Article ID: CBB830013873

Sugar Machines and the Fragile Infrastructure of Commodities in the Nineteenth Century (2018)

unapi

This essay uses sugar machinery to explore the fragile infrastructure that allowed global commodity traffic to emerge. In the nineteenth century, the cane sugar industry transformed the Caribbean, the Hawaiian Islands, and much of the rest of the tropical world. Observers then and now tied sugar’s revolutionary power to the invention and spread of advanced mechanical technologies. Yet the origins and lives of those machines themselves have remained obscure. The superficially effortless circulation of standardized material goods like sugar depended on carefully cultivated systems for managing people, paper, objects, and knowledge—and such things could not be standardized so easily.

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Article Lukas Rieppel; Eugenia Lean; William Deringer (2018) Introduction: The Entangled Histories of Science and Capitalism. Osiris: A Research Journal Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences (pp. 1-24). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB830013873/

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Authors & Contributors
Knight, G. Roger
Rouphail, Robert M.
Kerkhoff, Kathinka Sinha
Fullilove, Courtney
Marco Meniketti
John E. Crowley
Concepts
Agriculture
Sugar and sugar industry
Plantations
Economic botany; plant cultivation; horticulture
Globalization; internationalization
Technology
Time Periods
19th century
20th century
18th century
Edo period (Japan, 1603-1868)
Medieval
21st century
Places
United States
Japan
Java (Indonesia)
Caribbean
Atlantic world
Caribbean Sea
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