Sugar and Power
The Rogers Sugar refinery has stood on the Vancouver waterfront since 1890. The label on every package reads "Refined in Canada Since 1890." What the label leaves out is a history of colonial land seizure, indenture, violence, and corporate concealment that stretches from Canada to Fiji. This research follows that paper trail. Public writing on this topic is in Essays.
Book
Canadian Sugar in Fiji: Indenture, Colonization, and Profit Across the Pacific.
Currently I am researching Canadian sugar history. My manuscript, Canadian Sugar in Fiji: Indenture, Colonization, and Profit Across the Pacific, is under peer review. Expected publication date is 2027.
Funded by a SSHRC Insight Grant ($91,826, 2020–2025).
Research Articles
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2023Global Food History. Published 15 November 2023. DOI: 10.1080/20549547.2023.2278391 Open AccessRogers Sugar's advertising erased the global origins of cane sugar and the Girmityá who produced it, constructing a fiction of Canadian-made purity.
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2021Gastronomica: The Journal for Food Studies 21, no. 2 (Summer 2021): 14–27. DOI: 10.1525/gfc.2021.21.2.14BC Sugar's advertising campaigns between 1947 and 1958 and what their imagery reveals about white dominance in western Canada.
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2020Global Food History 6, no. 1 (March 2020): 41–59. DOI: 10.1080/20549547.2020.1712577 Open AccessBC Sugar constructed a racialized discourse of food cleanliness between 1891 and 1914, arguing that Chinese-made sugars were contaminated and Canadian-made sugars were pure.
Review Essays
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2025Agricultural History 99, no. 1 (2025): 102–107. DOI: 10.1215/00021482-11470591Featured review assessing Bosma's landmark synthesis of world sugar history and what its capitalism-centred framework illuminates.
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2025Journal of Pacific History 60, no. 2 (2025): 261–2. DOI: 10.1080/00223344.2024.2427570Narayan's important historical novel about girmit on sugar plantations in Navua.
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2023Business History Review 97, no. 3 (2023): 693–696. Free access via Cambridge Core Open AccessThomas and Coburn's important edited collection discussing Canadian extraction both domestically and overseas.
Media
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2024Zak Vescera. The Tyee, 16 February 2024. Open Access
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2023Zak Vescera. The Tyee, 21 December 2023. Open Access
How to Cite
Belisle, Donica. “Sugar and Power.” Donica Belisle. donicabelisle.ca/sugar.html. Accessed