ABSTRACT
Sugar and oil are possibly the first and the second key global commodities. There have been, of course, other global commodities, such as salt, iron, cocoa, coffee, and cotton—and there exist a growing set of publications on the history and anthropology of global commodities—but, for a variety of reasons, their impact on identity formation and grand ethnic or national projects has been less intense. Moreover, sugar and oil as global commodities can be seen as paradigmatic of their epoch because in many ways they are a sign of their time and an icon of power: the universal language of sugar and its technology was Portuguese, sometimes together with Spanish. Sugar became a commodity that characterized and in many ways represented the Portuguese empire and the period of Iberian domination of the Atlantic. In the case of oil drilling and transformation into fuel, right from its start in the end of the nineteenth century, the technical language—after all, a global commodity jargon—was and is still is predominantly English and most of its technology has been thus far produced in the US and UK. Oil and the technology it enables come to represent the stage of modernity the global language of which has been English.
