1 As pointed out by Ralph A. Austen and Woodruff D. Smith, “Private Tooth Decay as Public Economic Virtue: The Sugar-Slave Triangle, Consumerism, and European Industrialization,” Social Science History 14 (1990): 109.

2 See Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and Intoxicants (New York, 1992), 9–10;Paul Freedman, Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination (New Haven, 2008), 2–3. Schivelbusch and Freedman argue that spices lay at the core of an upper-class consumer culture that stimulated markets, trade, and eventually overseas exploration and colonization.

3 David Eltis, “New Estimates of Exports from Barbados and Jamaica, 1665–1701,” The William and Mary Quarterly 52 (1995): 642, 646.

4 Carole Shammas, “The Revolutionary Impact of European Demand for Tropical Goods,” in The Early Modern Atlantic Economy, ed. John J. McCusker and Kenneth Morgan (Cambridge, UK, 2000). Anne McCants, “Exotic Goods, Popular Consumption, and the Standard of Living: Thinking about Globalization in the Early Modern World,” Journal of World History 18 (2007): 433–462, and “Poor Consumers as Global Consumers: The Diffusion of Tea and Coffee Drinking in the Eighteenth Century,” Economic History Review 61 (2008): 172-200, asserts that scholars of global economic history have not given enough weight to changes in culture and consumption patterns. Robin Blackburn hints at the importance of sugar in turning peasants into consumers in The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492–1800 (New York, 1997), 403, 559. Joyce Appleby summarizes the link between consumption and economic growth in her effort to define capitalism: “When ordinary people joined their social superiors in the pursuit of the pleasures of consumption, their numbers changed the character of enterprise.” Joyce Oldham Appleby, The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism (New York, 2010), 49.

5 Barbara L. Solow, The Economic Consequences of the Atlantic Slave Trade (Lanham, 2014), 118–119. See also Barbara L. Solow, “Slavery and Colonization,” in Slavery and the Rise of the Atlantic System, ed. Barbara L. Solow (Cambridge, UK, 1991), 28–29. She notes that other tropical drugs such as tobacco and coffee did not lend themselves as readily to slave production. Though other commodities such as rice and indigo did rely heavily on slavery, they were not as compelling to consumers as sugar.

6 Craig Muldrew terms diet the “Cinderella” of early modern English historiography, despite the fact that food was the “petrol of the early modern economy.” Craig Muldrew, Food, Energy, and the Creation of Industriousness: Work and Material Culture in Agrarian England, 1550–1780 (Cambridge, UK, 2011), 2, 29–30. Recent scholarship on much later periods link sugar consumption to the growth of empire, business, and labor. For example, see April Merleaux, Sugar and Civilization: American Empire and the Cultural Politics of Sweetness (Chapel Hill, 2015).

7 For commentary on the lack of research on early modern sugar consumption in England and Europe, and arguments for moving the onset of such consumption earlier, see Anne E. C. McCants, “Poor Consumers,” and Eddy Stols, “The Expansion of the Sugar Market in Western Europe,” in Tropical Babylons: Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World, ed. Stuart B. Schwartz (Chapel Hill, 2004). The limited studies of New England consumption in the seventeenth century include Gloria L. Main and Jackson T. Main, “The Red Queen in New England?” The William and Mary Quarterly 56 (1999): 121–150; Gloria L. Main and Jackson T. Main, “Economic Growth and the Standard of Living in Southern New England, 1640–1774,” The Journal of Economic History 48 (1988): 27–46. The only systematic study of the colonial New England diet—Sarah F. McMahon, “A Comfortable Subsistence: The Changing Composition of Diet in Rural New England, 1620–1840,” The William and Mary Quarterly 42 (1985): 26–65—establishes the trajectory and parameters of the colonial New England diet but does not focus on tropical goods. For an overview of diet in the early republic, see Lorena S. Walsh, “Consumer Behavior, Diet, and the Standard of Living in Late Colonial and Early Antebellum America, 1770–1840,” in American Economic Growth and Standards of Living Before the Civil War, ed. Robert E. Gallman and John Joseph Wallis (Chicago, 1992), in which she calls for more research. Woodruff D. Smith reviews this gap in the field, both generally and in relation to sugar in particular, in chapter 1 of Consumption and the Making of Respectability, 1600–1800 (New York, 2002).

8 For connections between the two regions, see Alison Games, Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World (Cambridge, MA, 1999); Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Providence Island, 1630–1641: The Other Puritan Colony (Cambridge, UK, 1993); Russell Menard, Sweet Negotiations: Sugar, Slavery, and Plantation Agriculture in Early Barbados (Charlottesville, 2006), chapter 6; and Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713 (Chapel Hill, 1972), 110–116.

9 Charles F. Carroll, The Timber Economy of Puritan New England (Providence, 1973), 89, 138; W. Noel Sainsbury, ed., Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, America and West Indies: Volume 7, 1669–1674 (London, 1889), 475.

10 Margaret Ellen Newell, From Dependency to Independence: Economic Revolution in Colonial New England (Ithaca, 1998), 76–78. Historians have characterized New England’s role in the sugar–slave complex accordingly. This view focuses exclusively on New England’s exports of raw materials and the region’s import of English manufactures. See Solow, Economic Consequences of the Atlantic Slave Trade, xiii. Though New England’s role in the colonial Atlantic economy has been investigated and expanded most recently by Eric Kimball and Wendy Warren, who seek to further expose New England’s connections to sugar, slavery, and capitalism, more research needs to be done in uncovering the role of New Englanders as developers of the two regions and as consumers of slave-produced products. See Eric Kimball, “An Essential Link in a Vast Chain: New England and the West Indies, 1700–1775” (PhD diss., University of Pittsburgh, 2009); Wendy Warren, New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America (New York, 2016).

