Few plants capture the energy from the sun in as sweet an abundance as sugarcane, a perennial grass that stores sucrose in the sap of its jointed stalks. By weight, it is the most harvested crop on the planet, amounting to roughly two trillion stalks a year, or more than 200 stalks for every person on Earth.1 Renowned for its persistence, sugarcane survives harvest and regenerates from the living stool—the plant’s underground stubble whose buds sprout new shoots. Unlike plants grown from seed, each carrying a new genetic combination, every new cane is a clone of the one it was cut from. Cultivated cane provides the sweetness humans are innately predisposed to; yet depends on human care to be replanted. As a result, a relationship of mutual dependence between plant and farmer has developed and endured over millennia.2
Over eight millennia, value systems around sugarcane have designed landscapes and social hierarchies, determining which ecological components were exhausted and preserved and who could share in the value this system produced. In the gardens of New Guinea, where cane grasses were likely first domesticated, people propagated sugarcane clonally from cuttings, replanting varieties as lineages that became a medium of kinship, hospitality, and exchange.3 On Atlantic plantations, the plant was reduced to the sucrose in its stalk and its co-products were ranked below it as byproducts or “wastes.” Under industrial chemistry and the policies that subsidized it, sweetness was reduced to a molecule, extracted first from sugar beet and later, through enzymes, from corn, so that sugarcane became one interchangeable source among many.4
At roughly 550 million metric tons a year, bagasse—the fibrous mass left after sugarcane is crushed—represents one of the world’s largest agricultural byproduct streams. Starting in the seventeenth century, when deforestation in the Caribbean drove planters to burn it in place of firewood, bagasse has supplied the furnaces for sugar production. Over time, new uses for bagasse have been found, such as in paper pulp in the nineteenth century; insulating fiberboard, hardboard, and particleboard from the 1920s; and by the mid-1980s, medium-density fiberboard (MDF) products.5 From the late twentieth century, bagasse expanded into filler, reinforcement, and aggregate substitutes in mineral-bonded boards, masonry units, and later as loose-fill insulation. Yet most mills still burn it for heat and electricity, and like corn stover, it is increasingly used as a feedstock for cellulosic ethanol.
Today, bagasse’s most substantial market is particleboard in India, where capacity is expanding rapidly at annual growth rates of 12 percent, alongside smaller regional markets for MDF.6 And there is important research presently being done in cement-bonded panels and in the use of bagasse ash for concrete and masonry.7 As biomass streams of bagasse scale into twenty-first-century construction feedstocks, the different historical value systems—relational, exchange, use, and performance—remain at play, reshaping sugarcane and its cultivated relatives, human societies, and their shared ecologies.
Cultivating Relational Value: Sugarcane Grasses in New Guinean Gardens
Saccharum officinarum, or what we have come to know as “the noble cane,” traces its beginnings to a mosaic of Saccharum robustum grasses in present-day Papua New Guinea after the end of the last ice age.8 In the early twentieth century, Western archaeologists and prehistorians viewed this region as peripheral to the global centers of crop diversity and plant domestication in Asia, Africa, and South America.9 Despite evidence from twentieth-century expeditions, it was not until 2003 that microbotanical analysis and radiocarbon dating overturned the long-held belief that New Guinea had been a “passive recipient” of agriculture, showing instead that the region had developed some of the earliest plant domestication practices by some of the world’s most inventive farmers.10
Ancestral sugarcane thrived on the banks of meandering rivers and streams, usually where sand and silt accumulated on the inside of moving river bends. In this underworld, the roots of sugarcane could, by some accounts, reach as deep as a two-story building.11 Digging into layers of soil, sugarcane roots accessed slow trickles of water infused with minerals. Where there was open sky above, cane grew fifteen to twenty-five feet tall, and where another plant neighbor crowded at ground level, new shoots would emerge from their base and spread away from the river bend.12 Dense canebrakes could spread thirty to two hundred feet away from the water’s edge until they met resistance in the shade of the encroaching jungle. Along the lower Sepik River, sugarcane stands covered many square miles.13
