The Fruit Explorer Ponders Sugar, Part 3 of 6

[Continued from Part  2]

History of Sugar

• Sugar cane is indigenous to New Guinea and the islands of the South Pacific.
• Apparently sugar cane was domesticated in New Guinea circa 8000 B.C [Mintz, p. 19, Macinnis, pp. xviii-xix]. (This is surprisingly early for domestication to have taken place in an out-of-the-way place like New Guinea. The first domestication is often thought to have occurred in Mesopotamia circa 9000 B.C.)
• It is thought that sugar cane was carried to India around 6000 B.C [Mintz, p. 19].  An 8th century B.C. Chinese manuscript confirms that sugar cane was grown in India by that time. In these days, however, sugar cane was not a major crop, and the Indians, like the rest of the world, got most of their sweetness from honey.
• At first sugar cane was chewed to extract its sweetness. I did this myself when a child in Texas to my great delight. I would be given a piece of peeled sugar cane as pictured below.

• Perhaps the first notice of sugar cane by the West came from Nearchus, Alexander the Great's admiral, who sailed from the mouth of the Indus to the Persian Gulf in 324 B.C. He commented that "... a reed in India brings forth honey without the help of bees, from which an intoxicating drink is made though the plant bears no fruit." [Quoted in Mintz, p. 20].
• Table sugar might well have been first produced in the late first millenium B.C. when Indians discovered how to boil the sugar cane juice and concentrate it into granulated crystals. In India these crystals were called khanda, from which our word "candy" is derived. (All of this is controversial. Some think that table sugar was first produced around 350 A.D. or even later, and some doubt that it was first produced in India [Macinnis, pp. 7, 11].) 
• Perhaps the first notice of crystallized sugar by the West came from Dioscorides (ca. 40-90 A.D.), who wrote, "There is a kind of concreted honey, called saccharon, found in reeds in India and Arabia Felix, like in consistence to salt..." [quoted in Mintz, p. 20]. (Note how the first Europeans to encounter sugar compared it to known substances such as honey and salt.)
• Indian sailors carried sugar to China, where it caused a sensation. In the 7th century A.D. China sent technology transfer missions to India and subsequently set up sugar plantations.
• In the 8th century A.D., after the Arab expansion through North Africa and into Spain, the Arabs carried sugar production throughout the Mediterranean [Mintz, p. 23, Lewis, p. 206]; see the green areas of the map below. Sugar followed the Koran.