11 The literature on North America’s “consumer revolution” focuses almost entirely on the period from 1690 on, and the majority characterizes seventeenth-century consumer culture as limited. A good summary is Lorena S. Walsh, “Peopling, Producing, and Consuming in Early British America,” in The Economy of Early America: Historical Perspectives and New Directions, ed. Cathy Matson (University Park, PA, 2006), 142–144. See also Main and Main, “Economic Growth and the Standard of Living”; Gloria L. Main, Peoples of a Spacious Land: Families and Cultures in Colonial New England (Cambridge, MA, 2001), chap. 9; James McWilliams, “Butter, Milk, and a ‘Spare Ribb’: Women’s Work and the Transatlantic Economic Transition in Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts,” The New England Quarterly 82 (2009): 8.

12 Historians of early colonial foodways include James McWilliams, whose painstaking analyses of probate records and account books have done much to enhance our understanding of economic life in early New England. Sarah McMahon has offered the only comprehensive study of early New England diet, but her work does not address the role of tropical commodities. See James E. McWilliams, A Revolution in Eating: How the Quest for Food Shaped America (New York, 2005); McMahon, “Comfortable Subsistence.” For a review of the literature on colonial New England diet and the argument that “cultural assumptions” and neglect of primary sources on the part of historians have led to an overemphasis on self-sufficiency and seasonal rhythms in the secondary literature, see Joanne V. Bowen, “A Study of Seasonality and Subsistence: Eighteenth Century Suffield, Connecticut” (PhD diss., Brown University, 1990). However, Bowen herself asserts that seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century rural New Englanders were “self-sufficient,” becoming global consumers only with the rise of commercial agriculture at the end of the eighteenth century (55–56). One partial exception is Main, Peoples of a Spacious Land, who has drawn some limited conclusions from probate records.

13 For example, Martha L. Finch, Dissenting Bodies: Corporealities in Early New England (New York, 2010); Matt Cohen, The Networked Wilderness: Communicating in Early New England (Minneapolis, 2010). Both give a close reading of Edward Winslow’s healing of Wampanoag sachem Massasoit in 1623 but do not mention the significance of sugar in that healing.

14 As Carole Shammas lamented in 1989, “the literature on past consumer behavior has produced much writing about consumer cultures and consumer revolutions in which the exact nature of the change is left obscure.” Carole Shammas, “Explaining Past Changes in Consumption and Consumer Behavior,” Historical Methods 22 (1989): 65.

15 James Livingston points this out in Against Thrift: Why Consumer Culture Is Good for the Economy, the Environment, and Your Soul (New York, 2011). Though Livingston does not qualify this assertion, this sets aside investments in commodities that are expected to appreciate, and it assumes that people do not consume for the sole purpose of increasing their “cultural capital” and therefore their ability to maximize profits in the future.

16 For durable goods consumption in early modern England, see John E. Wills, Jr., “European Consumption and Asian Production in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in Consumption and the World of Goods, ed. John Brewer and Roy Porter (New York, 1993), 136; and in the same volume, John Styles, “Manufacturing, Consumption, and Design in Eighteenth-Century England,” 527–554.

17 See Jan De Vries, The Economy of Europe in an Age of Crisis: 1600–1750 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976), esp. 187, and Jan De Vries, “The Industrial Revolution and the Industrious Revolution,” The Journal of Economic History 54 (1994): 249–270. Much of De Vries’s work has been concerned with establishing patterns of consumption, and uncovering the shifts in labor allocation that enabled these patterns to change, rather than explaining such changes themselves. In his early work, he suggests that people began to buy more commodities on the market because rising taxes and greater poverty generally resulted in lower levels of household self-sufficiency. He also makes some broad references to “new standards of comfort and style” (The Economy of Europe, 187) and a new “domesticity” (“The Industrial Revolution,” 263). In his most recent book, The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), however, De Vries gives greater attention to the question of how to understand changes in consumer culture, speculating on factors that might have led to increasing consumerism in early modern Europe. He does not extend this analysis to particular goods. For a rare quantitative examination of the early modern demand for sugar, see Anne McCants’s study of institutional sugar consumption across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Dutch orphanages. She finds that “the secular trend toward greater use of sweeteners completely overwhelmed the sensitivity of sugar purchases, at first, to increases in price, and then later to declines in income.” Anne McCants, “Meeting Needs and Suppressing Desires: Consumer Choice Models and Historical Data,” The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 26 (1995): 204.

18 De Vries, The Industrious Revolution, 20–25. De Vries is building here on the work of Tibor Scitovsky, The Joyless Economy: An Inquiry into Human Satisfaction and Consumer Dissatisfaction (New York, 1976). For an exploration of “novelty,” see Maxine Berg, Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford, 2005). The psychological perception of novelty, of course, interplays with physical responses to goods, as the novelty of an item tends to increase any physical pleasure associated with it, and exposure habituates and decreases physical enjoyment, though not all commodities fit this pattern. One of the most influential commentaries on the social aspects of consumption is Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899; repr., Oxford, 2007). Veblen focused on consumption as a direct expression of monetary wealth, which subsequent commentators have found too simplistic. Pierre Bourdieu, in Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Cambridge, 1984), famously suggested a more nuanced version of Veblen’s theory, arguing that consumption is a way of forming a distinct identity rather than simply a way of indicating economic status. Since the first publication of Distinction in 1979, which focused on mid-twentieth-century France, numerous scholars have investigated, challenged, and refined the ways in which Veblen’s theories play out for other societies and time periods, in particular for the postmodern era. See, for example, Richard A. Peterson, “Understanding Audience Segmentation: From Elite and Mass to Omnivore and Univore,” Poetics 21 (1992): 243–258; Annick Prieur and Mike Savage, “Emerging Forms of Cultural Capital,” European Societies 15 (2013): 246–267.

