174 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE malnourished. It is conceivable to deduce from this line of reasoning that Indians were in good health with plenty of food; an alternative interpretation might be that the Crown attorney wished to increase tribute requirements and justify the usurpation of indigenous lands. The chapter in which these “countervailing forces” are debated (pp. 51—63) leaves the reader confused about what Super’s primary arguments are. Super makes little effort to assess the cultural effect of the development of different dietary patterns, although he is interested in this dimension of food analysis. His strongest and most original chapter is on the politics of food policies—how taxes on foods and livestock were determined and levied, the role that new institutions and bureaucrats played in influencing policies, the vulnerability of food policies to corruption, and, Anally, how these policies reflected and affected conflicting local and Crown interests that were played out in food supply, distribution, and consumption. The vision of a healthy Indian population eating well, despite widespread death from disease and its secondary consequences, forced labor, land seizures, disruption of social organization and economy, and the dismantling of imperial polities and ideology, does not emerge from this book. Super’s question is a useful one. A more careful assessment of documentation found in the Visita de la Provincia de León de Huánuco en 1562 by Ortiz de Zúñiga, for example, which has already produced a treasure trove of data on local habits of all sorts, might have given the book a more balanced perspective. This, combined with a creative analysis of the cultural bases for diet, and how food production and consumption patterns and changes in them were experienced and interpreted by both Spanish colonial and indigenous inhabitants (Sidney Mintz’s Sweetness and Power: The Place ofSugar in Modern History [1985] is a superb example of the success of this approach) would have made this a much better book. Linda J. Seligmann Dr. Seligmann is associate director ofthe Ibero-American Studies Program and faculty associate in anthropology at the University of Wisconsin—Madison. She has written on Quechua textile traditions, messianic movements, and land tenure systems and labor relations in the Andean highlands. She is currently writing a book with Stephen G. Bunker on the construction, maintenance, and uses of a highland irrigation system. The French Sugar Business in the Eighteenth Century. By Robert Louis Stein. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988. Pp. xv+ 185; tables, notes, bibliography, index. $27.50. Robert Louis Stein’s The French Sugar Business in the Eighteenth Century is a deceptive little monograph. On the surface, it appears to be a straightforward and exhaustive economic history of the French TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 175 sugar-growing and refining industry during the last century of the Old Regime, rather in the manner of an abbreviated thèse d'état. Nor is this a completely inaccurate assessment. Stein does investigate, often in minute detail, every conceivable facet of the sugar business during this period and presents the most comprehensive analysis of this complex industry that I have ever seen in print. Yet it would be an unfortunate oversight to dismiss this book as just an encyclopedic reference work intended for only a tiny and highly specialized audience. For in the process of unraveling the complexities of the 18th-century French sugar business, Stein also weaves in a subtle and skillful analysis of how commerce and technology interacted with the social, political, and cultural environment of the Old Regime. This is not only a book about the sugar industry; it also concerns the mentalité of the entire 18th-century French business community. Stein argues that, in several important ways, the sugar business of the 18th century foreshadowed developments generally associated with 19th-century capitalist industrialization. The sugar plantations in the Caribbean islands of Guadeloupe and Saint Domingue (Haiti) and the refineries located in Nantes, Rouen, Orléans, Bordeaux, and elsewhere in mainland France possessed large concentrated work forces (slaves on the plantations; free workers in the refineries) that were subject to constant supervision and strict discipline. In addition, the sophisticated technological requirements of raising, transporting, and processing sugar...
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Jul 2, 2016
Philip D Rotz 
