History of sugar

A sugarloaf was the traditional shape of sugar in the eighteenth century: a semi-hard sugar cone that required a sugar axe or hammer to break up and sugar nips to reduce to usable pieces

The history of sugar has five main phases:

  1. The extraction of sugar cane juice from the sugarcane plant; and, the subsequent domestication of the plant in tropical Southeast Asia many thousands of years ago (a firm date is unknown).
  2. The invention of manufacture of cane sugar granules from the sugarcane juice in India a little over two thousand years ago, followed by improvements in refining the crystal granules in India in the early centuries A.D.
  3. The spread of cultivation and manufacture of cane sugar to the medieval Islamic world together with some improvements of production methods.

Sugar was once used as a drug

  1. The spread of cultivation and manufacture of cane sugar to the West Indies and tropical parts of the Americas beginning in the 16th century, followed by more intensive improvements in production in the 17th through 19th centuries in that part of the world.
  2. The development of beet sugar, high fructose corn syrup and other sweeteners in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Known worldwide through the end of the medieval period, sugar was very expensive[1] and was considered a "fine spice",[2] but from about the year 1500, technological improvements and New World sources began turning it into a much cheaper bulk commodity.[3]

The spread of sugar cane cultivation

Saccharum officinarum - sugar cane

The people of New Guinea were probably the first to domesticate sugarcane, sometime around 8,000 BC. However, the extraction and purifying technology techniques were developed by people who were living in India. After domestication, its cultivation spread rapidly to Southeast Asia and southern China. India, where the process of refining cane juice into granulated crystals was developed, was often visited by imperial convoys (such as those from China) to learn about cultivation and sugar refining. [4] By the sixth century AD, sugar cultivation and processing had reached Persia; and, from there that knowledge was brought into the Mediterranean by the Arab expansion.[5] "Wherever they went, the [medieval] Arabs brought with them sugar, the product and the technology of its production."[6]

Spanish and Portuguese exploration and conquest in the fifteenth century carried sugar south-west of Iberia. Henry the Navigator introduced cane to Madeira in 1425, while the Spanish, having eventually subdued the Canary Islands, introduced sugar cane to them.[5] In 1493, on his second voyage, Christopher Columbus carried sugarcane seedlings to the New World, in particular Hispaniola.[5]

Early use of sugarcane in India

Sugarcane originated in tropical South Asia and Southeast Asia.[7] Different species likely originated in different locations with S. barberi originating in India and S. edule and S. officinarum coming from New Guinea.[7]

Originally, people chewed sugarcane raw to extract its sweetness. Indians discovered how to crystallize sugar during the Gupta dynasty, around 350 AD.[8]

Indian sailors, consumers of clarified butter and sugar, carried sugar by various trade routes.[9] Traveling Buddhist monks brought sugar crystallization methods to China.[10] During the reign of Harsha (r. 606–647) in North India, Indian envoys in Tang China taught sugarcane cultivation methods after Emperor Taizong of Tang (r. 626–649) made his interest in sugar known, and China soon established its first sugarcane cultivation in the seventh century.[11] Chinese documents confirm at least two missions to India, initiated in 647 AD, for obtaining technology for sugar-refining.[12] In South Asia, the Middle East and China, sugar became a staple of cooking and desserts. In the year 1792, sugar rose by degrees to an enormous price in Great Britain. The East India Company was then called upon to lend their assistance to help in the lowering of the price of sugar. On the 15th of March 1792, his Majesty's Ministers to the British Parliament, presented a report related to the production of refined sugar in British India. Lieutenant J. Paterson, of the Bengal establishment, reported that refined sugar could be produced in India[13] with many superior advantages, and a lot more cheaply than in the West Indies.

Early refining methods involved grinding or pounding the cane in order to extract the juice, and then boiling down the juice or drying it in the sun to yield sugary solids that looked like gravel. The Sanskrit word for "sugar" (sharkara) also means "gravel" or "sand". Similarly, the Chinese use the term "gravel sugar" (Traditional Chinese: 砂糖) for what the West knows as "table sugar".

