"The definitive 2,500-year history of sugar and its human costs, from its little-known origins as a luxury good in Asia to worldwide environmental devastation and the obesity pandemic. For most of history, humans did without refined sugar. After all, it serves no necessary purpose in our diets,...

While Spanish traders of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were mining the riches of the New World, the Portuguese continued to reap the lucrative Asian trade in spices and luxury items. Historians have long considered the Portuguese trade the exclusive enterprise of the kings of Portugal...