70 pages • 2 hours read
Marc Aronson, Marina BudhosSugar Changed the World
Nonfiction | Book | YA | Published in 2010A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Quiz
Reading Check, Multiple Choice & Short Answer Quizzes
Reading Check questions are designed for in-class review on key plot points or for quick verbal or written assessments. Multiple Choice and Short Answer Quizzes create ideal summative assessments, and collectively function to convey a sense of the work’s tone and themes.
Prologue and Part 1
Reading Check
1. What do the authors call the era before sugar spread around the world?
2. What “sweet reed” did Alexander the Great’s expedition find growing in India?
3. What was sugar used for, besides cooking, in sixth-century Iran?
4. What innovation in sugar production occurred in Egypt?
5. What tradition began when a French count opened his land for public gatherings?
Multiple Choice
1. What did a member of Marc Aronson’s extended family invent a way to do?
A) get sugar from beets
B) standardize honey flavors
C) color sugar
D) store sugar for long periods
2. Where did sugar cane originally come from?
A) Turkey
B) Iran
C) Guyana
D) New Guinea
3. What language does the word “khanda,” the origin of the word “candy,” come from?
A) Farsi
B) Sanskrit
C) Arabic
D) Greek
4. What was Jundi Shapur?
A) an ancient Persian medicine
B) an ancient Indian temple
C) an ancient Persian university
D) an ancient Indian dessert
5. What historical event spread important knowledge from the Muslim world into Europe?
A) the Crusades
B) the Siege of Constantinople
C) the Abbasid Revolution
D) the Norman Conquest
Short-Answer Response
Answer each of the following questions in a complete sentence or sentences. Incorporate details from the text to support your response.
1. Where did Marina Budhos’s ancestors go when they left India, and what work did they do in their new country?
2. What theory does the book offer about why sugar was used in Hindu religious rituals involving fire?
3. What historical event of the seventh century caused knowledge of sugar to spread into the Muslim world?
4. What belief about Medieval Europeans’ taste for spices does the book point out is false?
5. How did widespread demand for sugar give rise to plantations using slave labor?
Part 2
Reading Check
1. Who was Olaudah Equiano?
2. What was the job title for the person who supervised the work on a plantation?
3. Where did the owners of Caribbean plantations usually live?
4. What does the Brazilian word “maroon” refer to?
5. What major economic shift in England do the authors link to the sugar trade?
Multiple Choice
1. During what time period does the book say sugar drove the world’s economy?
A) the 1300s to the 1600s
B) the 1400s to the 1700s
C) the 1500s to the 1800s
D) the 1600s to the 1900s
2. What task were the physically weaker enslaved persons often given in the sugar fields?
A) weeding
B) planting
C) cutting
D) fertilizing
3. Which describes most of the plantation supervisors?
A) lower-class Europeans
B) middle-class Europeans
C) lower-class Americans
D) middle-class Americans
4. What term do the authors suggest should be used instead of “Triangle Trade”?
A) Bilateral Trade
B) Transatlantic Trade
C) Cyclical Trade
D) Spherical Trade
5. What was Palmares?
A) a plantation in Barbados
B) a nation established by escaped slaves
C) a Caribbean bank
D) a West African port city
Short-Answer Response
Answer each of the following questions in a complete sentence or sentences. Incorporate details from the text to support your response.
1. What is the title of Part 2, and why is it called this?
2. What task did enslaved women often perform after the sugar cane was harvested?
3. What cultural aspects of Black Caribbean communities does the book say have their roots in resistance?
4. What new practice that evolved in Europe among ordinary people during the 1600s dramatically increased sugar consumption?
5. How did sugar help fuel workers during England’s Industrial Revolution?
Part 3
Reading Check
1. According to the authors, what does the court’s verdict in the case against Pauline show about their attitude toward Pauline?
2. What did Thomas Clarkson write an essay about in 1785?
3. Why did some people in England begin boycotting sugar in the late 1700s?
4. What country emerged from the slave rebellion in Saint-Domingue?
5. Who took over the government of France in 1799?
Multiple Choice
1. Which of these events most clearly illustrates the power that plantation owners held?
A) the abolishment of slavery
B) the French Revolution
C) the court’s ruling in Madame Villeneuve’s case
D) the Molasses Act
2. Which country created the “Declaration of Rights of Man and the Citizen”?
A) England
B) France
C) Barbados
D) Haiti
3. Which country was the first to try to re-enslave the citizens of Haiti?
A) America
B) France
C) England
D) Spain
4. In what year did England finally ban English involvement in the slave trade?
A) 1780
B) 1793
C) 1799
D) 1807
5. Where did many plantation owners flee to after the revolution in Saint-Domingue?
A) Louisiana
B) Haiti
C) Cuba
D) Hawaii
Short-Answer Response
Answer each of the following questions in a complete sentence or sentences. Incorporate details from the text to support your response.