Between roughly 10,000 to 7,000 years ago, New Guinean communities developed interrelated root-crop horticulture and arboriculture alongside, and increasingly in place of, foraging. These systems combined a high diversity of crops, including semi-cultivated trees and long-lived perennials.14 Out of these systems grew a traditional cuisine of remarkable diversity including starchy staples (taro, yam, banana, sago, and sweet potato); tree crops (canarium nuts, okari, pandanus, candlenut, and breadfruit); and edible grasses (sugarcane stalks, Nastus bamboo shoots).15 From these river landscapes, New Guinean gardeners found a use for every part of the sugarcane, including in landscape architecture, construction, musical instruments, medicine, feed, salt-making, water, and food.16
When rivers flooded and safe drinking water ran short, people chewed the succulent young stalks. The hard, fibrous stalks of sugarcane were cut and planted together as fences, which rooted in place and within a year grew into living hedgerows.17 Cane stalks sweeter than the rest were plucked from the riverbank and replanted in gardens, away from the competition and shade that had held them back. In their gardens, rights to clear land were designed along complex lines of kinship with individual gardens divided among kin and friends. Among the Edolo people, customary law permitted sugarcane to be cut for visiting guests but forbade cutting cane someone else had planted without their permission.18 Failing to grow and offer sugarcane for guests represented a serious social transgression and a slight on the gardener’s manhood.19
Across much of New Guinea, gardening was what Marcel Mauss called a “total social phenomenon”; growing food was inseparable from kinship, ritual and status.20 Garden work produced and sustained valued social relations, and acts of giving and sharing food from gardens became the means to expand and strengthen social relations both within and between clans.21 This ethic of land and plant care was enacted in culinary practices that rewarded diligent cultivation. For example, in communal gatherings, the length of one’s sugarcane stem revealed the attention a gardener had invested in it, turning a plant into a public measure of diligence and generosity.22
Over generations, selection and close attention turned mutations into named varieties. New Guineans developed a rich vocabulary for the variations of plants as they grew, changed, and moved across the landscape, naming and remembering differences of taste, use, place, and origin that agronomic classification does not capture.23 Among the Huli, one of largest highland ethnic groups in New Guinea, ethnobotanists have recorded at least 171 names for sweet potato alone, distinguished by tuber color, size, and leaf form, and similarly detailed classifications for taro and pandanus.24 A typical New Guinean garden held about five to twenty named varieties of sugarcanes.25 Ancestral varieties were valued most highly, and the loss of one was felt as a break in historical continuity.26
Given that plants carried relational value, their health and quality were never simply agronomic concerns. Social norms governed how much could be harvested, by what methods, and by whom. This regulation operated at several scales at once, from the individual gardener and household to kin groups, clans, and the wider community. Cultivation of plants represented care for the relationships they embodied, and neglect of sugarcane registered as a failure toward kin, guests, and ancestors. As a social transaction subject to permission, obligation, and reciprocity, harvesting sustained a deep and finely grained botanical knowledge that regulated both the scale and the biodiversity of sugarcane grasses.
Over the following seven and a half millennia, sugarcane spread westward from New Guinea through Southeast Asia to India, where crystallized sugar was first produced, then across the Persian world, and with the expansion of Islamic caliphates into the Mediterranean. Throughout this long diffusion period, sugarcane remained an important crop among many in mixed agrarian economies. Its decisive transformation into a template monoculture for the Atlantic plantation system occurred on the Portuguese island of Madeira in the fifteenth century.