• European consumers apparently first encountered sugar in the 8th century, but it was not widely known until the 12th century when Crusaders brought it home with them [Mintz, pp. 23, 28]. In other words, Europe was for the most part without sugar prior to 1200 [Mintz, p. 74]. 
• In England during the 13th through 15th centuries sugar was so expensive that only the wealthy could afford it, and it was used primarily in small quantities as a spice. i.e., it was used not to sweeten a dish but to change its flavor [Mintz, pp. 79-87], or as a medicine [Mintz, pp. 96-108].
• In the 13th century Venice set up sugar plantations around Tyre and on Crete and Cyprus, and Venice sold sugar to Europe along with spices [Mintz, p. 28]. (See the e-mail of 9 Oct 2015 for Venice's role in the spice trade.) In Europe sugar supplemented honey, which had previously been the only sweetener used by the Europeans.
• In the 15th and 16th centuries, the Portuguese and Spanish started growing sugar on the Atlantic Islands (Madeiras, Canaries, Azores, and Cape Verdes) [Mintz, p. 234]. In addition to providing sugar, the settlement of these islands served the strategic purpose of safeguarding the Portuguese trade routes around Africa to the East [Mintz, p. 30]. In addition, these islands established the pattern of slave production that would soon be extended to the New World. Sugar cane is a crop that exhausts the soil, and as the 16th century wore on, sugar production in the Atlantic islands tailed off [Blackburn, pp. 169, 170].
• Sugar was taken to the New World by Columbus on his second voyage in 1493. Columbus and members of his family set up sugar plantations in Hispaniola, and the first harvest occurred in 1501 and the first shipment to Europe in 1516 [Mintz, p. 32]. Cortez established sugar cultivation in Mexico. With the realization of the magnitude of the silver bonanza, however, the Spanish lost interest in sugar [Blackburn, pp. 137-38]. 
• As production in the Atlantic islands faltered, the Portuguese took up the slack and then some by greatly increasing sugar production in Brazil after 1572 [Blackburn, pp. 166, 172]. It turned out that Brazil's soil, climate, and profusion of rivers and streams fitted it ideally for sugar cultivation [Blackburn, p. 169], and Brazil shipped sugar in commercial quantities to Lisbon in 1526 [Mintz, p. 33]. Brazil's prosperity in the final decades of the 16th century was built on sugar [Blackburn, p. 168]. Indians proved unsuitable for working the sugar plantations either because of disinclination or because they succumbed to European diseases [Mintz, p. 33], Brazil came to depend heavily on African slaves [Blackburn, pp. 168-70]. We have seen that Brazilian commerce in the Far East fell off as the 17th century progressed and the Dutch took over the spice trade (e-mails of 9, 22, 30 Oct and 5 Nov 2015). The void left by the fall-off in spices was filled by two vastly expanded sectors. First, there was the soaring production of sugar in Brazil [Blackburn, p. 173]. Second, there was the African slave trade, which, thanks to the decades of exploring of the west coast of Africa inspired by Prince Henry the Navigator (e-mail of 9 Oct 2015), Portugal dominated in the early 17th century despite the attempts by the Dutch, English, and French to enter the market [Blackburn, pp. 175, 176, 181]. These two areas of commerce were connected since the increased sugar production required more more slaves [Blackburn, p. 173]. As the 17th century wore on, the Portuguese dominance of sugar and slaves faded (see below), as did the prominence of Portugal in world commerce.
• In Europe in the 16th century, sugar, like cinnamon (e-mail of 5 Nov 2015), was simultaneously a luxury, a medicine, and a spice [Mintz, p. 30]. It was available only to the privileged few.
• In 1627 the British settled the Caribbean island of Barbados, which by 1655 was exporting significant amounts of sugar to Britain. In 1655 Britain greatly strengthened its portfolio of sugar-producing islands when it took Jamaica from Spain. Until the mid-19th century, British possessions in the Caribbean supplied substantially all of the sugar consumed by Britain [Mintz, p. 37].
• Compared to other countries, England led the way in number of colonies founded (or conquered), number of slaves carried to the new world, and promotion of the plantation system; sugar, not coffee or chocolate, was the crop that led the way [Mintz, p. 38].
• In the time of Louis XIV (reigned, 1643-1715) the splendor of the French court set the taste of aristocrats all over Europe and popularized its luxuries, e.g., elaborate sugar confections (see below) [Blackburn, p. 301].
• Around 1660, when sugar started arriving in England in bulk, is roughly the same time that coffee, tea, and chocolate all came to England (see e-mails of 16 May, 18 Jul, and 25 Jul 2015). In England all three of these beverages were taken with sugar, though this was not the practice in the regions in which they originated [Mintz, pp. 109, 110]. As the consumption of these beverages increased, the consumption of sugar grew in parallel [Mintz, p. 137]. The annual British per capita consumption of sugar in this era is estimated to be [Mintz, p. 67]:

1700-1709     4 lbs.

1720-1729     8 lbs.

1780-1789    12 lbs.

1800-1809    18 lbs.

Along with tea, sugar came to be associated with the English character [Mintz, p. 39]. In fact, "After 1660, England's sugar imports always exceeded its combined imports of all other colonial produce" [quoted in Mintz, p. 44]. As an example of its ubiquity, "... by 1750 the poorest English farm labourer's wife took sugar in her tea" [quoted in Mintz, p. 45]. It is remarkable that the national beverage and emblem of England after 1730, which was heavily consumed by the poor, consisted of tea from China and sugar from the West Indies. i.e., from opposite sides of the earth [Mintz, p. 116].

Starting somewhat before 1800 the consumption of sugar in England soared further as sugar spread beyond beverages and became more widespread in pastries, puddings, and other desserts [Mintz, pp. 117-20]. The explosion in the consumption of sugar illustrates the innate primate liking for sweetness [Mintz, p. 178]. 

In this period its use as a medicine and a spice fell away.

