Sugar Changed the World

The introduction to Part 1 describes Alexander the Great’s exploration of India. While exploring the Indian coast, Alexander’s friend Nearchus discovered a “sweet reed,” probably sugar cane. This “sweet reed” had also been known to the ancient Persians. Nearchus described the reeds as ones that “produce honey, although there are no bees” (10). However, the future significance of sugar cane was not appreciated by the Persians or by Alexander the Great and his contemporaries.

Sugar cane originated on the island of New Guinea. Knowledge and cultivation of it spread across East Asia, India, and Polynesia. In ancient India, early Hindu writings like the Atharva Veda show that sugar was used in religious rituals involving fire, possibly because people observed how boiling sugar cane crystalized it into clumps of sugar. Sugar was also eaten in India. The ancient Sanskrit word khanda, meaning “piece of sugar,” is the origin of the modern English word “candy.”

The use of sugar would also become known at Jundi Shapur, a sixth-century-A.D. university in what is now Iran. Jundi Shapur was a multicultural university with scholars from the Persian, Greek, Jewish, and Nestorian Christian worlds, and it also established the world’s first teaching hospital. There, shaker, as the Persians called sugar, became known as a medicine. Sugar was also being used in cooking. However, unlike today, sugar was mixed with salty and bitter flavors.

By 642 A.D., Muslim armies had conquered Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and parts of Iran and India. The scholarly culture of Islam picked up significant knowledge from the territories they conquered, including how to grow and refine sugar. Muslim elites used sugar in elaborate baking concoctions. Egypt also became a major producer of sugar. It was in Egypt that the process was developed for refining sugar into a white powder, rather than leaving it as molasses. From Egypt, knowledge of how to produce white sugar spread as far as China.

Europe remained isolated from these developments. Still, Europeans liked spices, and “the popularity of spices had nothing to do with disguising the taste of meat or fish that had gone bad” (20-21). By the 1100s, cooking in Europe was more diverse. A count in the Champagne region of France began opening his lands to merchants, thus starting the trend of fairs. At these fairs, merchants from anywhere from Spain to Russia could sell their goods in a safe and regulated area. Italian merchants brought goods they had traded in Muslim areas, such as sugar. For them, sugar was still a medicine. Also, it was only affordable to the very wealthy, like King Henry III of England.

Sugar in Europe was still primarily gained through trade until the Crusades, when Christian armies tried to reclaim Jerusalem from Muslim rule. Following their time in the Middle East, Christians returned to Europe with newfound knowledge of subjects such as advanced mathematics, windmills, and sugar. As a result, instead of relying on trade, Europeans now learned how to plant and refine sugar on their own.

However, sugar remained difficult to produce. Because sugar cane has to be quickly cleaned and boiled, turning sugar cane into sugar requires a lot of work and a lot of burning wood. Muslim producers of sugar found that sugar was best produced on plantations. These were farms that specialized in producing one luxury product to be sold and traded, rather than producing a wide variety of foods like traditional farms, and the idea was a novel one: “Never before in human history had farms been run this way, as machines designed to satisfy just one craving of buyers who could be thousands of miles away” (27). Because of the labor needed, Muslim and Christian sugar plantations resorted to slave labor from Russians or prisoners of war. They also struggled with having enough land to produce the wood needed for the boiling process. Spain and Portugal set up sugar plantations on the Canary Islands and in the Azores that were run by slaves from Africa.