Sugar cane, a member of the grass family, originated in New Guinea thousands of years ago and was traded along the coasts of southern and southeastern Asia. Between 2000 and 1500 years ago, someone, somewhere between Indonesia and Persia, discovered how to make crystalline sugar from its juice.
From Persia, the cane and technology were carried round the Mediterranean by the Arab expansion of the 7th and 8th centuries. Although originally a tropical crop, sugar cane was planted in north Africa, southern Spain, Sicily, Crete and Palestine and Syria, and a sugar industry flourished.
Crusaders took the taste for it back to northern Europe in the 11th and 12th centuries.
Sugar was expensive and treated like a spice but was in huge demand. Production spread to Madeira and the Canary Islands in the Atlantic Ocean and, after Columbus discovered the West Indies, they became the main area of production to supply the burgeoning European market. European navies fought over the sugar islands - England often had the upper hand in privateering and blockading.
Governments, naval officers and planters could become rich on sugar, but the industry was built on the backbreaking work of slaves.
According to Peter Macinnis's Bittersweet: The story of sugar, (Allen and Unwin) there are four curses of sugar.
1. It is capital-intensive, requiring land for growing, transport and mills for crushing and refining.
2. Sugar needs to be processed as quickly as possible after being cut so mills and processing factories have to be established in the cane fields.
3. Sugar is hungry for fuel. To obtain a tonne of sugar, 7 tonnes of cane have to be cut and hauled to a mill and 5 tonnes of water evaporated.
Planters destroyed the forests surrounding their plantations.
. In the past, sugar production was labour-intensive.
Slavery provided a cheap solution to the problem.
From the mid-15th century the pattern of sugar and slaves had been set. Ships carried cheap manufactured goods from Europe to Africa, where they exchanged their cargo for slaves, sailed across the Atlantic to the West Indies, sold the slaves who had survived the trip and loaded sugar and rum, a by-product distilled from molasses and sugar waste, to return to Europe.
According to Macinnes, it is estimated that between 1450 and 1900 around 11.7 million slaves were exported from Africa, but only 9.8 million survived the journey across the Atlantic. A sugar slave had a life expectancy of 10 years after reaching the sugar fields and the "exchange rate" in the plantation was 1 ton of sugar per slave life in 1700 and 2 tons per slave life in 1800.
It was believed white-skinned people could not work in the tropics so, besides sugar plantations, slaves were made to work in mines, cotton fields and many other industries.
In the 19th century, when slavery was being abolished by European and North American countries, indentured labourers were recruited or "blackbirded" in ways that were little better than the slave trade. Indians, Chinese, Pacific Islanders and others were transported to the Caribbean, South Africa, Australia, Fiji and other countries to do the work locals refused to do.
Ironically, some of the English anti-slave campaigners were oblivious to the desperate straits of their own poor, displaced by the industrial revolution. In Britain, once taxes were reduced and the price was cheap enough, sugar, especially in hot, sweet tea, became an important food for the poor, providing warmth and calories.
Sugar cane is no longer the only source of sugar. In the early 19th century when France was cut off from colonial supplies, chemists discovered how to make sugar from sugarbeet, which grew in cool climates.
More recently, in the 1950s when President Eisenhower embargoed Cuban sugar, US scientists developed high-fructose corn syrup from US-grown corn, as a substitute for cane sugar in processed foods.
As Macinnis sums up: "Sugar has caused the mass movement and death of millions of humans. It has resulted in the large-scale clearance of land and the destruction of soil and whole environments. On the plus side it has provided us with many taste delights, and had a beneficial effect on the economies of many nations" - truly a bittersweet story.
• Further reading: Bittersweet, the story of sugar by Peter Macinnis, Allen and Unwin, 2002 Sweetness and Power, The place of sugar in modern history by Sydney Mintz, Viking 1985