19 The overwhelming emphasis in histories of markets is on Neil McKendrick’s classic “mill girl who wanted to dress like a duchess,” the “latent social force” of “social emulation” unleashed by industrialization to create a “potent economic expression of growth,” summarized by Joyce Appleby as the “propulsive power of envy, emulation, love of luxury, vanity, and vaulting ambition.” Neil McKendrick, “Home Demand and Economic Growth: A New View of the Role of Women and Children in the Industrial Revolution,” in Historical Perspectives: Studies in English Thought and Society, ed. Neil McKendrick (London, 1974), 208–209; Joyce Appleby, “Ideology and Theory: The Tension Between Political and Economic Liberalism in Seventeenth-Century England,” The American Historical Review 81 (1976): 505.

20 For Mintz, mass sugar consumption appears in the eighteenth century as a result of the interest of “capitalists” in dominating and controlling a new industrial workforce. According to him, “the heightened consumption of goods like sucrose was the direct consequence of deep alterations in the lives of working people.” The upper classes invested in “provisioning, sating—and indeed, drugging—farm and factory workers, sharply reduc[ing] the overall cost of creating and reproducing the metropolitan proletariat.” In this version of the story, the success of the English sugar plantations lay in the “insertion of an essentially new product within popular European tastes and preferences.” British imperial forces secured sources of cheap sugar to placate and make bearable the lives of industrial laborers. This strategy benefitted capitalists and not incidentally ensured a market for sugar merchants and planters. In this way, “the ever-rising consumption of sugar was an artifact of the intraclass struggles for profit.” Smith similarly points to a new capitalist social structure as a source of changes in sugar habits, but he places more emphasis on culture. In his telling, an emerging middle class felt social pressure to emulate the consumption habits of the wealthy and participate in a culture of “respectability.” When ingesting sugar in a rigidly defined ritual, the most prominent example being tea drinking, people signaled their ability to restrain their hunger for sugar in acceptable times and forms and to adapt their behavior to new economic pressures. Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York, 1985), 37–38, and chap. 4, esp. 174, 180–181, 186. For Smith’s perspective, see Woodruff D. Smith, “Complications of the Commonplace: Tea, Sugar, and Imperialism,” The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 23 (1992): 261, 264, and Smith, Consumption and the Making of Respectability, 2–4, 9. See also James Walvin, Fruits of Empire: Exotic Produce and British Taste (New York, 1997), who argues that a taste for sugar was promoted by “commercial interests” and spread by “the contagion of social usage” or “emulation” (196). Mintz also acknowledges the importance of sugar’s drug-like qualities, particularly in his later work, but implies that social structures and cultural preferences better explain the spread of sugar. See Sidney W. Mintz, “The Changing Roles of Food in the Study of Consumption,” in Consumption and the World of Goods, 269–272. For a broader critique of the “emulation” model of consumption, see Jon Stobart’s discussion of “utility,” or comfort and pleasure, as an explanation for increasing consumption, particularly of groceries. Jon Stobart, Sugar and Spice: Grocers and Groceries in Provincial England, 1650–1830 (Oxford, 2013), 5–11. My summary here is limited, and I do not mean to undervalue the important contributions of Mintz, Smith, and others to our understanding of early modern consumerism, nor do I intend to conflate the nuanced work of various different scholars.

21 Colin Campbell, “Understanding Traditional and Modern Patterns of Consumption in Eighteenth-Century England: A Character-Action Approach,” in Consumption and the World of Goods, 40–43; see his extensive version of this argument in Colin Campbell, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism (Oxford, 1987). Campbell is part of a larger trend; countering simplistic assumptions about the process of social emulation, scholars have moved toward the psychological underpinnings of culture, exploring how ideas, needs, and identities come to be bound up in material objects.

22 For an explicit analysis of the role of evolutionary psychology in explaining consumer behavior, see Gad Saad, The Consuming Instinct: What Juicy Burgers, Ferraris, Pornography, and Gift Giving Reveal About Human Nature (New York, 2011). He argues that there are only a few human instincts that are strong enough to explain consumer behavior patterns. See also Bruce G. Trigger, “Early Native North American Responses to European Contact: Romantic Versus Rationalist Interpretations,” The Journal of American History 77 (1991): 1197–1198. Trigger posits a universal “rationalist” human approach to consumption that transcends culture. Of course, even those scholars that emphasize biology over culture concede that there are an infinite number of distinct cultural manifestations of these universal drives, and that culture, as well as differing material environments, affect how people prioritize wants and needs. In particular, scholars have focused on the question of whether material abundance strongly affects the power of certain drives. For example, we might ask: Is sensory pleasure a more important motivation for consumption for those who have to worry whether they have access to material goods, and therefore do not take those material aspects for granted? See the analysis of cultural capital in Douglas Holt, “Does Cultural Capital Structure American Consumption?” Journal of Consumer Research (1988): 1–25. He argues that in the era of mass consumption, the affluent focus on “metaphysical” or “idealistic” meanings of objects as a way of differentiating themselves and claiming status. Colin Campbell makes a similar argument (“Consuming Goods and the Good of Consuming,” Critical Review 8 (1994): 503–520) by differentiating “traditional” societies in which the drive for sensory pleasure can be satisfied from “modern” societies in which pleasure is an emotional ideal that can never be realized. Jean Baudrillard comes down much more firmly on the side of culture, arguing that concepts of “scarcity,” “abundance,” and “primary” or “minimum” are misleading, as within any society all basic or individual desires are culturally determined, even—for example—what constitutes hunger. Jean Baudrillard, “La Genese Ideologique des Besoins,” Cahiers Internationaux de Sociologie 47 (1969): 45–68.

