Sugarcoated Slavery: Colonial Commodities and the Education of the Senses in Early Modern France

Abstract

This article offers a theorization of colonial commodities as a category of analysis and a preliminary sketch of how this theorization might present new ways to understand the role of empire and imperial labor systems in the development of capitalism in eighteenth-century France. It argues that the peculiar qualities of colonial commodities enabled early modern French men and women to develop and practice novel habits and behaviors, namely, forms of obfuscation, abstraction, and double consciousness. Focusing on sugar and drawing on natural history texts and travelogues, it shows how written text and explanatory images about sugar and sugarcane schooled reader-consumers to overlook key elements of the production process, especially skilled slave labor. It ultimately argues that the study of colonial commodities provides insight into the formation of essential structures of thought that would become second nature under mature capitalism.