The Natural History of Chocolate, and of Sugar

D. Quélus (possibly Jean-Baptiste de Caylus, French, d. 1722)

Paris: L. d’Houry, 1719

Written by an author who claims to have spent 15 years in the “American islands,” this text expounds on the cultivation, health benefits, and commercial potential of chocolate and sugar—colonial goods that were key to what has been termed a “culture of taste” in eighteenth-century Europe. That culture depended on a brutal system of enslaved labor typically omitted in books like this one. Its foldout page depicting sugar cane paired with cinnamon—as sugar might be combined with cinnamon in a cup of chocolate or tea—evinces the same sham sense of beauty, discovery, and abundance touted in other New World propaganda at the time.

Although early efforts to produce sugar in France’s Louisiana colony were largely unsuccessful, in later years the industry exploded, and by the mid-nineteenth century the state was responsible for one-quarter of the world’s entire cane-sugar supply. On the eve of the Civil War, more than 125,000 enslaved men, women, and children lived in Louisiana, most of them forced to labor on sugar plantations under horrific conditions.