23 De Vries, The Industrious Revolution, 52. De Vries’s implication is the industrious revolution was a cultural and emotional one, an “innovation … linking … fashion and taste … to modernity.”

24 Works that address some aspect of other early modern “drug” foods include Ross W. Jamieson, “The Essence of Commodification: Caffeine Dependencies in the Early Modern World,” Journal of Social History 35 (2001): 269–294; William Jankowiak and Daniel Bradburd, Drugs, Labor, and Colonial Expansion (Tucson, 2003); Woodruff D. Smith, “From Coffeehouse to Parlour: The Consumption of Coffee, Tea, and Sugar in North-western Europe in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries”; Jordan Goodman, “Excitantia: Or, How Enlightenment Europe Took to Soft Drugs,” in Consuming Habits: Global and Historical Perspectives on How Cultures Define Drugs, ed. Jordan Goodman, Paul E. Lovejoy, and Andrew Sheratt (New York, 2007); and Bennett Alan Weinberg and Bonnie K. Bealer, The World of Caffeine: The Science and Culture of the World’s Most Popular Drug (New York, 2001). See also Brian Cowan, The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse (New Haven, 2005); Marcy Norton, Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World (Ithaca, 2008).

25 Historians of sugar consumption often fail to distinguish whether they are assuming a “liking” manipulated by culture and then satisfied through the machinations of impersonal markets, or a “craving” that drove the emergence of those markets and shaped cultural expression. As discussed earlier, most historians emphasize social structures and culture as factors in the expansion of the sugar market. This neglects the point that “biochemistry underlies [eating], not determining the outcome, but affecting the flexibility of the responses.” Helen Macbeth and Sue Lawdry, “Food Preferences and Taste: An Introduction,” in Food Preferences and Taste: Continuity and Change, ed. Helen Macbeth (Providence, 1997), 5.

26 Fabio Parasecoli, “Food and Popular Culture,” in Food in Time and Place: The American Historical Association Companion to Food History, ed. Paul Freedman, Joyce E. Chaplin, and Ken Albala (Oakland, 2014), 329; this example is typical of food histories. Mintz himself is often vague on periodization but overemphasizes the causal role of the English sugar plantations, stating that their establishment resulted in “the insertion of an essentially new product within popular European tastes and preferences.” Mintz, Sweetness and Power, 37–38.

27 It was through the Crusades, around the year AD 1000, that large numbers of Europeans were first exposed to the sugar fields of Crete, Sicily, Lebanon, and Egypt. Europeans rapidly began both trading for larger amounts of sugar and growing it themselves on their newly conquered lands in the Mediterranean as well as on the Iberian peninsula. By the fifteenth century, merchants and entrepreneurs had established the crop on the Atlantic islands of Madeira, the Canaries, and Sao Tome. Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (Cambridge, UK, 1986), 77; David Mancall, Deadly Medicine: Indians and Alcohol in Early America (Ithaca, 1995), 31–32. Most of the technology and processing techniques that would be used in the vastly expanded production of New World sugar were developed during medieval times on these Mediterranean and Atlantic island plantations, including animal and water power and purification processes that produced distinct grades of sugar. Michael Krondl, Sweet Invention: A History of Dessert (Chicago, 2011), 88–89.

28 Alison Games, “Migrations and Frontiers,” in The Atlantic World, 1450–2000, ed. Toyin Falola and Kevin D. Roberts (Bloomington, 2008), 45, 47, 50, 55. As Timothy Buckner observes in the same volume, “Demand for sugar, and the profits created by that demand, massively increased the volume of the Atlantic slave trade.” Buckner, “The Slave Trade’s Apex in the Eighteenth Century,” in The Atlantic World, 103.

29 The question of the extent to which sugar changed the course of Caribbean, Atlantic, and indeed world history is a subject of much contention. For several decades, historians operated under the assumption that sugar ushered in a “revolution” in plantation agriculture in the West Indies, because previous crops neither generated as much profit nor cultivated as great a volume of slave-produced goods. Recently, Russell Menard, among others, has convincingly shown that the rise of sugar in the mid-seventeenth century should rightly be understood as a “boom” rather than as a revolution. Sugar, though particularly well suited to large-scale operations, vertical integration, and brutal slave regimes, arose in the context of a Caribbean economy already successfully planting and trading tobacco, cotton, and indigo in the first half of the seventeenth century. This story of the rapid and spectacularly successful conversion to sugar monoculture on Barbados from 1640 to 1660, replicated repeatedly elsewhere in the Caribbean, is known in the historiography as the “sugar revolution,” implying that sugar was responsible for the dominance of slavery and plantation agriculture in the region for the next two hundred years. Classic works describing this transition are Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713 (Chapel Hill, 1972); Carl Bridenbaugh and Roberta Bridenbaugh, No Peace Beyond the Line: The English in the Caribbean, 1624–1690 (New York, 1972); Gary A. Puckrein, Little England: Plantation Society and Anglo-Barbadian Politics, 1627–1700 (New York, 1984). Russell Menard argues that the sugar “boom” in the 1640s built on a cotton “boom” in the 1630s, when Barbadian planters were renowned for their high-quality cotton. Russell R. Menard, Sweet Negotiations: Sugar, Slavery, and Plantation Agriculture on Early Barbados (Charlottesville, 2006), 23.

