extensive ecological harm caused by sugar plantations being fully recognised, but it is the brutal human cost, from enslaved Africans to indentured Indians, that has struck us most forcibly in the recent past. Walvin shows that we can only fully understand our contemporary dietary concerns by coming to terms with the relationship between society and sweetness over a long historical span, dating back two centuries to a time when sugar was vital to the burgeoning European domestic and colonial economies. An 'entertaining, informative and utterly depressing global history of an important commodity . . . By alerting readers to the ways that modernity's very origins are entangled with a seemingly benign and delicious substance, How Sugar Corrupted the World raises fundamental questions about our world.' Sven Beckert, Laird Bell Professor of American History at Harvard University, and author of Empire of Cotton: A Global History