When Sweetness Came at a Price

Imagine walking through Amsterdam in the seventeenth century and catching a strange, heavy sweetness drifting from a building beside the canal. Inside, enormous kettles bubble over open fires while workers carefully transform dark, sticky sugar into something lighter, purer and considerably more valuable.

This is not a bakery. Nobody is preparing a particularly ambitious dessert. You have stumbled upon one of Amsterdam’s sugar refineries, where an ingredient we barely think about today was helping to build fortunes.

Sugar was once a luxury, a symbol of wealth and an increasingly profitable commodity. And Amsterdam, never a city to ignore a promising business opportunity, became one of Europe’s important centres for processing and trading it.

But behind the sweetness lay a story far more complicated than a spoonful of sugar might suggest.

Before Amsterdam Had a Sweet Tooth

Sugar was known in Europe long before Amsterdam’s Golden Age, but it was expensive and far less accessible than today. Honey had traditionally been a familiar source of sweetness, while imported cane sugar offered wealthy households something different.

By the late sixteenth century, Amsterdam was developing into a major trading centre. Merchants imported raw sugar from Atlantic trading networks, particularly Portuguese-controlled territories, and the city’s growing commercial infrastructure made it an attractive place to process and redistribute valuable goods.

As Amsterdam expanded, so did its appetite for the sugar business. During the seventeenth century, Brazil became an important source of raw sugar, followed increasingly by Caribbean colonies and Suriname.

Ships carried the product across the Atlantic, merchants arranged its sale and Amsterdam’s refiners transformed it into something suitable for European kitchens, shops and further export.

The city was discovering that sweetness could be extremely profitable.

The Jordaan’s Not-So-Sweet Smell

Today, the Jordaan is famous for picturesque canals, cosy cafés and streets that seem almost designed for leisurely wandering. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, however, parts of the neighbourhood were considerably less charming to the nose.

Sugar refining was hot, smoky and labour-intensive work. Raw sugar was dissolved, boiled, filtered and crystallised, with workers handling heavy equipment and maintaining fires beneath large kettles. The process produced a thick, penetrating smell that travelled well beyond the refinery walls.

Many sugar businesses eventually concentrated around the Jordaan, particularly near the Bloemgracht, Rozengracht and Lijnbaansgracht. Some had names like Etna and ‘t Vagevuur, or Purgatory, which hardly suggested a peaceful afternoon at work.

By around 1750, Amsterdam counted approximately ninety sugar refineries. Hundreds of workers earned their living processing a product that had travelled thousands of kilometres before reaching their kettles.

And the city kept growing richer.

The People Behind the Sweetness

But where had that raw sugar actually come from?

Much of it was produced on colonial plantations where enslaved Africans were forced to work under brutal conditions. Growing and processing sugarcane demanded exhausting physical labour, from cutting the tall stalks to operating mills and boiling cane juice in dangerous heat.

Amsterdam was not merely a distant customer of this system.

In 1683, the city became a one-third owner of the Society of Suriname, alongside the Dutch West India Company and the Van Aerssen van Sommelsdijck family. This organisation governed the colony and profited from its plantation economy, which depended on slavery.

The wealth generated by sugar helped support merchants, investors, shipping businesses and refineries in Amsterdam. Meanwhile, the people whose forced labour produced that wealth endured violence, exploitation and the denial of their freedom.

Resistance was also part of this history. Enslaved people resisted in numerous ways, including escaping plantations and forming independent Maroon communities.

It is impossible to tell the story of Amsterdam’s sugar industry without telling theirs.

From Sugarloaves to Something Ordinary

The sugar produced in Amsterdam’s refineries did not resemble the convenient paper bags found in supermarkets today.

Refined sugar was often formed into hard, cone-shaped loaves. Pieces could be broken off for use in kitchens, while sugar also found its way into confectionery, preserved fruits, sweetened drinks and medicines.

For wealthier Amsterdammers, serving sweet delicacies could demonstrate status and hospitality. As production expanded and sugar became more widely available over the following centuries, its place in everyday cooking changed.

What had once been a costly imported ingredient gradually became familiar. Sweet pastries, biscuits, preserves and desserts no longer seemed particularly extraordinary.

The remarkable thing is how quickly a complicated history can disappear into an ordinary kitchen cupboard.

A little sugar in your coffee rarely inspires thoughts of Atlantic shipping routes, colonial plantations or the smoky refineries of old Amsterdam.

Perhaps it should.

The History Hidden Behind the Canal Houses

Amsterdam’s sugar industry has left traces throughout the city, even where the refineries themselves have disappeared.

Archaeologists working on the North/South metro line uncovered pottery associated with sugar refining near the Rokin. Historical records also tell us about Hans Pelt, a sugar refiner who purchased property there in 1611 for a business called De Drie Suijkerbroden.

Elsewhere, the city’s colonial connections remain visible in buildings associated with merchants and plantation investors. The elegant canal houses that visitors admire today belong to a history of extraordinary commercial success, but some are also connected to profits from slavery.

These stories do not make Amsterdam’s architecture less impressive. They make its history more complete.

The next time you wander through the Jordaan, imagine the fires burning behind those old façades, the heavy smell of boiling sugar drifting into the street and the merchants calculating their profits.

Amsterdam once turned sweetness into a fortune.

Understanding where that fortune came from reveals a city whose history was never quite as sweet as its sugar.