Private Tooth Decay as Public Economic Virtue

The paper starts with a quote from Thomas and Bean (1974):

The only group of clear gainers of British trans-atlantic slave trade, and even those gains were small, were European consumers of sugar and tobacco and other plantation crops. They were given the chance to purchase dental decay and lung cancer at somewhat lower price than would have been the case without the slave trade.

And takes another direction, arguing for the role of sugar as a mass-consumption commodity in the protoindustrialization of Europe.
HT to Brad Delong. You must read the general notes of his class.