1. Who was Pauline, and what did she refuse to do in 1714?
2. In 1733, what did the English Parliament do that caused protests in England’s American colonies?
3. Why did one aspect of the French Revolution create problems for English abolitionists?
4. Why did the American government refuse to recognize the government of Haiti until 1862?
5. How did sugar production contribute to ethnic diversity in Hawaii?
Part 4 and Essay
Reading Check
1. After slavery was outlawed in Britain, what country did plantation owners turn to for indentured labor?
2. What plant gave the world a new source of sugar in 1747?
3. What enormous change happened in Russia in 1861?
4. What did South Africa call the law that called for Indians in South Africa to be fingerprinted and registered?
5. What kind of sources did Aronson and Budhos look at first while they were researching this book?
Multiple Choice
1. Where did Reverend John Smith lead a slave rebellion?
A) Guyana
B) Barbados
C) Louisiana
D) Jamaica
2. What did the word “coolie” refer to?
A) the laborers who cut sugar cane during the harvest
B) people born in the Caribbean
C) people of mixed race
D) Indian laborers on sugar plantations
3. What did Bechu lead a protest over?
A) the lack of voting rights for laborers
B) the jailing of a group of Indian laborers
C) laborers being paid by the task instead of by the hour
D) laborers being beaten and starved by their employers
4. What is satyagraha?
A) human dignity
B) holiness
C) nonviolent resistance
D) faith in other people
5. What do Budhos and Aronson say was their main goal in writing the book?
A) to demonstrate how one crop, like sugar, can impact people all over the world
B) to take a broader view of history and understand the deep human drives behind it
C) to ask critical questions about the standard historical description of the sugar trade
D) to make a complex historical subject understandable to a younger audience
Short-Answer Response
Answer each of the following questions in a complete sentence or sentences. Incorporate details from the text to support your response.
1. Why were many Indians eager for work in the Caribbean during the early 1800s?
2. What did sugar producers promise Indian workers?
3. In what ways were the lives of indentured sugar laborers oppressive?
4. How did Gandhi become interested in the plight of indentured laborers in South Africa?
5. What questions do Budhos and Aronson say they were focused on when they were researching for this book?
Quizzes – Answer Key
Prologue and Part 1
Reading Check
1. the “Age of Honey” (Prologue)
2. sugar cane (Part 1)
3. medicine (Part 1)
4. refining white sugar from molasses (Part 1)
5. public fairs (Part 1)
Multiple Choice
Short-Answer Response
1. They left India to live in Guyana. They worked on the sugar plantations there as laborers. (Prologue)
2. Sugar crystals form when sugar cane is boiled. (Part 1)
3. Muslim armies conquered vast new territories, including places where sugar was used, such as parts of Persia. (Part 1)
4. It is a myth that Europeans primarily used spices to disguise the taste of spoiled food. (Part 1)
5. Sugar must be processed quickly after it is harvested, and the process is labor-intensive. Plantations—large farms devoted to one crop—were invented to deal with these needs, and their immense labor needs were met by enslaved people. (Part 1)
Part 2
Reading Check
1. an enslaved African man in Barbados (Part 2)
2. overseer (Part 2)
3. in Europe Part 2)
4. escaped slaves (Part 2)
5. the Industrial Revolution (Part 2)
Multiple Choice
Short-Answer Response
1. The title of Part 2 is “Hell,” and it is called this because of the terrible conditions suffered by those forced into labor on sugar plantations. (Part 2)
2. They separated the white grains of sugar from the brown. (Part 2)
3. The book says that the music and dance of the Caribbean are often rooted in resistance. (Part 2)
4. Coffee, tea, and hot chocolate are all bitter drinks that were imported at this time and adopted by large numbers of Europeans—and many people preferred to add sugar to these drinks. (Part 2)
5. Workers in the factories that arose during the Industrial Revolution needed a quick and relatively inexpensive source of calories. Sugared tea offered them the energy to get through long hours of difficult work. (Part 2)
Part 3
Reading Check
1. They saw her as a human being. (Part 3)
2. the abolishment of slavery (Part 3)
3. to protest slavery (Part 3)
4. Haiti (Part 3)
5. Napoleon Bonaparte (Part 3)
Multiple Choice
Short-Answer Response
1. Pauline was enslaved in the Caribbean but had been transported to Paris by the woman who enslaved her, Madame Villeneuve. Slavery was illegal in France itself, so Pauline refused to leave France. (Part 3)
2. The Parliament passed a tax on all molasses that came from a non-English source to discourage the colonists from trading with the French. (Part 3)
3. The French Revolution turned violent, and English people were frightened of the chaos and bloodshed that sometimes accompany change. This made them more leery of accepting changes to their own society, including abolition. (Part 3)
4. Americans were afraid that the slave revolution there would inspire slave revolutions elsewhere. (Part 3)
5. Because of restrictions on the slave trade, sugar producers in Hawaii imported low-paid workers from several countries in Asia as well as from Portugal. (Part 3)
Part 4 and Essay
Reading Check
1. India (Part 4)
2. beets (Part 4)
3. the liberation of the serfs (Part 4)
4. the Black Act (Part 4)
5. books written by historians/printed secondary sources (Essay)
Multiple Choice
Short-Answer Response
1. India was very poor, and Northern India had recently been suffering drought and famine. (Part 4)
2. Most Indian workers were told that after five years of labor under an indenture contract, they would be free to return to India. (Part 4)
3. The work was very hard. Workers did not have freedom of movement, and they were harshly punished for any transgression of plantation rules. (Part 4)
4. He met an indentured laborer in Natal, South Africa. The man had been assaulted by his employers. This situation made Gandhi aware that indentured laborers in South Africa had very few rights. (Part 4)
5. The authors were interested in the relationship of sugar and slavery to the ideal of freedom. They were also interested in how understanding this relationship might impact the way people view both freedom and technological innovation. (Essay)
