IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hhs/gunhis/0011.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

From extreme luxury to everyday commodity Sugar in Sweden, 17th to 20th centuries

Author

Listed:
  • Rönnbäck, Klas

    (Department of Economic History, School of Business, Economics and Law, Göteborg University)

Abstract

This paper will focus upon the Swedish consumption of sugar, a product that illustrates the shift from being a luxury to being a mass-consumed commodity. Very little attention has been paid to the commodity of sugar by Swedish scholars, at least concerning the period prior to the introduction of the sugar beet in the late 19th century. The paper will try to answer three questions: - When did sugar experience a shift from luxury to everyday commodity? - What factors are important to explain the shift? - What impacts did the increasing sugar consumption have, at home and abroad? Regarding the last question, the paper most importantly presents a novel calculation of how large the ‘ghost acreage’ and slave labour population the Swedish consumption during the early modern era required.

Suggested Citation

  • Rönnbäck, Klas, 2007. "From extreme luxury to everyday commodity Sugar in Sweden, 17th to 20th centuries," Göteborg Papers in Economic History 11, University of Gothenburg, Unit for Economic History, revised 29 Jan 2008.
    • Handle: RePEc:hhs:gunhis:0011
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/2077/7497
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Economic History; Price History; Consumption; Sugar; Sweden; Ghost acreage; Slavery;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • N33 - Economic History - - Labor and Consumers, Demography, Education, Health, Welfare, Income, Wealth, Religion, and Philanthropy - - - Europe: Pre-1913
    • N36 - Economic History - - Labor and Consumers, Demography, Education, Health, Welfare, Income, Wealth, Religion, and Philanthropy - - - Latin America; Caribbean
    • N93 - Economic History - - Regional and Urban History - - - Europe: Pre-1913

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hhs:gunhis:0011. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Jens Anmark (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/dehguse.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.