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In
the beginning, when God created the Earth, He provided
Man with all the bounties of nature and endowed the
world with an abundance fruits filled with natural
sugars. There were no cities. Man had to build them
himself. The word “civilisation” means nothing more
than the art of living in the cities. And, lastly,
refined sugar did not form part of his daily diet.
The story of the sugar is, in its greater part, the
story of Civilisation all over the world and in
particular of the rapid growth of the Spanish,
Portuguese and British Empires from the 16th Century
onwards.
Sugar cane originated in New Guinea where it has been
known since about 6000 BC. It is thought that cane sugar
was first used by man in Polynesia from where it spread
to India. In 510 BC the Emperor Darius of what was then
Persia invaded India where he found "the reed which
gives honey without bees". The secret of cane sugar, as
with many other of man's discoveries, was kept a closely
guarded secret whilst the finished product was exported
for a rich profit.
A passage in the sacred Hindu text, The Atharva Veda,
makes passing reference to it: “I have crowned thee with
a shooting sweet cane so that thou shalt not be averse
to me.” It means God gifted India with the abundant
growth of sugarcane as he had gifted other countries of
the world with other exotic fruits. Man, though, had to
use his ingenuity to exploit this sweet cane for food
and thank God for making this part of Earth so
wondrously bountiful.
At first, it is assumed that sugarcane was used as
cattle fodder since it grows abundantly and easily in
tropical areas. Later, man must have started chewing on
it himself and relished its sweetness.
Naturally, the next thing was to exploit it as an
agricultural crop.
Indians made the juice from sugarcane into Jaggery – not
to be confused with Gur, made in the same way but from
the Date Palm. The harvested canes were taken to
crushing mills made up of stonerollers and passed
between them with which the farmers managed to extract
every last drop of sweet juice. This would then be
evaporated in vast pans leaving the solid residue formed
into Jaggery blocks.
Its production soon became a huge source of income for
the farmers of India. Early on the Indian farmers must
have drunk the juice raw and found that it made an
excellent, tasty beverage. It still does – ice cold
when possible it remains popular around the world.
The first Greek travellers and soldiers who came into
contact with the Indians had no words to describe the
plant. When Nearchus, an admiral in the service of
Alexander the Great, first sailed through the Indus
valley in 325 BCE on an exploratory visit, he tasted the
cane and compared its sweetness to honey. He also found
the natives drinking the juice after fermenting it.
The Greek and Roman traders who followed him took the
jaggery back with them to their native lands calling it
“Indian Salt” or “honey without bees”. It was used,
like honey, as medicine. Herodotus in his writings
called it: “manufactured honey” and Pliny called it “the
honey from the cane. ” It took a Roman writer to give
it its first Latin name, which he recorded as
“saccharum. ” Dioscorides described it as a sort of
concentrated honey found abundantly in the canes of
India and Arabia Felix and it was in its nature like
salt and brittle between the teeth.
The school of Medicine and Pharmacology in Jundishapur,
which was the pride of the Persian Empire is credited
with carrying out research on jaggery, and succeeded in
developing a process of solidifying and refining it into
a crystalline white powder which would last a last a
long time without being fermented. This discovery
started a new era of large scale trade between Persia
and India which continued until 600 CE, after which the
Persians started growing the sugar cane on their own.
The T’ang Dynasty in China imported from Bukhara large
quantities of bread loaves with crunchy sugar stones
inside and it became an imperial luxury.
A piece of saccharum was considered a rare and precious
miracle drug in its time and was heavily in demand in
times of plague and pestilence and would be sold for a
small fortune.
While the Medieval Latin name (and taxonomic name for
the genus of reeds) for this precious medicine came to
be appropriated later for a sugar substitute in the
West, the original Sanskrit word for sugar survived in
the languages of the Muslim empires and also in the
spoken Latin language. The Sanskrit word “Khanda”
became the English “Candy. ”
It was the major expansion of the Arab peoples in the
seventh century AD that led to a breaking of the secret
of making sugar. When they invaded Persia in 642 AD they
found sugar cane being grown and learnt how sugar was
made. Arabs were responsible for much of its spread as
they took it to Egypt around 640 AD, during their
conquests. They carried it with them as they advanced
around the Mediterranean. Sugar cane spread by this
means to Syria, Cyprus, and Crete, eventually reaching
Spain around 715 AD. As their expansion continued they
established sugar production in other lands that they
conquered including North Africa and Spain.