Bolo de Mel and Pearls of the Atlantic: The Birth of the Monoculture and Scaling Exchange Value Systems
Five hundred years since its invention in the Convent of Santa Clara, the sugar molasses cake, or bolo de mel, is found today on every Christmas table and on the shelves of every notable bakery and duty-free airport in Madeira.27 Made with mel de cana, the dark syrup left after sugar has been crystallized from boiled cane juice, the cake is essentially a byproduct of a byproduct of sugarcane. The convent came to house the daughters of Madeira’s sugar-owning elite in a religious order known for its austerity. Connected to religious houses across Iberia, Santa Clara became a center for celebrated confectionery traditions, turning sugar, eggs, and spices into sweets that circulated as gifts, medicine, and devotional objects. In doing so, they supplied an export market for highly prized sugar confections that came to be known as “Pearls of the Atlantic.” Through Madeira’s export and domestic markets, sugarcane was refined into a graded ladder of products, from fine white sugar down to coarser brown sugars, skimmings, and molasses, reflecting the materialization and socialization of new value systems and social hierarchies around the plantation complex.28
The plantation’s value system first took ecological form in Madeira, where sugarcane grasses were elevated above all other plant life, including trees and the island’s prized forest ecosystems, which were subordinated to sugarcane’s cultivation and fuel needs. Nicknamed the “Isle of Woods” by the Vikings, Madeira remains home to the world’s largest refuge for laurel forests, though the laurisilva that once covered most of the island now survives on only about a fifth of it. Accounts from Alvise Cadamosto, the fifteenth-century Venetian merchant and explorer, preserve the legend that the first Portuguese settlers to arrive in Madeira in 1420 set fires to the island’s forests to clear land for planting cane, resulting in seven continuous years of burning.29 Estimated to be around 20 million years old, the laurel forest canopy intercepts and collects mist from the northeast trade winds, condensing moisture and filtering it through the bodies of its trees and soils before delivering it through a vascular spring system to land below. Water moving downhill carries weathered volcanic rock and sediment, renewing the fertile soils of the lower valleys where early sugarcane plantations were established.
In early colonial Madeira, most land was worked under the contrato de colonia, a sharecropping arrangement akin to Italian mezzadria, in which the harvest was divided between owner and cultivator.30 To bring water to a greater expanse of terraced fields below, settlers built the levadas, an extensive network of irrigation channels cut into the mountainsides. Madeira’s sugar was produced by a mixed and hierarchical workforce. Enslaved people from the Canary Islands and West Africa worked alongside free wage laborers, who were often paid partly in kind, as well as Sicilian sugar specialists who brought milling expertise to the island.31 Much of the trade was financed by Genoese and Florentine capital that leveraged Portugal’s expanding maritime network, carrying the sugar from Funchal to Lisbon, Antwerp, Genoa, and beyond.32
At its peak in the first decade of the sixteenth century, around 2,500 metric tons of crystalline sugar were leaving Madeira for mainland Europe a year.33 Given that sugar in medieval Europe had been considered a rare spice and medicine associated with a distant, half-mythical East, this image sustained high prices even as production moved closer on the Atlantic island. Yet distance still separated consumers from the conditions of production, which is what allowed exchange value to climb so far above the cost borne by the island's land and labor. Similar to the medieval period, sugar still circulated largely as medicine, but increasing imports from Madeira allowed it to spread beyond elite households. Under the Crown's monopoly, Madeiran sugar flowed through networks of royal charity and religious institutions, where it was given as medicine to the poor.
Compared to New Guinean gardens, Madeira shows what happens to a plant when its value is reorganized around the market. Forests were cleared and cultivated biodiversity narrowed to the few cane varieties best suited to milling. Value centered on a single commodity, crystalline sugar, traded on a world market, while byproducts such as syrup were sold at lower value. Different products of the cane mapped onto the hierarchies of the societies along lines of origin, class, and legal status. Refined white sugar, the most processed and most expensive, served elites as medicine, spice, and display, while darker sugars like molasses and treacle reached the poor and the enslaved, and rum fed sailors and plantation workers.34 By the 1520s, however, Madeiran sugar production declined, weakened by soil exhaustion, widespread deforestation, and cheaper production emerging in São Tomé and Principe to its south.35 Over the following two centuries, the sugar plantation model was relayed and intensified across the Atlantic, to Hispaniola and Brazil before being established in the English and French Caribbean.
