Profs & Pints Charlottesville: Tariffs, Corruption, and Sugar

Profs and Pints Charlottesville presents: “Tariffs, Corruption, and Sugar,” a look at how capitalism and empire changed the food we eat, with David Singerman, assistant professor of history and American studies at the University of Virginia and author of Unrefined: How Capitalism Reinvented Sugar.

[All tickets must be purchased online, with sales tax and processing fees added, at https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/profsandpints/charlottesville-tariffs-corruption-sugar .]

The wealthier societies get, the more sugar they seem to eat, even though scientists increasingly blame sugar for various modern maladies such as widespread obesity and diabetes.

Our addiction to sweetness is hardly just the product of our appetites, however. It has a long, unsavory history driven by forces infinitely more powerful than any sweet tooth, being largely the creation of sugar empires that over the past 500 years have made fortunes for a few and brought misery to millions.

Learn the fascinating story of how sugar came to dominate both our pantries and our politics with David Singerman, a historian of science, technology, the environment, and American capitalism.

You’ll learn how sugar was once an artisanal product, valued on the basis of natural properties like color, taste, texture, and even sound. The owners of Caribbean plantations depended on the expertise of enslaved workers to make sugar that could be sold back to Europe.

Eventually, however, the planters and industrialists involved with the sugar trade grew uncomfortable with their reliance on the knowhow of the enslaved. They responded by reinventing sugar as a pure chemical substance. In the process, they also changed the landscape of the Caribbean.

Professor Singerman will describe how sugar interests later became major players in American politics in the Gilded Age, an era marked by political corruption somewhat similar to that of our own time. The “Sugar Trust” became the most notorious monopoly in the country, and tariffs on sugar imports emerged as one of the nation’s most divisive partisan issues.

You’ll hear about politicians being punched in the street, about sugar con men who vanished with millions in investors’ money, and about a conspiracy so sweetly devious that not even the Justice Department could figure it out.

This talk will offer insights on the origins of current issues including debates over President Trump’s tariffs and America’s interests in the Caribbean. (Advance tickets: $13.50. Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Doors open for talk attendees at 4:30 pm and the talk starts at 6 pm.)

Image: “Shipping Sugar,” an 1823 print by William Clark (Royal Museums Greenwich / Public domain).