Sugar and civilization : American empire and the cultural politics of sweetness / April Merleaux.

Chapel Hill : The University of North Carolina Press, [2015]

xv, 302 pages : black and white illustrations ; 24 cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Sugar's civilizing mission: immigration, race, and the politics of empire, 1898-1913 -- Spectacles of sweetness: race, civics, and the material culture of eating sugar after the turn of the century -- This peculiarly indispensable commodity: commodity integration and exception during World War I -- Commodity cultures and cross-border desires: Piloncillo between Mexico and the United States in the 1910s through the 1930s -- From cane to candy: the racial geography of new mass markets for candy in the 1920s -- Sweet innocence: child labor, immigration restriction, and sugar tariffs in the 1920s -- Drowned in sweetness: integration and exception in the New Deal sugar programs -- New Deal, new empire: Neocolonial divisions of labor, sugar consumers and the limits of reform -- Epilogue: Imperial consumers at war.