European slave traders brought rum—distilled molasses, itself a byproduct of sugar production—to Africa. In the eighteenth century, slave merchants could purchase an African adult for about 120 gallons of rum, and a child for 80 gallons. Hundreds of thousands of slaves were brought to sugarcane plantations in the New World, where they produced sugar for Europe’s ravenous sweet tooth, and more molasses, which was distilled into rum, to be traded for more slaves.

Inspired by the French and American revolutions, the half-million sugar plantation slaves of St. Domingue (later Haiti) overthrew their French colonial masters in 1791 with an armed revolt, and abolished slavery early in the nineteenth century, establishing the first free black republic in the world. Slowly the rest of the European sugar producers moved from a slave-based workforce to wage labor. It wasn’t until 1888 that the last link between slaves and sugar production was broken when Brazil outlawed slavery.

The unchanging dark secret hidden within the clean white crystals is that sugar has always been the product of extensive amounts of cheap labor. Mindful of what happened to their French competitors in Haiti, the British rulers of Guyana in the West Indies, after abolition of slavery in 1838, imported three thousand contract laborers per year from India to ensure a steady supply of workers and, not coincidentally, to divide the workforce between Africans and Indians and thereby make it more difficult for them to organize resistance to the plantation owners. Large numbers of unorganized workers and low wages made and kept sugar cheap and profitable.