Cane sugar in the medieval era in the Muslim World and Europe

Map showing sugar cane India as the first sugar cane country, followed by small areas in Africa, and smaller areas in Europe
The westward diffusion of sugarcane in pre-Islamic times (shown in red), in the medieval Muslim world (green) and by Europeans in the 15th century (islands circled by violet lines)[14]

There are records of knowledge of sugar among the ancient Greeks and Romans, but only as an imported medicine, and not as a food. For example, the Greek physician Dioscorides in the 1st century (AD) wrote: "There is a kind of coalesced honey called sakcharon [i.e. sugar] found in reeds in India and Eudaimon Arabia [i.e. Yemen[15]] similar in consistency to salt and brittle enough to be broken between the teeth like salt. It is good dissolved in water for the intestines and stomach, and [can be] taken as a drink to help [relieve] a painful bladder and kidneys."[16] Pliny the Elder, a 1st century (AD) Roman, also described sugar as medicinal: "Sugar is made in Arabia as well, but Indian sugar is better. It is a kind of honey found in cane, white as gum, and it crunches between the teeth. It comes in lumps the size of a hazelnut. Sugar is used only for medical purposes."[17]

During the medieval era, Arab entrepreneurs adopted sugar production techniques from India and expanded the industry. Medieval Arabs in some cases set up large plantations equipped with on-site sugar mills or refineries. The cane sugar plant, which is native to a tropical climate, requires both a lot of water and a lot of heat to thrive. The cultivation of the plant spread throughout the medieval Arab world using artificial irrigation. Sugar cane was first grown extensively in medieval Southern Europe during the period of Arab rule of in Sicily beginning around the 9th century known as the Emirate of Sicily .[18][19] In addition to Sicily, Spain which at the time was known as Al-Andalus was an important center of sugar production [20] beginning in the 9th century.[21] Sugar was exported throughout Europe. The volume of imports increased in the later medieval centuries as indicated by the increasing references to sugar consumption in late medieval Western writings. But cane sugar remained an expensive import. 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.[1]

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.[22] He also notes that it spread along the coast of East Africa to reach Zanzibar.[22]

Crusaders brought sugar home with them to Europe after their campaigns in the Holy Land, where they encountered caravans carrying "sweet salt". 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.[23] Crusade chronicler William of Tyre, writing in the late 12th century, described sugar as "a most precious product, very necessary for the use and health of mankind".[24] The first record of sugar in English is in the late 13th century.[25]

Ponting recounts the trials of the early European sugar entrepreneurs:

The crucial problem with sugar production was that it was highly labour-intensive in both growing and processing. Because of the huge weight and bulk of the raw cane it was very costly to transport, especially by land, and therefore each estate had to have its own factory. There the cane had to be crushed to extract the juices, which were boiled to concentrate them, in a series of backbreaking and intensive operations lasting many hours. However, once it had been processed and concentrated, the sugar had a very high value for its bulk and could be traded over long distances by ship at a considerable profit. 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. The local population on Cyprus spent most of their time growing their own food and few would work on the sugar estates. The owners therefore brought in slaves from the Black Sea area (and a few from Africa) to do most of the work. The level of demand and production was low and therefore so was the trade in slaves — no more than about a thousand people a year. It was not much larger when sugar production began in Sicily.

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. The problem was the heavy labour involved because the Europeans refused to work except as supervisors. The solution was to bring in slaves from Africa. The crucial developments in this trade began in the 1440's...[23]

During the 1390s, a better press was developed, which doubled the amount of juice that was obtained from the sugarcane and helped to cause the economic expansion of sugar plantations to Andalusia and to the Algarve. It started in Madeira in 1455, using advisers from Sicily and (largely) Genoese capital for the mills. The accessibility of Madeira attracted Genoese and Flemish traders keen to bypass Venetian monopolies. "By 1480 Antwerp had some seventy ships engaged in the Madeira sugar trade, with the refining and distribution concentrated in Antwerp. The 1480's saw sugar production extended to the Canary Islands. By the 1490's Madeira had overtaken Cyprus as a producer of sugar."[26] African slaves also worked in the sugar plantations of the Kingdom of Castile around Valencia.[26]

In the 16th century Rabbi Yosef Karo, the author of the Shulchan Aruch, the code of Jewish law, mentions the use of sugar mixed with the juice of lemons and water by Jews in Cairo, Egypt to make lemonade on Sabbath. (Orech Chayim, Hilchot Shabbat)

Sugar cultivation in the New World

The Triangular trade - slaves were imported into the Caribbean Islands to plant and harvest sugar cane.

