UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER - CHSTM LUNCHTIME SEMINAR - 28 MAY, 1PM
The next seminar in this term's lunchtime series will take place on Tuesday 28 May and will be given by David Singerman from MIT. The title of the paper is 'The empire of purity in the Atlantic sugar world.' The abstract is provided below.
The seminar will take place at 1pm in seminar room 2.57 (Simon Building) and will be followed by lunch, for those who wish to join us. We look forward to seeing you there.
"Over the course of the nineteenth century, sugar became a new kind of commodity. Its value, once assigned based on judgments of its taste, smell, texture, and place of origin, came to be defined instead in chemical terms, through its sucrose content, and thus by instruments and laboratory practices. This new ideal of value was intimately tied to equally new human and material means by which cane was turned into crystals. From the 1850s onward, huge and sophisticated “central factories” supplanted small plantations across the Atlantic world, and produced sugars that defied traditional associations among color, purity, and price.
My dissertation explores how this new scientific ideal of a commodity’s value shaped trade and labor in the Atlantic sugar market at the end of the century. This paper focuses on how it opened new avenues for corruption. Facing evidence of widespread customs fraud, the Treasury Department adopted complex new instruments and routines to safeguard the integrity of its custom houses. But these merely made it more difficult than ever to hold officials accountable. Instead, the government found itself beholden to mercenary norms of commercial chemists. The physical spaces of the sugar trade were shaped by attempts to evade the tariff, from the architecture of the customs house to the private wharves of the monopolistic Sugar Trust."
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