Agricultural History Review, Volume 60 Part 1 (2012), p. 149

1,650 grams of paper suggests heavy reading. In over 900 pages, Peter D. Griggs presents the first comprehensive history of Australian cane sugar production. Covering a period from 1788 to 1995, Griggs’s impressive study offers a thorough and detailed look into the development of the Australian sugar industry. Expanding from the north-eastern coast into a global business, it was part of a wider trend in commercial sugar production around the globe.

Three sections cover the main epochs in the historical development of the Australian sugar industry. The years from 1788 to 1863 mark the beginnings of the Australian sugar production. The second period covers the years from the sustained commercial production of raw sugar in 1864 to the outbreak of the First World War. The third period, from 1915 until 1995, saw government regulation of all sectors of the sugar production process changing to a mostly de-regulated environment by the 1980s. Nineteen chapters fill those epochs with life. On the basis of a remarkable number of primary sources and secondary literature, Griggs presents a story of economic success and environmental drama. Even though he claims his book focuses on geographical and environmental questions, he deals with a number of other historical subject areas as well.

In particular, Griggs focuses on social and economic history, when outlining the fundamental differences in Australian cane sugar production compared to that practised by the rest of the world. By the early twentieth century Australian sugar was produced in central milling systems supplied with cane grown on small, family-owned farms, which relied on high-cost European labour. This was a unique feature of the Australian sugar industry. In his seminal work of 1985, Sweetness and Power, Sydney Mintz reminded us that elsewhere the origins and structures of cane sugar production were mainly a mixture of colonial ‘indigene’ production and metropolitan ‘white’ consumption.

The high wage cost led to a high degree of mechanization. Here, the study is a history of technology that focuses on research and innovation in the refining and milling sectors, cultivation methods, improving the network of drainage, breeding and improving cane varieties, combating diseases, and harvesting and transporting cane.

Governmental measures were also very important in the development of the Australian sugar industry. Here, Griggs’s study is a political history. Australia’s sugar industry became one of most regulated in the world. Tight government controls over production were installed in the 1920s. Before 1985, numerous regulations governed all aspects of production, from the amount of cane produced on each farm, or the amount produced in each mill, to the final price paid. Government intervention stopped in the 1980s, and today Australian sugar production is no longer protected through a comprehensive set of measures, unlike that of the United States or Brazil for example.

Griggs’s work is also a history of entrepreneurship. The Colonial Sugar Refining Company assumes a prominent role in the book. Having been a major driving force in the development of the Australian cane sugar industry, the Company was responsible for about 25 per cent of the Australian raw sugar output after 1920. It took up a near monopoly over the refining sector between 1850 and 1880 and again between 1900 and 1989 and was important in maintaining the connection between science and agriculture. Therefore, it became a major driver and pioneer in Australian sugar business.

The downside of intensive sugar farming is shown in the environmental history that Griggs traces. Through large-scale deforestation between 1860 and 1915 and water pollution, the sugar industry had a massive effect on the character of the landscape along Australia’s north-east coast. Only in the late twentieth century has a new generation of cane growers and millers begun to repair the environmental damage. They have a long way yet to go.

Griggs’s book is extensive. Here and there one misses analytical connections to other parts of the world, because sugar was, and is still, a global commodity. Accordingly, policy measures were highly responsive to measures taken elsewhere. Some aspects on transfers could have been elaborated a bit more, especially when it comes to innovation and science. Was there an international global community of knowledge-based experts, a so-called ‘epistemic community’ of sugar-cane scientists? Furthermore, the cultural aspect of the family farm in shaping a national economy – and maybe identity – deserved elaboration in a twentieth chapter. By contrast, in Europe the family farm has been considered as the cultural pillar of the Common Agricultural Policy since 1962. Here again, an international link would have been most interesting.

Griggs has written an impressive and highly informative volume. Anyone interested in sugar as a global commodity ought to read the 900 pages. This may be a daunting task, but after you have finished the book, you will have gained a taste for it. The sugar industry provides a perplexing taste of sweetness, but one that has clearly incited Griggs to maximum performance.