30 Larry Gragg, Englishmen Transplanted: The English Colonization of Barbados, 1627–1660 (Oxford, 2003), 106–107.

31 For the Brazilian sugar industry, see Bridenbaugh and Bridenbaugh, No Peace Beyond the Line, chap. 3.

32 Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 18–21, 48, 117.

33 John J. McCusker, Rum and the American Revolution, Vol. 1 (New York, 1989), 106.

34 Gragg, Englishmen Transplanted, 119.

35 David W. Galenson, Traders, Planters, and Slaves: Market Behavior in Early English America (Cambridge, 1986), 7–13, 153.

36 Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 67–74, 226–228; Menard, Sweet Negotiations, 31–47; George Downing to John Winthrop Jr., Aug. 1645, 5:44, Winthrop Family Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, MA.

37 Bernard Bailyn, New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, MA, 1955), 83–86.

38 Nathaniel B. Shurtleff, Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England (Boston, 1853), 1:337, 2:169.

39 “Captain Thomas Breedon to the Council for Foreign Plantations, March 11, 1661,” in Collections of the New York Historical Society for the Year 1869 (New York, 1870), 18.

40 Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 210, 336. Somewhat more ships came from English ports overall (139) than from all New England ports (107).

41 Edward Randolph, Edward Randolph; Including his Letters and Official Papers… (Boston, 1898), 2:249.

42 Major John Scott, “The Description of Barbados (1677),” in Some Early Barbadian History, ed. P. F. Campbell (Barbados, 1993), 246.

43 “Notes Relating to America,” in Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, American and West Indies, 1661–1668, ed. William Noel Sainsbury (London, 1880), 532; “A Description of the Province of New Albion, 1648,” in Tracts and Other Papers, Relating Principally to the Origin, Settlement, and Progress of the Colonies in North America…, ed. Peter Force (Gloucester, 1963), 2:5; Vincent T. Harlow, A History of Barbados: 1625–1685 (New York, 1926), 290.

44 Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 210, 275–276; the imperial report cited that of all the fish that New Englanders traded, they sent “the worst to Barbadoes.” See: “Notes Relating to America,” in Calendar of State Papers.

45 Jerome S. Handler, “Father Antoine Biet’s Visit to Barbados in 1654,” The Journal of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society 32 (1965-66): 56-69.

46 A Volume Relating to the Early History of Boston Containing the Aspinwall Notarial Records from 1644 to 1651 (Boston, 1903), 140.

47 Daniel A. Romani Jr., “The Pettaquamscut Purchase of 1657/58 and the Establishment of a Commercial Livestock Industry in Rhode Island,” in New England’s Creatures: 1400–1900, ed. Peter Benes (Boston University, The Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife Annual Proceedings, 1993), 45–60; Menard, Sweet Negotiations, 110; Bailyn, New England Merchants, 89, 100; see also my analysis of Connecticut farmer Thomas Minor’s account books in note 128.

48 Historians have emphasized the role of the Dutch, and more recently the English merchant investors. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 59–67, 201; Menard, Sweet Negotiations, 49–61.

49 Eltis, “New Estimates,” 644–645 and Tables I-V.

50 Eltis, 644–645 and Tables I-V. As Eltis points out, it is difficult to make conclusive statements about seventeenth-century West Indies sugar product exports because records were not always kept; few of those that were kept before 1670 survive; and measures of prices and weights were variable, making comparisons between sets of records difficult. See also A. P. Thornton, “Some Statistics of West Indian Produce, 1660–1685,” Caribbean Historical Review 4 (1954): 251–180.

51 John J. McCusker, in his massive study of the colonial Atlantic market for sugar, rum, and molasses, largely neglects imports into New England and the North American colonies. He does, however, note the lack of a market for rum and molasses in England. McCusker, Rum, 2:891, 930, 974, 1064. Carole Shammas reports similar findings. Shammas, “Changes in English and Anglo-American Consumption from 1550 to 1800,” in Consumption and the World of Goods, 182–183. See also Gilman M. Ostrander, “The Colonial Molasses Trade,” Agricultural History 30 (Apr. 1956): 77–84. The seventeenth century marked the height of the New England market’s importance to Barbados. By the mid-eighteenth century, the English islands were distilling their molasses into rum, which did eventually become more popular in England, and New England began smuggling in massive amounts of foreign molasses for their tables and distilleries.

52 Sir George Downing to John Winthrop Jr., 26. Aug. 1645, 5:43, Winthrop Papers.

53 Wendy Warren, New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America (New York, 2016), 81.

54 Paul J. Lindholdt, ed., John Josselyn, Colonial Traveler: A Critical Edition of Two Voyages to New-England (Hanover, 1988), 128.

55 Quoted in Darrett B. Rutman, “Governor Winthrop’s Garden Crop: The Significance of Agriculture in the Early Commerce of Massachusetts Bay,” The William and Mary Quarterly 20 (July 1963): 412.

56 McMahon, “Comfortable Subsistence.”

57 Lindholt, John Josselyn, 15.

58 John Davies, History of the Caribby-Islands (London, 1666), 196.

59 Russell R. Menard, “Plantation Empire: How Sugar and Tobacco Planters Built Their Industries and Raised an Empire,” Agricultural History 81 (July 2007): 317; Menard, Sweet Negotiations; Charles M. Andrews, The Colonial Period of American History: England’s Commercial and Colonial Policy (New Haven, 1964), 4:88.

60 Thomas Verney to Edmund Verney, 10 Feb. 1639, in Letters and Papers of the Verney Family, ed. John Bruce (London, 1853), 196.

61 Robert C. Batie, “Why Sugar? Economic Cycles and the Changing of Staples on the English and French Antilles, 1624–54,” Journal of Caribbean History 8 (1976): 19; Larry Gragg, Englishmen Transplanted: The English Colonization of Barbados, 1627–1660 (Oxford, 2003), 98–99.