The Recession of Plot Use Values in the Gardens of the Enslaved
By the time the sugar industry became established in Jamaica, the exchange value system around the sugarcane complex had deepened following the “sugar revolution” in Barbados in the 1640s, in which land holdings became consolidated into large estates and labor shifted from indentured Europeans to enslaved Africans, turning the plantation into an integrated agro-industrial unit, a synthesis of field and factory.36 As sugarcane needed to be crushed within hours of cutting and its juice boiled to prevent immediate rotting, a large-scale enslaved workforce was needed to continually farm, harvest, and process cane. Madeira had combined enslaved and free labor without codifying slavery by race, but in the Caribbean, plantation slavery was instituted in law, as in Barbados’s slave code of 1661 that made bondage racial.37
To feed this scale of labor workforce, another planting ecosystem emerged alongside the sugarcane crop. In plots, small gardens at the door of their homes or on peripheral sites to the plantation (hillsides, ravines, woodlands), the enslaved used their religious beliefs, botanical skills, medicinal, and agricultural knowledge from Africa to adapt farming in new soil and climates to supplement their diet.38 Over the 350-year period of the transatlantic slave trade, plants were brought across the Atlantic as seeds, kernels, grains, fodder grasses, and valuable medicinal herbs by the enslaved.39 As documented in Judith Carney’s extensive research on the ethnobotanical contributions of the enslaved to the New World, although their provision grounds and gardens drew on plants of Amerindian, Asian, and European origin, more than half were species native to Africa.40 The success of their experiments in new plot landscapes resulted in food, medicines, dyes, oil, and a broad range of products used for the survival, health, and economy of the enslaved.41
In relation to the plantation, the Jamaican philosopher Sylvia Wynter argued that the plot maintained a value system inherited from Africa, one in which earth is a source of life, ancestral power, and spiritual residency.42 Whereas the plantation was a totalizing monopoly system built to secure its own power, leveraging the right to property to govern, the plot was a temporary concession. For the enslaved, the plot was a counter-culture space for folk thought and resistance and enabled a reciprocity with land and kin. Folk culture formed the basis of the plot’s social order and value according to its “use value.”43
Plantation and plot did not operate as oppositional value systems, but rather as two poles that originated from a single historical process.44 Readings of post-emancipation dynamics revealed how the plot became a site where the enslaved became initiated in exchange value systems, gaining exposure to property relations, and to the norms that defined which persons, and whose ways of living, were recognized as legitimate.45 During what is known as the “apprenticeship period” in the British Caribbean (1834–38), the formerly enslaved remained bound to the plantations, and the peasant values of provision and use were increasingly subordinated to the demands of industry. An 1836 report to the Governor of Jamaica describing the parish of Trelawny reported that “all the apprentices grow yams, cocoas, and other vegetables greatly to exceed domestic consumption,” emphasizing not only what might be stored or preserved, but also the surplus that would go to market.46 To survive as free subjects, the formerly enslaved were made to produce for the market, and the plot, once a refuge from the plantation, was drawn into its circuits of exchange value.
Performance Value Substitutions: Bourbon and Ribbon Cane, Sugar Beet and Corn
Up until the mid-nineteenth century, the world’s sugar came almost entirely from sugarcane. As the Caribbean model of sugarcane plantation expanded to the American South, innovations in land use and milling technologies intensified regional scales of production. Building on the three-cylinder mill that had become the industry standard in the seventeenth century, Louisiana planters adopted steam-powered mills and multiple-effect evaporator technologies to process ever larger harvests.47 At its mid-nineteenth-century peak, Louisiana’s sugar industry produced roughly two to four times the earlier peak output of Jamaica and Saint-Domingue, and about a hundredfold that of Madeira.48
From tropical America, the shift in scale and challenge of Louisiana’s subtropical climate and winter frost introduced a series of substitutions of the creole cane by other Saccharum species. Like Madeira’s laurisilva forests, fuel required for sugar boiling in the Caribbean and American South consumed forests at a scale that made wood scarce and led to large-scale deforestation.49 In response to this, Louisiana planters in the 1850s shifted to burning the bagasse waste in place of wood, expanding the performance requirements for sugarcane species beyond the cane juice.