The Portuguese took sugar to Brazil. By 1540, there were 800 cane sugar mills in Santa Catarina Island and there were another 2,000 on the north coast of Brazil, Demarara, and Surinam. The first sugar harvest happened in Hispaniola in 1501; and, many sugar mills had been constructed in Cuba and Jamaica by the 1520s.[27]

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. Specialist trades in mold-making and iron casting developed in Europe due to the expansion of sugar production. Sugar mill construction developed technological skills needed for a nascent industrial revolution in the early 17th century.[27]

After 1625, the Dutch carried sugarcane from South America to the Caribbean islands, where it was grown from Barbados to the Virgin Islands. Contemporaries often compared the worth of sugar with valuable commodities including musk, pearls, and spices. Sugar prices declined slowly as its production became multi-sourced, especially through British colonial policy. Formerly an indulgence of only the rich, the consumption of sugar also became increasingly common among the poor too. Sugar production increased in mainland North American colonies, in Cuba, and in Brazil. The labour force at first included European indentured servants and local Native American slaves. However, European diseases such as smallpox and African ones such as malaria and yellow fever soon reduced the numbers of local Native Americans.[27] Europeans were also very susceptible to malaria and yellow fever, and the supply of indentured servants was limited. African slaves became the dominant source of plantation workers because they were more resistant to malaria and yellow fever, and because the supply of slaves was abundant on the African coast.[28][29]

During the 18th century, sugar became enormously popular. Britain, for example, consumed five times as much sugar in 1770 as in 1710.[30] By 1750 sugar surpassed grain as "the most valuable commodity in European trade — it made up a fifth of all European imports and in the last decades of the century four-fifths of the sugar came from the British and French colonies in the West Indies."[30] The sugar market went through a series of booms. The heightened demand and production of sugar came about to a large extent due to a great change in the eating habits of many Europeans. For example, they began consuming jams, candy, tea, coffee, cocoa, processed foods, and other sweet victuals in much greater numbers. Reacting to this increasing craze, the islands took advantage of the situation and set about producing still more sugar. In fact, they produced up to ninety percent of the sugar that the western Europeans consumed. Some islands proved more successful than others when it came to producing the product. In Barbados and the British Leeward Islands sugar provided 93% and 97% respectively of exports.

Planters later began developing ways to boost production even more. For example, they began using more manure when growing their crops. They also developed more advanced mills and began using better types of sugarcane. 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."[30] Despite these and other improvements, the price of sugar reached soaring heights, especially during events such as the revolt against the Dutch[31] and the Napoleonic Wars. Sugar remained in high demand, and the islands' planters knew exactly how to take advantage of the situation.

A 19th-century lithograph by Theodore Bray showing a sugarcane plantation. On right is "white officer", the European overseer. Slave workers toil during the harvest. To the left is a flat-bottomed vessel for cane transportation.

As Europeans established sugar plantations on the larger Caribbean islands, prices fell, especially in Britain. By the 18th century all levels of society had become common consumers of the former luxury product. At first most sugar in Britain went into tea, but later confectionery and chocolates became extremely popular. Many Britons (especially children) also ate jams.[32] Suppliers commonly sold sugar in the form of a sugarloaf and consumers required sugar nips, a pliers-like tool, to break off pieces.

Sugarcane quickly exhausts the soil in which it grows, and planters pressed larger islands with fresher soil into production in the nineteenth century as demand for sugar in Europe continued to increase: "average consumption in Britain rose from four pounds per head in 1700 to eighteen pounds in 1800, thirty-six pounds by 1850 and over one hundred pounds by the twentieth century."[33] 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. Instead, nearly three-quarters of its land formed a rolling plain — ideal for planting crops. Cuba also prospered above other islands because Cubans used better methods when harvesting the sugar crops: they adopted modern milling methods such as watermills, enclosed furnaces, steam engines, and vacuum pans. All these technologies increased productivity. Cuba also retained slavery longer than the most of the rest of the Caribbean islands.[34]

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.

Hacienda La Fortuna. A sugar mill complex in Puerto Rico, painted by Francisco Oller in 1885. Brooklyn Museum

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. Mauritius, Natal and Queensland in Australia started growing sugar. The older and newer sugar production areas now tended to use indentured labour rather than slaves, 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). In Queensland workers from the Pacific islands were moved in. On Hawaii, they came from China and Japan. The Dutch transferred large numbers of people from Java to Surinam."[35] It is said that the sugar plantations would not have thrived without the aid of the African slaves. In Colombia, the planting of sugar started very early on, and entrepreneurs imported many African slaves to cultivate the fields. The industrialization of the Colombian industry started in 1901 with the establishment of Manuelita, the first steam-powered sugar mill in South America, by Latvian Jewish immigrant James Martin Eder.

