Sugar is commonly understood as a food ingredient, source of pleasure, or public-health concern. This book reconstructs it instead as a medium through which Atlantic modernity reorganized land, labour, race, finance, empire, consumption, and bodily life. It argues that the Caribbean plantation was not merely a farm but an agro-industrial, financial, disciplinary, racial, ecological, and political institution designed to direct living worlds toward distant accumulation. Following sugar from the rise of plantation slavery through industrial mass consumption, emancipation, wage labour, nationalized production, and the contemporary food environment, the study identifies a recurring institutional pattern: benefits move toward legally and financially recognized claims, while human, ecological, household, and public costs remain displaced elsewhere. This pattern is conceptualized as the displaced balance sheet. Saint Kitts and Nevis provides the book’s central territorial case. Its unusually long relationship with sugar reveals how the plantation repeatedly changed form — from Indigenous dispossession and racial slavery to post-emancipation land concentration, centralized industry, organized labour, public subsidy, and final closure in 2005. The 1935 Buckley’s uprising demonstrates how sugar workers transformed the cane field into a site of political agency and helped establish the foundations of modern labour politics and democratic citizenship. The book further develops the concepts of emancipation without deplantation, counter-plantation, and the metabolic afterlife. It argues that the end of slavery did not automatically redistribute land or productive power, that colonized peoples continually created life-making worlds beyond plantation purposes, and that contemporary food-import dependence and chronic-disease burdens must be understood through multicausal interactions among history, trade, commercial formulation, public policy, biology, and individual agency. The concluding sections propose reparative accounting and deplantation as frameworks for reconstructing land, labour, finance, nourishment, health, memory, and pleasure around the protection, restoration, and enlargement of life. The aim is not to condemn sweetness as a substance, but to end sacrifice as its concealed institutional condition.