The seeds of this shift began between 1780 and the 1820s, when creole sugarcane underwent a series of substitutions by other varieties, each selected for a different performance value. Given it yielded more sugar per acre, matured faster, and produced bagasse that burned more efficiently, otaheite or “bourbon” cane from Tahiti became the principal cane of the American sugar industry.50 In colder northern Louisiana, cane was selected for a different trait. There, purple and striped varieties of Javanese ribbon cane were introduced in 1817 and displaced both creole and otaheite varieties because they could tolerate frost and matured early enough to be harvested before winter.51
Under the pressures of monoculture intensification and rising global sugar demand, each substitution prescribed a narrower set of performances (juice quantity, fuel, speed of growth, frost tolerance). And once sweetness had been abstracted from the plant as a performance value, any crop that could deliver it more cheaply could serve as a substitute. Sugar beet, a temperate root crop, was the first to displace sugarcane. While it was proven beets contained sucrose identical to cane sugar in 1747, the British blockade of Europe’s sugar supply from the Caribbean spurred beet production in the early 1810s. Beginning in the 1850s, sugar beet’s displacement of cane sugar rose from a small fraction in 1840 to roughly 60 percent by 1900.5253 A second substitution by the world’s second supercrop, corn, followed in the United States, where from the 1930s, hybrid varieties, synthetic fertilizer, mechanization, and New Deal farm programs produced chronic corn surpluses, and enzymatic methods developed from the late 1950s onwards turned corn surplus into high-fructose corn syrup.54 Furthermore, spurred by sugar price spikes and import quotas which kept domestic sugar expensive, major American soft-drink makers and food manufacturers turned to high-fructose corn syrup by the mid-1980s.55 Here, the substitution of sucrose by a syrup of glucose and fructose enabled sweetness to no longer be tied to the sugar molecule at all.
Value Redirection and Return: From the Siphon to Generative Justice Systems
Across sugarcane’s long arc from relational to performance value, each substitution represents a gradual alienation from the relational web through which the plant was valued.56 Sweetness became first detached from a diverse species rooted in a place and the people who cultivated it, then from the tropics, before being disassociated from the sugarcane plant altogether. Yet as sugarcane’s sweetness lost its competitive value, its production was safeguarded through the emerging performance values of the plant’s other components, like bagasse as a construction feedstock. But building codes and markets require a narrow set of measurable performance values from biobased construction materials—embodied carbon, mechanical strength, fire resistance, moisture tolerance, among others—not so differently from how Louisiana planters required specific performances of the sugarcane grass.
Sugarcane’s history suggests that performance value does not retire a monoculture so much as reinvent it, opening new commodity frontiers each time the old one is exhausted.57 In the United States, more corn now goes to fuel ethanol than every food use combined, including the high-fructose syrups that once displaced cane sugar.58 The building sector’s scale, and in some cases the processing needed to meet contemporary material standards, could make biobased construction’s performance value systems extend sugarcane’s monoculture and its impacts.
