The John Carter Brown Library at Brown University is pleased to announce that registration is now open for “Beyond Sweetness: New Histories of Sugar in the Early Atlantic World” a multi-day conference, October 24-27, 2013.

The centrality of sugar to the development of the early Atlantic world is now well known. Sugar was the ‘green gold’ that planters across the Americas staked their fortunes on, and it was the commodity that became linked in bittersweet fashion to the rise of the Atlantic slave trade. Producing unprecedented quantities of sugar through their enforced labor, Africans on plantations helped transform life not only in the colonies but also in Europe, where consumers incorporated the luxury into their everyday rituals and routines. Given its importance, sugar as a topic still pervades scholarship on the Americas and has been treated in many recent works about the Caribbean, Brazil, and other regions.

26 speakers from the U.S., Canada, and the Caribbean will evaluate the current state of scholarship, consider alternative consumer cultures and economies, and assess new directions in the study of sugar. Stuart B. Schwartz (Yale University) will give the keynote address on Thursday, October 24, 5:30 p.m.

Funded in part by the Center for New World Comparative Studies (JCB), the Almeida Family Fund (JCB), and a generous pledge by a member of the JCB Board of Governors; co-sponsored by Brown University’s Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice, and Departments of History, English,  and History of Art and Architecture. 

The conference will coincide with the JCB’s fall 2013 exhibition, Sugar and the Visual Imagination in the Atlantic World, c 1650-1840 (K. Dian Kriz, Brown University, guest curator), and include an optional private tour to the John Brown House (Rhode Island Historical Society).

For full program and registration information ($50 for faculty/$35 for students), please visit: http://blogs.brown.edu/sugarandbeyond/ Registration deadline is October 1, 2013.