetness and Power : Sidney Mintz’s 1985 book tracing sugar’s transformation from a luxury into a mass-consumed commodity. This landmark study develops his account of sugar, empire, labor, and changing consumption.
Sugar plantations in the Caribbean : Large Caribbean estates that produced sugar, chiefly through enslaved labor during the colonial era. Mintz connected plantation labor to the expanding supply of sugar consumed in Europe.
Worker in the Cane : Sidney Mintz’s 1960 study of the life and work of a Puerto Rican sugarcane laborer. This ethnography grounds his analysis of Caribbean labor in an individual worker’s experience.
Julian Steward : An American anthropologist known for cultural ecology and the comparative study of social systems. Steward led the research project in Puerto Rico where Mintz began his influential fieldwork.
Caribbean anthropology : The study of Caribbean societies, histories, cultures, and social relations through anthropological methods. Mintz’s fieldwork and scholarship helped establish this regional approach.
Atlantic slave trade : The forced transportation of millions of Africans across the Atlantic to labor in the Americas. Enslaved labor underwrote the plantation system central to Mintz’s account of sugar.
Puerto Rico : A Caribbean island that has been a United States territory since 1898. Mintz conducted fieldwork there and studied its rural communities and plantation labor.
Eric Wolf : An anthropologist who analyzed peasant societies, colonialism, and the expansion of capitalism. Wolf shared Mintz’s commitment to connecting local communities with larger historical forces.
Plantation economy : An economic system organized around large estates, coerced labor, and production of crops for export. Plantation production shaped the Caribbean societies Mintz studied and the history behind sugar.
Industrial Revolution : The transformation toward mechanized production and factory industry that began in Britain in the eighteenth century. Mintz traced how industrial workers’ diets and routines helped turn sugar into a staple.
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