In this innovative grassroots to global study, Kathleen Mapes explores how the sugar beet industry transformed the rural Midwest by introducing large factories, contract farming, and foreign migrant labor. Identifying rural areas as centers for modern American industrialism, Mapes contributes to an ongoing reorientation of labor history from urban factory workers to rural migrant workers. She engages with a full range of individuals, including Midwestern family farmers, industrialists, Eastern European and Mexican immigrants, child laborers, rural reformers, Washington politicos, and colonial interests. Engagingly written, Sweet Tyranny demonstrates that capitalism was not solely a force from above but was influenced by the people below who defended their interests in an ever-expanding imperialist market.| "Mapes tells the understudied sugar beet industry's fascinating story, and links events in Michigan between 1899 and 1940 to the broader national and global considerations. . . . Recommended."—Choice
"Mapes has uncovered patterns of global trade and labor markets that have had a profound impact on American society from the turn of the twentieth century up to the present day."—Michigan Historical Review
"A very nuanced yet powerful examination of the triumph of industrialism over agricultural America."—The Annals of Iowa
|Kathleen Mapes is an associate professor of history at the State University of New York, Geneseo.