• In the mid-18th century sugar overtook grain as the most valuable commodity in world trade; sugar accounted for nearly a fifth of European imports [Blackburn, p. 403]. All sugar produced up to this time had come from sugar cane.
• In 1747 German chemist Andreas Sigismund Marggraf showed that the sugar obtained from beet juice was identical to that obtained from sugar cane. His student, Franz Carl Achard, in 1784 began experiments with growing beets, breeding them for sugar content, and investigating the process for extracting sugar from the beet juice. His results led to an award from the King of Prussia in 1801, which allowed him to buy an estate; that same year he began growing sugar beets as a crop in Silesia and established the first sugar beet factory. These beets are the ancestors of all modern sugar beets [Cooke and Scott, pp. 7-10]. Achard claimed that growers of sugar cane had attempted without success to bribe him to torpedo the nascent sugar beet industry by repudiating his results [Cooke and Scott, p. 11]. In 1807 his factory burned down and he was ruined, though in 1809 he did publish his detailed findings so that others could take advantage of them [Cooke and Scott, p. 11].
• In 1806 Napoleon struck at the British economy by outlawing all imports of British goods into Europe, which he controlled. Britain retaliated by blockading Europe, and one consequence is that France could not import sugar from the West Indies [Cooke and Scott, pp. 15-16]; recall from the e-mail of 18 Jul 2015 that coffee was another import that the French could not get at this time. Upon learning that sugar could be produced from sugar beets, Napoleon responded decisively to this crisis and in 1811 decreed that a crash sugar beet program be launched in France [Cooke and Scott, p. 16]. By 1813 production of sugar from sugar beets was flourishing in Europe. In that year, however, Europe escaped from Napoleon's control, started importing cane sugar, and abandoned sugar beets. France however, continued to cultivate and develop the sugar beet industry [Cooke and Scott, p. 18]. This activity established the European sugar beet industry [Langer and Hill, p. 143, Cooke and Scott, pp. 15-18]. The right side of the cartoon below shows Napoleon squeezing juice from a sugar beet into a cup of coffee. The left side shows a mother giving her baby a sugar beet and saying "Suck, my dear, suck, your father says it's sugar!" (Translation by Mei-Mei, who says that his sounds better in French since the words for "suck" and "sugar" are almost identical.)

• Sugar cubes were invented in Moravia circa 1840. ("You say Mo-ray-via, and I say Mo-rah-via," see e-mail of 9 Oct 2015.)
• Sugar beet production rebounded in Europe starting in the 1830s [Cooke and Scott, p. 18-21]. Sugar beets accounted in 1840 for five percent of world sugar production and in 1880 for more than fifty percent [Langer and Hill, p. 143]. This increase was largely due to countries wanting to lessen their dependence on imported sugar [Langer and Hill, p. 143], in part because they did not trust that slave-produced sugar could be reliably supplied; they had see the collapse of sugar production after the slave revolt in Saint Domingue in the 1790s (see below) [Cooke and Scott, p. 17]. This led to a tradition of public support for the sugar industry [Cooke and Scott, p. 19]. In addition, breeding experiments after the Napoleonic wars had greatly improved the yield [Cooke and Scott, pp. 13-15], and there were technological improvements as well, e.g., horse-drawn machines for sowing and hoeing [Cooke and Scott, p. 19]. The sugar beet marked "...the first time that a temperate-zone commodity would make a serious dent in the market for subtropical and tropical production" [Mintz, p. 71].
• By the 1860s Cuba was the world's leading producer of sugar [Copeland, et al., p. 3]. 
• In 1870 the first successful commercial planting of sugar in the U.S. occurred in Alvarado, California [Cooke and Scott, p. 22].
• In 1916 Milton Hershey began development of Central Hershey, a company town sixty miles east of Havana. This town provided a reliable supply of sugar to be used in the production of chocolate. One can think of Central Hershey as being the sister city of Hershey, PA. Hershey sold the holdings in 1946.
• In 1958, two-thirds of Cuba's exports (mostly sugar) were to the U.S. After Castro's 1959 revolution, one of his first acts was to nationalize the large sugar estates, most of which were owned by Americans. In 1961, the U.S. retaliated by cutting Cuba's sugar import quota to zero. The Soviet Union responded by supporting Cuban agriculture by paying five times the world price for Cuba's sugar. After the Soviet collapsed in 1989, the Cuban sugar industry also collapsed. Cuba produces less sugar now than at the beginning of the 20th century.
• In 1989 sugar beets were grown in 13 states with the leading producers being California, Colorado, Idaho, North Dakota, Minnesota, Michigan and Texas.

[Continued in Part 4]