The Sweet Taste of Empire

How seventeenth-century English literary genres associated with gastronomic and aesthetic pleasure shaped representations of Caribbean colonization and slavery Over the course of the seventeenth century, sugar prices fell drastically. As this newly affordable luxury made its way from royal entertainments to the closets of home cooks in ever increasing quantities, sugar bound England’s fortunes to the Caribbean. The pursuit of sugar’s pleasures and profits generated newly visible and vexed relati