At the same time, the value systems around sugarcane’s history also suggest how material economies can be designed differently around performance value. Inspired by the boiling house device that drew cane juice from the vats so that sugar could granulate, the literary scholar Kaneesha Parsard proposes “siphon” as a term for practices by which working people redirect value, partially and provisionally, from systems they do not control.59 Siphoning belongs to a longer lineage of thought on resistance that works from within a system rather than escaping it, from Michel de Certeau’s “tactics” to Shauna Sweeney’s “market marronage.”60 Parsard draws examples of siphoning from Caribbean fiction, ranging from a builder who assembles a house from the plantation’s leftover materials to a resort worker who profits from the tourist economy that took the plantation’s place.61 What distinguishes the siphon from the conceptual lineage of resistance to which it belongs is its capacity for directionality.62 Where exchange value asks what a thing can be traded for on the market and performance value asks what it can do, siphoning asks in which direction value flows, and who directs it where. Siphoning depends on a gradient it did not create, drawing on the predictable concentrations of value that extraction produces to redirect part of their flow in the near term.
However, siphoning is limited in its capacity to sustain and generate new value flows. The cyberneticist Ron Eglash’s theory of generative justice asks how new value flows can be generated and sustained, grounding this in the right to produce “unalienated value and directly participate in its benefits” and the right of communities “to nurture self-sustaining paths for its circulation.”63 In Eglash’s terms, relationality is designed when those who generate value also set the conditions of its production and shape the paths along which it circulates, so that value returns along the chain instead of being extracted at each link.64 Within a generative justice framework, the evaluation of a building material’s design would not only be driven by how it performs in a wall, but by how much value it returns to diverse coproducers and soils across its life cycle. Across biomass to biobased building material industries, this would involve engaging new entrepreneurship models and governance around production infrastructures to allow farming stakeholders to share in the value of the building product in addition to the crop, as well as rethinking the whole life cycle design of biomass-derived materials to enable them to return to the soil and broader ecology safely at the end of their life.
Rough estimate based on 2020 data from the Food and Agriculture Organization: 1.9 billion annual tonnage and millable stalk mass of sugarcane crop harvests. “Agricultural Production Statistics 2010–2023,” FAOSTAT data release highlights, December 20, 2024.
Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power (New York: Viking, 1985), 14–17, 157.
Malcolm Ross et al., eds., The Lexicon of Proto Oceanic: The Culture and Environment of Ancestral Oceanic Society, vol. 2, The Physical Environment (Canberra: ANU E Press, 2011), 524–28. See also Tim Denham, “Forgetting Cane Grasses: Switching Temporal Focus to Reveal Mosaics of Saccharum Diversity,” Plants, People, Planet 7, no. 3 (2025): 593–95.
Mary An Godshall, “Sugar and Other Sweeteners,” in Kent and Riegel’s Handbook of Industrial Chemistry and Biotechnology (Boston: Springer US, 2012).
Joseph E. Atchison, “Agricultural Residues and Other Nonwood Plant Fibers: Potentially Important Renewable Resources in the Developing World are Discussed,” Science 191, no. 4228 (1976): 768–72. See also John A. Youngquist et al., Literature Review on Use of Nonwood Plant Fibers for Building Materials and Panels (Madison: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Forest Products Laboratory, 1994), 5–28.
Mordor Intelligence, India Particle Board – Market Share Analysis, Industry Trends & Statistics, Growth Forecasts (2026–2031), report no. 2114340 (July 30, 2026).
Atchison, “Agricultural Residues and Other Nonwood Plant Fibers”; Youngquist et al., Literature Review, 25.
Olivier Garsmeur et al., “The Genomic Footprints of Wild Saccharum Species Trace Domestication, Diversification, and Modern Breeding of Sugarcane,” Cell 188, no. 25 (2025): 7253; see also Denham, “Forgetting Cane Grasses,” 591–92.
Antoinette Schapper, “Farming and the Trans-New Guinea Family,” in Language Dispersal Beyond Farming, ed. Martine Robbeets and Alexander Savelyev (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2017),155.
Katharina Neumann, “New Guinea: A Cradle of Agriculture,” Science 301, no. 5630 (2003): 180-81. See also T.P. Denham, “Origins of Agriculture at Kuk Swamp in the Highlands of New Guinea,” Science 301, no. 5630 (2003): 189–93.
John N. Warner, “Sugar Cane: An Indigenous Papuan Cultigen,” Ethnology 1, no. 4 (1962): 408.