While no longer grown and processed by slaves, sugar from developing countries has an ongoing association with workers earning minimal wages and living in extreme poverty.[35]

The rise of beet sugar

Sugar refinery in Šurany (Slovakia) founded in 1854 (a picture is from 1900).
More information in the History section at Sugar beet

In 1747 the German chemist Andreas Marggraf identified sucrose in beet root.[36] This discovery remained a mere curiosity for some time, but eventually Marggraf's student Franz Achard built a sugar beet processing factory at Cunern in Silesia (in present-day Konary in Poland), under the patronage of King Frederick William III of Prussia (reigned 1797–1840). While never profitable, this plant operated from 1801 until it suffered destruction during the Napoleonic Wars (ca. 1802–1815).

Napoleon, cut off from Caribbean imports by a British blockade, and at any rate not wanting to fund British merchants, banned imports of sugar in 1813. A beet sugar industry emerged, especially after Jean-Baptiste Quéruel industrialized the operation of Benjamin Delessert.

In the developed countries, the sugar industry relies on machinery with a low requirement for manpower. A large beet refinery producing around 1,500 tonnes of sugar a day needs a permanent workforce of about 150 for 24-hour production.

Sugar beets provide approximately 30% of world sugar production.

Mechanization

Beginning in the late 18th century, the production of sugar became increasingly mechanized. The steam engine first powered a sugar mill in Jamaica in 1768, and soon after, steam replaced direct firing as the source of process heat.

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. At reduced pressure, water boils at a lower temperature, and this development both saved fuel and reduced the amount of sugar lost through caramelization. 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). This system consisted of a series of vacuum pans, each held at a lower pressure than the previous one. The vapors from each pan served to heat the next, with minimal heat wasted. Modern industries use multiple-effect evaporators for evaporating water.

The process of separating sugar from molasses also received mechanical attention: David Weston first applied the centrifuge to this task in Hawaii in 1852.

Other sweeteners

Cyclamate-based sugar substitute sold in Canada.

In the United States and Japan, high-fructose corn syrup has replaced sugar in some uses, particularly in soft drinks and processed foods.

The process by which high-fructose corn syrup is produced was first developed by Richard O. Marshall and Earl P. Kooi in 1957.[37] The industrial production process was refined by Dr. Y. Takasaki at Agency of Industrial Science and Technology of Ministry of International Trade and Industry of Japan in 1965–1970. High-fructose corn syrup was rapidly introduced to many processed foods and soft drinks in the United States from around 1975 to 1985.

A system of sugar tariffs and sugar quotas imposed in 1977 in the United States significantly increased the cost of imported sugar and U.S. producers sought cheaper sources. High-fructose corn syrup, derived from corn, is more economical because the domestic U.S. and Canadian prices of sugar are twice the global price[38] and the price of corn is kept low through government subsidies paid to growers.[39][40] 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.[41]

The average American consumed approximately 37.8 lb (17.1 kg) of high-fructose corn syrup in 2008, versus 46.7 lb (21.2 kg) of sucrose.[42]

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. However, there is to date little evidence that high-fructose corn syrup is any unhealthier, calorie for calorie, than sucrose or other simple sugars. The fructose content and fructose:glucose ratio of high-fructose corn syrup do not differ markedly from clarified apple juice.[43] Some researchers hypothesize that fructose may trigger the process by which fats are formed, to a greater extent than other simple sugars.[44] However, most commonly used blends of high-fructose corn syrup contain a nearly one-to-one ratio of fructose and glucose, just like common sucrose, and should therefore be metabolically identical after the first steps of sucrose metabolism, in which the sucrose is split into fructose and glucose components. At the very least, the increasing prevalence of high-fructose corn syrup has certainly led to an increase in added sugar calories in food, which may reasonably increase the incidence of these and other diseases.[45]

