Sugarcane cultivation and sugar refining were practiced in India, Arabia and the Mediterranean in the Middle Ages, apparently spread from a point of origin in northeastern India though the Muslim world.
By the time of the discovery of the Americas in the late 15th century, sugarcane cultivation had already spread to the Canary Islands.
Columbus and other early explorers of the Caribbean recognized that the climate weather was ideal for sugarcane cultivation and Columbus brought the first sugarcane from the Canary Islands to Santo Domingo in 1493.
The first sugar mill in the Western Hemisphere was built there in 1509, and by 1511, sugarcane was being harvested in Cuba. It spread rapidly to the other islands and to Mexico and Brazil.
The estates granted to Hernan Cortes in Mexico after his conquest there in 1524 were largely devoted to sugarcane production.
The Africa slaves trade stimulated a need for products that the European could barter for slaves in Africa which included distilled spirits.
Rum could be made from molasses, one of the by products of the sugar refining process.
The sugar and rums became essential parts of the triangular trades that brought millions of Africans to the New World over the 300 years from about 1520 to about 1820. Since reducing the sugarcane to raw sugar and molasses required a heating process the island regions were soon denuded of firewood.
Planters would crush the sugarcane to separate the fibers in heavy roller mills usually powered by draft animals or slaves.
The crush cane would be rinsed repeatedly with water to extract the sugar juices. After the exhaustion of firewood, planters used the fibrous remains of the canes, called bagasse, as fuel for the crude boiling pits to crystallize the raw sugar.
By the 1600s, the refining process had been separated from the plantations. Raw sugar was shipped to refineries in Lisbon Marseilles, London and Amsterdam and later to New York and other cities in colonies North America.
The history traced that the industrialization to Europe and the northern American colonies to the place in the sugar induced triangular trade and the reduction of the Caribbean region to a plantation economy based on cheap labor to the same factor.
When France became isolated from its sugarcane colonies following the French revolution, the loss of Haiti (the French part of the island of Santo Domingo) to a slave-led revolution led the French to begin sugar beet production.
The process of refining sugar from beets had been develop in about 1750 by German chemist Andreas Margraf.
A small sugarcane plantation economy developed in Louisiana Territory between 1750 and 1800 and remained in place after the purchase of that territory by the United States in 1803.
The Sugar Story
