Sugar and Power
Rogers Sugar’s refinery has stood on the Vancouver waterfront since 1890. Today, the labels on each of its packages say “Refined in Canada Since 1890.” But how Canadian is that sugar, really? This work answers that question, indicating that western Canadian cane sugar has been grown in places around the world, often in conditions of violence and coercion. Public writing on this topic is in Essays.
Book
Indenture and Canadian Sugar in Fiji: Power and Profit across the Pacific.
Currently I am researching Canadian sugar history. My manuscript, Indenture and Canadian Sugar in Fiji: Power and Profit across the Pacific, is forthcoming.
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 AccessB.C. Sugar’s advertising presented cane sugar as Canadian-made. This article shows how that claim erased the global and colonial origins of the cane sugar that B.C. Sugar sold, including on its own sugar cane plantations in Fiji.
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2021Gastronomica: The Journal for Food Studies 21, no. 2 (Summer 2021): 14–27. DOI: 10.1525/gfc.2021.21.2.14Between 1947 and 1958 B.C. Sugar sold Rogers Golden Syrup through racist imagery. This article examines what that imagery reveals about advertising and marketing in western Canada.
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2020Global Food History 6, no. 1 (March 2020): 41–59. DOI: 10.1080/20549547.2020.1712577 Open AccessB.C. 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.
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2025Journal of Pacific History 60, no. 2 (2025): 261–2. DOI: 10.1080/00223344.2024.2427570A review of Narayan’s historical novel about indenture on the sugar plantations of Navua, Fiji.
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2023Business History Review 97, no. 3 (2023): 693–696. Free access via Cambridge Core Open AccessA review of an edited collection on Canadian corporations and dispossession at home and abroad.
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