A house of honey: White sugar, brown sugar, and the taste for modernity in colonial and postcolonial Indonesia

Abstract

This article sets out to review aspects of the history of a key world food commodity, and particularly to review the historical trajectory of white sugar and its links to ideas about “modernity.” It argues that the idea of white sugar, in tandem with the manufacture of this form of the commodity, was taken up by new elites in the new states of the ex-colonial world during the middle decades of the twentieth century, and (following Sidney Mintz) that white sugar became literally the taste of modernity for elites and masses alike. It explores the ramifications of this argument in the context of the Netherlands Indies/Indonesia during a period of time extending from the 1930s through the 1950s.