Sugar and politics

First of two parts

THE recent controversy concerning sugar importation led me to revisit an influential history book on the sugar industry written by historian John Larkin in 1993 entitled Sugar and the Origins of Modern Philippine Society. This book on the sugar industry was hot off the press and was an important reading material when I was enrolled in an undergraduate course on the economic history of the Philippines at UP Diliman during my senior year as a history major in the mid-1990s.