This piece analyzes the eighteenth-century campaigns to develop a maple sugar industry in North America as a way of undercutting slavery and the sugar-plantation complex of the Caribbean. It is part of a larger collection that examines how trees became woven into the cultural, economic, and political fabric of life in the eighteenth century, and uses the case of the sugar maple to explore the intersections between nature, enlightenment science, and new ambitions for societal reform.