See also

Notes

  1. 1 2 One source for the price of cane sugar in late medieval England is the annual account books of a large abbey at Durham, which recorded the purchases of many different goods for use in the abbey, including sugar and various spices, giving the quantity bought and the price paid, with records existing for many years in the 14th and 15th centuries. Selections from these account books are online in two volumes at Archive.org: Extracts from the Account Rolls of the Abbey of Durham. In the Durham Abbey account books the word for sugar is spelled Zuker (year 1299), succre (1309), sucore (1311), Zucar (1316), suker (1323), Zuccoris (1326), Succoris (1329), sugre (1363), suggir (1440).
  2. ↑ Bernstein 2009, p. 205.
  3. ↑ Bernstein 2009, p. 207.
  4. ↑ SKIL 2014, p. .
  5. 1 2 3 Parker 2011, p. 10.
  6. ↑ Mintz 1986, p. 25.
  7. 1 2 Sharpe 1998.
  8. ↑ Adas 2001, p. 2341.
  9. ↑ Adas 2001, p. 311.
  10. ↑ Kieschnick 2003.
  11. ↑ Sen 2003, pp. 38–40.
  12. ↑ Kieschnick 2003, p. 258.
  13. ↑ bihargatha.in
  14. ↑ Watson, Andrew. Agricultural innovation in the early Islamic world. Cambridge University Press. p. 26–7.
  15. ↑ There is no evidence from Yemen itself that sugarcane was cultivated in Yemen before the start of the Islamic era. There is plentiful evidence that Yemen imported goods from India in the pre-Islamic era (see e.g. Periplus of the Erythrean Sea). Hence historians today tend to believe that when Dioscorides was writing in the 1st century AD, Yemen imported sugar from India; and, that it did not produce it locally, and that the sugar that Dioscorides obtained in Greece was an import from Yemen but ultimately became an import from India. The Sugar Cane Industry: An Historical Geography from its Origins to 1914, by J.H. Galloway, year 1989, page 24.
  16. ↑ Quoted from Book Two of Dioscorides' Materia Medica. The book is downloadable from links at the Wikipedia Dioscorides page.
  17. ↑ Patrick Faas (2003). Around the Roman Table: Food and Feasting in Ancient Rome. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. p. 149.
  18. ↑ Sato 2014, p. 30.
  19. ↑ http://www.bestofsicily.com/mag/art143.htm
  20. ↑ Sato 2014, p. 31.
  21. ↑ http://canal.ugr.es/index.php/social-economic-and-legal-sciences/item/6177-sugar-cane-cumin-and-orange-grove-crops-were-adapted-in-alandalus-from-the-10th-century?tmpl=component&print=1
  22. 1 2 Ponting 2000, p. 353.
  23. 1 2 Ponting 2000, p. 481.
  24. ↑ Barber, Malcolm (2004). The two cities: medieval Europe, 1050–1320 (2nd ed.). Routledge. p. 14. ISBN 978-0-415-17415-2.
  25. ↑ UMich Middle English Dictionary.
  26. 1 2 Ponting 2000, p. 482.
  27. 1 2 3 Benitez-Rojo 1996, p. 93.
  28. ↑ Watts 2001.
  29. ↑ Wood 1996, p. 89.
  30. 1 2 3 Ponting 2000, p. 510.
  31. ↑ On the Caribbean island of Curaçao, there were slave rebellions in 1716, 1750, 1774, and 1795, the latter led by the slave Tula.
  32. ↑ Wilson 2011.
  33. ↑ Ponting 2000, p. 698.
  34. ↑ Ponting 2000, pp. 698–9.
  35. 1 2 Ponting 2000, p. 739.
  36. ↑ Marggraf (1747) "Experiences chimiques faites dans le dessein de tirer un veritable sucre de diverses plantes, qui croissent dans nos contrées" [Chemical experiments made with the intention of extracting real sugar from diverse plants that grow in our lands], Histoire de l'académie royale des sciences et belles-lettres de Berlin, pages 79-90.
  37. ↑ Marshall & Kooi 1957.
  38. ↑ Tom Philpott (10 May 2006). "ADM, high-fructose corn syrup, and ethanol". Grist. Retrieved 9 September 2011.
  39. ↑ Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy
  40. ↑ Corn Production/Value
  41. ↑ James Bovard (April 1998). "The Great Sugar Shaft". Freedom Daily. The Future of Freedom Foundation. Retrieved 9 September 2011.
  42. ↑ "U.S. per capita food availability – Sugar and sweeteners (individual)". Economic Research Service. 2010-02-16. Retrieved 2010-03-12.
  43. ↑ https://www.researchgate.net/publication/46575508_Sugar_composition_of_depectinized_apple_juices_Composicao_de_acucares_em_sucos_de_macas_despectinizados
  44. ↑ Samuel 2011.
  45. ↑ Collino 2011.

Bibliography

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