English-language researchers carrying out local studies of the sugar industry have relied until the present on Noel Deerr’s classic study The History of Sugar (1949-50) as the main source on the global history of the sugar cane industry. New researchers in the field will find in J. H. Galloway’s The Sugar Cane Industry: An Historical Geography from its Origins to 1914 an updated, concise, readable, and well-researched study with an excellent bibliography.

Galloway traces the evolution and diffusion of the industry according to a well-conceived periodization: (1) early origins in Asia and diffusion to the Arab world (c. 700-1100); (2) the development of plantations in the Mediterranean sugar industry (c. 1200-1600); (3) the transformation from the Mediterranean industry to the slave plantations of tropical America, originating in Sao Tomé and Hispaniola and culminating in the Haitian Revolution of 1791; (4) the long nineteenth century (1791-1914), which saw the transformation from plantations utilizing coerced labor to the central sugar mills operated by corporate capital; and (5) a return of the industry to Asia and the Pacific in the period 1750-1914.

Throughout the book, Galloway pays careful attention to the relation between the industrial process of sugar milling and the agrarian process of cane farming. The articulation of these two processes is the organizing axis of the book. Without a doubt, The Sugar Cane Industry will become a standard source for students of plantation economies, of slavery, of indentured servitude and contract labor, of ingenios and centrales. Specialists in Latin America, where plantations have been so central, will find it indispensable.