62 William A. Green, “Supply vs. Demand in the Barbadian Sugar Revolution,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 18 (Winter 1988): 403–418.

63 David Cressy, Coming Over: Migration and Communication Between England and New England in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, 1987), 69–71; Virginia DeJohn Anderson, New England’s Generation: The Great Migration and the Formation of Society and Culture in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, 1991), chap. 4.

64 For an analysis of the early commercial orientation of Massachusetts Bay, see Margaret Ellen Newell, From Dependency to Independence: Economic Revolution in Colonial New England (Ithaca, 1998), chaps. 4 and 5.

65 Carole Shammas, The Pre-Industrial Consumer in England and America (Los Angeles, 1990), 100–101. For a review of early modern sugar consumption in Europe, see Anne E.C. McCants, “Exotic Goods, Popular Consumption, and the Standard of Living: Thinking about Globalization in the Early Modern World,” Journal of World History 18 (2007): 433–462.

66 Typical is John J. McCusker, the foremost scholar on colonial rum, who focuses almost exclusively on the eighteenth century; his seventeenth-century work explores the rum industry in Britain and Europe. The scholarship on molasses is similarly scanty, though intriguing. McCusker estimates that in 1770, after re-exports, American colonists had enough rum for every adult white male to drink twenty-one gallons a year. McCusker, Rum, 1:468. He further notes that the “British colonists in North America had a nearly insatiable appetite for molasses.” McCusker, “The Business of Distilling in the Old World and the New World During the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: The Rise of a New Enterprise and its Connection with Colonial America,” in The Early Modern Atlantic Economy, ed. John J. McCusker and Kenneth Morgan (Cambridge, 2000), 215. Two scholars that assert the vital importance of molasses as a consumer good in New England are Gilman M. Ostrander, “The Colonial Molasses Trade,” Agricultural History 30 (1956): 77–84, and Carl Bridenbaugh, “The High Cost of Living in Boston, 1728,” The New England Quarterly 5 (1932): 800–811, but both focus on the eighteenth century.

67 Rodgers, Middlesex County Records of Probate, 58. Measurements of sugar in the seventeenth century were variable, and price also varied considerably according to quality. Problematically, any barrel of sugar was likely to be termed a “hogshead,” even if its size was much smaller or larger than a typical hogshead, and thus we cannot be sure of any one calculation converting the volume of a barrel into pounds of sugar. Storekeepers’ accounts, dealing with smaller and more precise amounts, are much more reliable for calculating sugar prices. A “butt” was the equivalent of two hogsheads, and scholars estimate that each hogshead held 500 to 600 pounds of sugar, so each butt likely held 1,000 to 1,200 pounds of sugar. According to these calculations, Long’s three butts of sugar would hold 3,000, to 3,600 pounds of sugar; valued at £60, the sugar would have been worth wholesale about 4 to 5 d. per pound. Retail prices were usually higher; it is also possible that these butts held less sugar than would be expected or that the sugar was of low quality. For an analysis of colonial sugar measurements, see McCusker, Rum, 2:784, and John J. McCusker, Essays in the Economic History of the Atlantic World (London, 1997), especially 38, 804.

68 Rodgers, Middlesex County Records of Probate, 121–126. The record indicates that the sugar was valued at roughly 6d. a pound.

69 The Probate Records of Essex County, Massachusetts (Salem, MA, 1916), 1:65; Robert Charles Anderson, The Great Migration Begins: Immigrants to New England 1620–1633 (Boston, 1995), 1:382.

70 Rodgers, Middlesex County Records of Probate, 1–2, 26, 360.

71 Rodgers, 287; Richard Frothingham, The History of Charlestown, Massachusetts (Charlestown, 1845), 78–79.

72 The Probate Records of Essex County, 1:34–36.

73 The Probate Records of Essex County, 1:58.

74 The Probate Records of Essex County, 1:49, 241–242. Plasse’s tools are evidence of his trade as well as a reference in “Early Settlers of Essex and Old Norfolk,” New England Historical and Genealogical Register (Oct. 1853), 7:359.

75 The Probate Records of Essex County, 1:195–198.

76 The Probate Records of Essex County, 1:244–245.

77 Rodgers, Middlesex County Records of Probate, 115.

78 Rodgers, 6, 426.

79 The Probate Records of Essex County, 1:203–204.

80 The Probate Records of Essex County, 1:280–281.

81 George F. Dow, ed, Records and Files of the Quarterly Courts of Essex County, Massachusetts (Salem, MA, 1911), 1:66, 97, 105, 119, 296, 375, 388, 428; 2:165; Probate Records of Essex County, 1:284.

82 Rodgers, Middlesex County Records of Probate, 110.

83 Rodgers, 318.

84 Jan de Vries goes so far as to argue that “inventories are no guide to food consumption.” De Vries, “Between Purchasing Power and the World of Goods,” 102. Sarah McMahon discusses gaps in the probate record specifically in regards to foodstuffs in colonial Massachusetts in Sarah F. McMahon, “Provisions Laid Up for the Family: Toward a History of Diet in New England, 1650–1850,” Historical Methods 14 (1981): 4–21.

85 Curwen Family Papers, MSS 45, George Corwin Account Book 1652–1655, Series I, Volume I, Phillips Library, Peabody, MA.

86 “An Abstract of the Inventory of the Contents of the Shop of Capt. Joseph Weld of Roxbury, Made February 4, 1646–7,” in Every Day Life in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, ed. George F. Dow, (New York, 1988), 242–243.