In peacetime the Arabs became the masters of trade in
sugar, which they traded with Western countries.
The overindulgence and the shameful addiction to sugar
made the Arabs corpulent and they lost the cutting edge
of their fighting skills over their enemies. Once
feared for these intrepid fighting skills, they had now
become fat and flabby. Leonard Rauwolf, a German
botanist travelling in Arab lands in 1573 makes a note
of this fact in his memoirs.
Sugar was only discovered by western Europeans as a
result of the Crusades in the 11th Century
AD. Crusaders returning home talked of this "new spice"
and how pleasant it was. The first sugar was recorded in
England in 1099. The subsequent centuries saw a major
expansion of western European trade with the East,
including the importation of sugar. It is recorded, for
instance, that sugar was available in London at "two
shillings a pound" in 1319 AD. This equates to about
US$100 per kilo at today's prices so it was very much a
luxury.
By the early 14th Century CE, Pope Clement V
had heard about the sugarcane grown in Muslim lands and
was quick to appreciate the enormous benefits that would
accrue from its trade. In 1306, he renewed his appeal
to the Christian kings for another Crusade against
foreign lands. He wrote to them about the sugarcane
grown there and how mastering its trade would bring
untold riches to Christendom.
Convinced by his arguments, some European kings decided
to taste the new “forbidden” fruit and the events that
followed in its wake left a trail of slavery, genocide
and organized crime across the world. The big empires
tried to compete with one another to establish a
monopoly over the trade of sugar and spices.
The Portuguese were the frontrunners in the quest for
sugarcane. Henry the Navigator toured the entire west
coast of North Africa in the fifteenth century to search
for sugarcane with unsuccessful results. But he found
plenty of black Africans for slaves. And in the
terrible trade that followed some twenty million
captured Africans were sold into slaveery in the growing
sugar trade. By 1456, the Portuguese were masters of
sugar and slave trade. However Spain was not far behind
and when the Moors were expelled from Spain by the
conquering Christian armies they left behind them vast,
luxurious fields of ripe sugarcane in Jativa, Qurtuba,
Granada and across Andalusia generally.
In the 15th century AD, European sugar was refined in
Venice, confirmation that even then when quantities were
small, it was difficult to transport sugar as a food
grade product. In the same century, Columbus sailed to
the Americas, the "New World". In 1493 he took sugar
cane plants to grow in the Caribbean. The climate there
was so advantageous to the growth of the cane that an
industry was quickly established.
Soon, the Portuguese and the Spanish Kingdoms received
Papal approval to recruit the natives of Africa and
Spain to work in their sugar plantations abroad. Dutch
traders, not to be left behind, soon got their act
together and in the 16th Century they became
masters of the lucrative slave trade.
The Dutch established a sugar-refining factory in
Antwerp. Raw sugar cane was shipped to Antwerp
refineries from all over Europe adding to the riches
that came with its trade from the wider world.
No other product - not even oil in the modern era - had
so profoundly influenced the political history of the
Western world as sugar. The wealth that the trade
produced made the Christian nations of Portugal and
Spain gain huge power in Europe. Eventually England’s
Queen Elizabeth I granted a Royal Charter for Slave
Trading from Africa over which the English soon
established a monopoly.
It was not long before they started turning fermented
sugarcane juice into rum which became a major trade good
in its own right. They traded the fiery liquid with
Native Americans for expensive furs, which they later
traded in Europe to amass huge personal and corporate
fortunes.
All the while they continued to enslave the population
of Africa who were sold to sugar plantation to work in
their sugar fields and factories as forced labour.
By 1860 the British were the biggest sugar trading
nation in the world. Sugarcane became the last major
cash crop to be introduced in North America and was
grown with the help of slave labour in Louisiana.
What started as a medicine became a luxury that helped
destroy the power of the Arab Muslims and gave birth to
the huge Empires of the Western European nations. It
started a hideous trade in people whose effects are
still felt today on both sides of the Atlantic. And
today it at once enriches our lives with taste and
destroys them with obesity.
Sugar is what it has always been: a miraculous compound
fraught with pleasure and danger to us all. | 
