Seokju Oh, Columbia University - Comment by Andrew Elrod, Senior Editor, Phenomenal World
This is a hybrid event.
Massachusetts faced a severe sugar shortage in late 1917, with nearly a quarter of retail stores reporting empty shelves. Herbert Hoover later blamed a straightforward collision of demand and supply shocks. This paper argues instead that the shortage was a failure of imperial governance. The "American field" was no unitary national market but an imperial patchwork stitching the beet-producing West, Louisiana, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and Cuba. Using the records of the US Food Administration, I show how federal price policy, set with the "Sugar Trust," antagonized primary producers across the field, recovering the imperial infrastructure that civilian consumption both depended on and obscured.
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