87 For an analysis of the importance of local commerce for Massachusetts merchants in the seventeenth century, see James E. McWilliams, Building the Bay Colony: Local Economy and Culture in Early Massachusetts (Charlottesville, 2007).

88 Phyllis Hunter, Purchasing Identity in the Atlantic World: Massachusetts Merchants, 1670–1780 (Ithaca, 2001), 41–43; John Goff, The Salem Witch House: A Touchstone to Antiquity (Charleston, 2009), 28–39; J. Willard Gibbs, Memoir of the Gibbs Family of Warwickshire, England, and United States of America (Philadelphia, 1879).

89 Winifred Rothenberg, “Farm Account Books: Problems and Possibilities,” Agricultural History 58 (April 1984): 110; Sally M. Schultz and Joan Hollister, “Single-Entry Accounting in Early America: The Accounts of the Hasbrouck Family,” The Accounting Historians Journal 31 (June 2004): 141–174.

90 W. T. Baxter, “Credit, Bills, and Bookkeeping in a Simple Economy,” The Accounting Review 21 (April 1946): 154–166. Baxter uses the term “commodity money” to describe the use of popular goods as currency, and points out that this “commodity money” was synonymous with trade goods intended for foreign markets. See also W. T. Baxter, “Observations on Money, Barter, and Bookkeeping,” Accounting Historians Journal 31 (June 2004): 136; W. T. Baxter, “Accounting in Colonial America,” in Studies in the History of Accounting, ed. A. C. Littleton and B. S. Yamey (London, 1956); and Larry Kreiser, “Early American Accounting,” Journal of Accountancy (July 1976): 79.

91 For an excellent analysis of Corwin’s account books, see James E. McWilliams, Building the Bay Colony, 75–79. McWilliams is one of the few scholars to interpret these records. McWilliams does not look at tropical commodities, however.

92 George Corwin Account Book 1: 1652–1655.

93 David W. Conroy, In Public Houses: Drink and the Revolution of Authority in Colonial Massachusetts (Chapel Hill, 1995), 12–18, 31, 41–47; Richard P. Gildrie, “Taverns and Popular Culture in Essex County, Massachusetts, 1678–1686,” Essex Institute Historical Collections 124 (July 1988): 158–185.

94 Lindholdt, John Josselyn, 131.

95 Henry Fitzgilbert Waters, The Gedney and Clarke Families of Salem, Mass. (Salem, MA, 1880), 4–7; Dow, Records and Files of the Quarterly Courts of Essex County, 3:18, 80; George Corwin Account Book 1: 1652–1655 (sugar estimates are based on the average price of 8d. a pound).

96 Bernard Bailyn, New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century (New York, 1955), 53–54.

97 Ruth A. McIntyre, William Pynchon: Merchant and Colonizer (Springfield, MA, 1961); Bailyn, New England Merchants, 30.

98 Bailyn, New England Merchants, 54; Warren, New England Bound, 75–76, 80. For this interpretation of commercial farming in Springfield, see Stephen Innes, Labor in a New Land: Economy and Society in Seventeenth-Century Springfield (Princeton, 1983), especially chap. 4.

99 Joseph H. Smith, ed., Colonial Justice in Massachusetts, 1639–1702: The Pynchon Court Record (Cambridge, MA, 1961), 222.

100 Carl Bridenbaugh, ed., The Pynchon Papers: Letters of John Pynchon, 1654–1700 (Boston, 1982), 1:7.

101 Bridenbaugh, 1:20.

102 John Pynchon, Account Books and Other Records, 1651–1697, vol. 1, microfilm.

103 Pynchon, Account Books, vol. 1.

104 This price of 10d. a pound indicates that during this very early period of settlement sugar was a little more expensive in remote areas, but still affordable for most people. Account books show that sugar prices were lower in Massachusetts Bay; the higher price on the frontier was mentioned by Adam, who noted that “it can not be oford cheper I suppos deliverd ther.” Adam Winthrop to John Winthrop Jr., June 3, 1649, 5:349–350, Winthrop Papers, 372.

105 Rodgers, Middlesex County Records of Probate, 181.

106 Dow, Records and Files of the Quarterly Courts of Essex County, 1:296.

107 Samuel Eliot Morison, Harvard College in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, MA, 1936), 74–76, 106-107.

108 “College Laws and Customs,” Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts 31 (1935): 332.

109 Morison, Harvard College, 90–97.

110 S. E. Morison, “Chesholme’s Steward’s Book, Introduction,” Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts 31 (1935): 9–17. The General Court passed legislation in 1644 recommending that all New England families contribute the equivalent of a quarter bushel of corn to Harvard College to support scholarships for poor students, and sometimes families paid this tax in sugar as well. For example, in 1652 “mr goorre of roxbury” paid his contribution in 7s. 6d. worth of sugar. “Steward’s Book,” 275.

111 Morison, “Introduction,” 16–17.

112 Morison, Harvard College, 97.

113 “Steward’s Book,” 21.

114 “College Laws and Customs,” 330–331.

115 “Steward’s Book,” 225–238.

116 See, for example, accounts with merchant John Glover, “Steward’s Book,” 51–52.

117 Letter to John Winthrop Jr., Feb. 1, 1674, Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society (Boston: MHS, 1891–1892): 2nd series, 7:16–17. The writer notes that he sold his New England horses in Barbados for 3,000 pounds of sugar each.

118 Ostrander, “Colonial Molasses Trade,” 77–84.

119 Peleg Sanford, The Letter-Book of Peleg Sanford, 1666–1668 (Providence), 34.

120 Sanford, 41, 51.

121 Sanford, 70.

122 William Paine’s 1661 probate record indicates that a hogshead of molasses sold for three pounds. Dow, Records and Files of the Quarterly Courts of Essex County, 2:272.