Warner, “Sugar Cane.”
Warner, “Sugar Cane.”
Jean Kennedy, “Agricultural Systems in the Tropical Forest: A Critique Framed by Tree Crops of Papua New Guinea,” Quaternary International 249 (2012): 140–50.
R. Michael Bourke, “History of Agriculture in Papua New Guinea,” in Food and Agriculture in Papua New Guinea, ed. R. Michael Bourke and Tracy Harwood (Canberra: ANU E. Press, 2009), 15.
Denham, “Forgetting Cane Grasses,” 594.
Warner, “Sugar Cane.” 408.
Schapper, “Farming and the Trans-New Guinea Family,” 173.
Schapper, “Farming and the Trans-New Guinea Family,” 173.
Marcel Mauss, Essai sur le don (Paris: Presses Univesitaires de France, 2007), 5-6.
Schapper, “Farming and the Trans-New Guinea Family,” 171–73.
Schapper, “Farming and the Trans-New Guinea Family,” 171–73.
Schapper, “Farming and the Trans-New Guinea Family,” 167–68.
Simon Haberle, Ethnobotany of the Tari Basin, Southern Highlands Province, Papua New Guinea (Canberra: Biogeography & Geomorphology Department, Australian National University, 1991), 2.
Warner, “Sugar Cane,” 410.
Tim Denham, “Early Agriculture and Plant Domestication in New Guinea and Island Southeast Asia,” Current Anthropology 52, no. S4 (2011): S379–S395.
Ana Teresa Peixinho, “Estética alimentar queirosiana: notas gastronómicas na obra de Eça de Queirós,” in Patrimónios alimentares de aquém e além-mar, ed. Joaquim Pinheiro and Carmen Soares (Coimbra: Imprensa da Universidade de Coimbra, 2016), 249.
Mintz, Sweetness and Power, xix.
Alvise Cadamosto, The Voyages of Cadamosto and Other Documents on Western Africa in the Second Half of the Fifteenth Century, ed. and trans. G.R. Crone (Nendeln: Kraus, 1967), 9.
Alberto Vieira, Madeira. Canaviais, engenhos e escravos. Madeira-Na Rota do Ouro Branco (Funchal: Cadernos de divulgação do CEHA, 2018).
Jason W. Moore and Raj Patel, “Introduction: A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things,” in A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet (University of California Press, 2017), 16–17.
Moore and Patel, “Introduction: A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things,” 26.
Jason W. Moore, “Madeira, Sugar, and the Conquest of Nature in the ‘First’ Sixteenth Century: Part I: From ‘Island of Timber’ to Sugar Revolution, 1420–1506,” Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 33, no. 4 (2009): 353.
Mintz, Sweetness and Power, xix-xxii, 157.
Moore, “Madeira, Sugar, and the Conquest of Nature in the ‘First’ Sixteenth Century, Part II: From Regional Crisis to Commodity Frontier, 1506–1530.” Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 33, no. 1 (2010): 12–17.
Barbados’s tobacco and cotton farms of five to thirty acres, worked by a few enslaved persons, were transformed into 200–400-acre sugar plantations worked by dozens to hundreds of enslaved workers. Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624-1713 (UNC Press Books, 2012); R.R. Menard, Sweet Negotiations: Sugar, Slavery, and Plantation Agriculture in Early Barbados (University of Virginia Press, 2006).
Edward B. Rugemer, “The Development of Mastery and Race in the Comprehensive Slave Codes of the Greater Caribbean During the Seventeenth Century,” William and Mary Quarterly 70, no. 3 (2013): 429–58.
Geri Augusto, “Plants of Bondage, Limbo Plants, and Liberation Flora: Diasporic Reflections for STS in Africa and Africa in STS,” in What Do Science, Technology, and Innovation Mean from Africa?, ed. Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017): 80–83.
Judith A. Carney, “African Traditional Plant Knowledge in the Circum-Caribbean Region,” Journal of Ethnobiology 23, no. 2 (2003): 168.
