History of sugar
[2][3] Known worldwide by the end of the medieval period, sugar was very expensive[4] and was considered a "fine spice",[5] but from about the year 1500, technological improvements and New World sources began turning it into a much cheaper bulk commodity.
[8][9] Saccharum officinarum was first domesticated in New Guinea and the islands east of the Wallace Line by Papuans, where it is the modern center of diversity.
[10][11][7][12][13] From Island Southeast Asia, S. officinarum was spread eastward into Polynesia and Micronesia by Austronesian voyagers as a canoe plant by around 3,500 BP.
Lieutenant J. Paterson, of the Bengal Presidency, reported that refined sugar could be produced in India with many superior advantages, and a lot more cheaply than in the West Indies.
Sugar cane was first grown extensively in medieval Southern Europe during the period of Arab rule in Sicily beginning around the 9th century.
[35][36] In addition to Sicily, Al-Andalus (in what is currently Spain and Portugal) was an important center of sugar production, beginning by the tenth century.
Its price per pound in 14th and 15th century England was about equally as high as imported spices from tropical Asia such as mace (nutmeg), ginger, cloves, and pepper, which had to be transported across the Indian Ocean in that era.
[4] Clive Ponting traces the spread of the cultivation of sugarcane from its introduction into Mesopotamia, then the Levant and the islands of the eastern Mediterranean, especially Cyprus, by the 10th century.
[39] Crusaders brought sugar home with them to Europe after their campaigns in the Holy Land, where they encountered caravans carrying what they called "sweet salt".
[40] Early in the 12th century, Venice acquired some villages near Tyre and set up estates to produce sugar for export to Europe, where it supplemented honey as the only other available sweetener.
The [European sugar] industry only began on a major scale after the loss of the Levant to a resurgent Islam and the shift of production to Cyprus under a mixture of Crusader aristocrats and Venetian merchants.
In the Atlantic ocean [the Canaries, Madeira, and the Cape Verde Islands], once the initial exploitation of the timber and raw materials was over, it rapidly became clear that sugar production would be the most profitable way of getting money from the new territories.
[45] The approximately 3,000 small sugar mills that were built before 1550 in the New World created an unprecedented demand for cast iron gears, levers, axles and other implements.
Sugar mill construction sparked development of the technological skills needed for a nascent industrial revolution in the early 17th century.
[citation needed] Contemporaries often compared the worth of sugar with valuable commodities including musk, pearls, and spices.
The labour force at first included European indentured servants and local Native American, and African enslaved people.
For example, they began consuming jams, candy, tea, coffee, cocoa, processed foods, and other sweet victuals in much greater amounts.
In the eighteenth century "the French colonies were the most successful, especially Saint-Domingue, where better irrigation, water-power and machinery, together with concentration on newer types of sugar, increased profits.
"[53] In the 19th century Cuba rose to become the richest land in the Caribbean (with sugar as its dominant crop) because it formed the only major island landmass free of mountainous terrain.
[54] After the Haitian Revolution established the independent state of Haiti, sugar production in that country declined and Cuba replaced Saint-Domingue as the world's largest producer.
[citation needed] Long established in Brazil, sugar production spread to other parts of South America, as well as to newer European colonies in Africa and in the Pacific, where it became especially important in Fiji.
The older and newer sugar production areas now tended to use indentured labour rather than enslaved people, with workers "shipped across the world ... [and] ... held in conditions of near slavery for up to ten years...
In the second half of the nineteenth century over 450,000 indentured labourers went from India to the British West Indies, others went to Natal, Mauritius and Fiji (where they became a majority of the population).
[57] Marggraf's student, Franz Karl Achard, devised an economical industrial method to extract the sugar in its pure form in the late 18th century.
In 1813 the British chemist Edward Charles Howard invented a method of refining sugar that involved boiling the cane juice not in an open kettle, but in a closed vessel heated by steam and held under partial vacuum.
Further gains in fuel-efficiency came from the multiple-effect evaporator, designed by the United States engineer Norbert Rillieux (perhaps as early as the 1820s, although the first working model dates from 1845).
The process of separating sugar from molasses also received mechanical attention: David Weston first applied the centrifuge to this task in Hawaii in 1852.
[67][68] High-fructose corn syrup became an attractive substitute, and is preferred over cane sugar among the vast majority of American food and beverage manufacturers.
Soft drink makers such as Coca-Cola and Pepsi use sugar in other nations, but switched to high-fructose corn syrup in the United States in 1984.
[70] In recent years it has been hypothesized that the increase of high-fructose corn syrup usage in processed foods may be linked to various health conditions, including metabolic syndrome, hypertension, dyslipidemia, hepatic steatosis, insulin resistance, and obesity.