123 George Corwin Account Book, 1:1652–1655, and 3:1657–1662; The Probate Records of Essex County, 2:196–198.

124 George Corwin Account Book, 5:1663–1666; for example, see the accounts of Anthony Needham and John Waters.

125 See Margaret Newell’s work tracing the residences of Gibbs’s customers. Newell, From Dependency to Independence, 100.

126 Robert Gibbs Business Records, 1659–1708, Account Book, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, MA.

127 See Virginia DeJohn Anderson, “Thomas Minor’s World: Agrarian Life in Seventeenth-Century New England,” Agricultural History 82 (Fall 2008): 496–518, and Paul B. Hensley, “Time, Work, and Social Context in New England,” The New England Quarterly 65 (Dec. 1992): 531–559.

128 Sidney H. Miner and George D. Stanton Jr., eds., The Diary of Thomas Minor, Stonington, Connecticut, 1653 to 1684 (Ann Arbor, 1976), especially 67, 70, 102, 141–142, 166.

129 Frederick H. Smith, Caribbean Rum: A Social and Economic History (Gainesville, 2005), 16.

130 George Corwin Account Book, 5:1663–1666; Records and Files of the Quarterly Courts of Essex County, 3:182, 4:274.

131 George Corwin Account Book, 5:1663–1666; Records and Files of the Quarterly Court of Essex County, 3:269, 383.

132 William Richard Cutter, New England Families: Genealogical and Memorial (New York, 1913), 1:10; George Corwin Account Book, 5:1663–1666.

133 George Corwin Account Book, 5:1663-1666; Walter Goodwin Davis, Massachusetts and Maine Families in the Ancestry of Walter Goodwin Davis (Baltimore, 1996), 248–249.

134 Smith, Caribbean Rum, 10–15; Mark Edward Lender and James Kirby Martin, Drinking in America: A History (New York, 1982), 6–7.

135 McCusker, Rum, 1:55-58.

136 Richard Pares, Yankees and Creoles: The Trade Between North America and the West Indies Before the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 1956).

137 Smith, Caribbean Rum, 28–29.

138 Kristen D. Burton, “Intoxication and Empire: Distilled Spirits and the Creation of Addiction in the Early Modern British Atlantic” (PhD diss., University of Texas, 2015), chap. 1.

139 Shurtleff, Records of Massachusetts, 4 (2): 37–38; 2:194–195. The extensive legislation aimed at controlling alcohol consumption, much of it quickly repealed in the face of opposition, included forbidding the custom of group toasts, limiting the sale of various types of alcohol, outlawing inebriation itself, maintaining strict licensing requirements for taverns, forcing responsibility for drunkenness on innkeepers, and hiring investigators to enforce sobriety in taverns. Shurtleff, Records of Massachusetts, 1:112, 205, 213–214, 258, 266, 271–272; 2:100, 121, 257; 4 (pt. 1):203; 5:211. See also James K. Hosmer, ed., Winthrop’s Journal “History of New England” 1630–1649 (New York, 1908), 1:325; Dean Albertson, “Puritan Liquor in the Planting of New England,” The New England Quarterly 23 (Dec. 1950): 477–490; Conroy, In Public Houses, 49–56.

140 Increase Mather, A Sermon, Occasioned by the Execution of a Man Found Guilty of Murder (Boston, 1687), 25.

141 Cotton Mather, Sober Considerations on a Growing Flood of Iniquity (Boston, 1708), 3, 11.

142 Stephen Innes, “Thrift and Prosperity,” in Thrift and Thriving in America: Capitalism and Moral Order from the Puritans to the Present, ed. Joshua J. Yates and James Davison Hunter (New York, 2011), 118–119, 121–122, 124, 131. Innes describes the “Protestant dilemma,” which was the ideology that lauded hard work and prosperity but condemned acquisitiveness and material pleasures.

143 Mather, Sober Considerations, 9; John Winthrop, “Experiencia,” (1929) 1:197, Winthrop Papers.

144 The Winthrop family had extensive trade dealings in sugar; see references to their involvement the sugar trade earlier in this article, and see also, for example, Samuel Winthrop to John Winthrop Jr., Sept. 1664, “Letters of Samuel Winthrop,” Massachusetts Historical Society.

145 Jose Winthrop, Notebook of Jose Winthrop, 1683, Mss C28, New England Historic Genealogical Society, Boston, MA. Jose Winthrop farmed and served as constable in a rural area adjacent to Boston, now the towns of Winthrop and Revere. Named Jose, he is sometimes misrepresented in the records as Joseph or Jesse. See Oliver Ayer Roberts, History of the Military Company of the Massachusetts (Boston, 1895), 1:295–296; A Report of the Record Commissioners of the City of Boston (Boston, 1883), 8:232.

146 David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York, 1989), 134–139.

147 Ken Albala, “Premodern Europe,” in Food in Time and Place: The American Historical Association Companion to Food History, ed. Paul Freedman, Joyce E. Chaplin, and Ken Albala (Berkeley, 2014), 35.

148 Letter to John Winthrop Jr., 1 Feb. 1674, Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society (Boston, 1891–1892): 2nd series, 7:16–17.

149 John Hull Letter-book, vol. 2, 411, Folio 3, MSS John Hull Papers, 1624–1685, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, MA.

150 Robert B. Thomas, The Farmer’s Almanack (Boston, 1804).

151 For two recent examples of this literature, see Mark Peterson, The City-State of Boston: The Rise and Fall of an Atlantic Power, 1630–1865 (Princeton, 2019); and Christy Clark-Pujara, Dark Work: The Business of Slavery in Rhode Island (New York, 2016).