Carney, “African Traditional Plant Knowledge in the Circum-Caribbean Region,” 174-78.
Sidney W. Mintz and Douglas Hall, The Origins of the Jamaican Internal Marketing System, Yale University Publications in Anthropology, no. 57 (New Haven: Department of Anthropology, Yale University, 1960), 196.
Sylvia Wynter, “Novel and History, Plot and Plantation,” Savacou 5, no. 1 (1971): 99.
Wynter, “Novel and History, Plot and Plantation,” 100; Kaneesha Cherelle Parsard, “Siphon, or What Was the Plot? Revisiting Sylvia Wynter’s ‘Novel and History, Plot and Plantation,’” Representations 162, no. 1 (2023): 56–64.
Wynter, “Novel and History, Plot and Plantation,” 100; Parsard, “Siphon, or What Was the Plot?”
Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2026), 130.
Letter from J. A. Dillon to the Marquess of Sligo, March 9, 1836, CO 137/215 (Jamaica, March–May 1836), Despatches, vol. 7, Apprentices, fol. 101, The National Archives, Kew, UK.
J.H. Galloway, “Tradition and Innovation in the American Sugar Industry, c. 1500–1800: An Explanation,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 75, no. 3 (1985): 334–51.
Ratios calculated from Noel Deerr, The History of Sugar, vol. 1 (London: Chapman & Hall, 1949–50), 50; and Jason W. Moore, “Madeira, Sugar, and the Conquest of Nature in the ‘First’ Sixteenth Century, Part II,” 2.
David Watts, The West Indies: Patterns of Development, Culture and Environmental Change Since 1492, Cambridge Studies in Historical Geography, vol. 8 (Cambridge University Press, 1990). See also Richard Follett, The Sugar Masters: Planters and Slaves in Louisiana’s Cane World, 1820–1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005).
Galloway, “Tradition and Innovation in the American Sugar Industry, c. 1500–1800,” 341–42.
Galloway, “Tradition and Innovation in the American Sugar Industry, c. 1500–1800,” 341–42.
Deerr, The History of Sugar.
Only during World War I, when Europe’s beet fields were destroyed, did sugarcane production recover its place through exports from Cuba.
Willard W. Cochrane, The Development of American Agriculture: A Historical Analysis, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
John S. White, “Straight Talk about High-Fructose Corn Syrup: What It Is and What It Ain’t,” American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 88, no. 6 (2008): 1716S–1721S.
Defined by Ron Eglash as the extraction of value (of labor, ecology or expression) from the cycles that generate it.
Commodity frontier is defined by historian Jason W. Moore as a zone where capital appropriates uncommodified nature, including land, forests, soils and human labor, cheaply or for free, so that the costs of producing commodities stay low.
Jennifer bond et al., Feed Outlook: January 2026, report no. FDS-26A (U.S. Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service. 2026), ➝.
Parsard, “Siphon, or What Was the Plot?” 59–62.
Market marronage describes the practices of enslaved women in Jamaica who fled the plantation into the island’s public markets, supporting themselves by trading there while remaining within slavery’s economy. Shauna J. Sweeney, “Market Marronage: Fugitive Women and the Internal Marketing System in Jamaica, 1781–1834,” The William and Mary Quarterly 76, no. 2 (2019): 203–5.
Parsard concedes that not all siphoning is not necessarily a noble strategy but it still describes how value can be redirected from “below,” i.e., those who do not control or own the systems of production.
Michel de Certeau, “The Practice of Everyday Life. Contesti. Città, Territori, Progetti no. 2 (2024): 29-–42; Sweeney, “Market Marronage,” 203–5.
Ron Eglash, “An Introduction to Generative Justice,” Teknokultura: Revista de Cultura Digital y Movimientos Sociales 13, no. 2 (2016): 381.
Eglash, “An Introduction to Generative Justice,” 381.
