The Ancient and Medieval History of Sugar
In the Beginning
The oldest known cultivation of sugar was around 8,000 BCE by the indigenous people in what is now Papua New Guinea. They grew sugar cane and chewed it raw. It quickly spread across Australasia and to the Indian subcontinent where people began to refine it into pure sugar crystals around the first century of the common era.
Sugar was an essential product in classical India. It sweetened the cakes of the ruling castes, and was integral to many religious rites of the ancient Vedic religion. Travelers from Greece and Rome thought that it was a kind of solidified honey they called “saccharon” and imported small amounts for supposed medicinal benefits.
Cultivation reached China during the Tang Dynasty in the 7th century CE, brought by Buddhist missionaries. It took another four centuries for sugar cultivation to reach Yemen, Ethiopia and Zanzibar. After this, the sugar trade began penetrating into the Mediterranean, North Africa, and Europe more broadly.
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A New Kind of Power
Europeans began cultivating sugar in Sicily after North African Arabs conquered the island and introduced slave-plantations. Sugar remained an extremely expensive luxury for Europeans, until it became more widespread after the Crusades in the 11th century introduced Europeans to cultivation and refining techniques.
Building on techniques copied from the Arabs, in the 14th century, the Venetians developed a process for creating the first mass manufactured sugar-loafs. This allowed sugar to transport much easier and was an integral step its transformation into a commodity capable of transit on long trade routes.
Coupled with countless other incremental innovations, that built off technologies and theories important from both the Near and Far East, in areas like mathematics, physics and manufacturing, the more effective commercialization of sugar helped energize a qualitative leap in productivity and economic expansion, from which the world continues to tremble. Sugar came to represent not just a tasty delight, but real wealth and power. A man’s fortune could be measured in the sugar loaves in his warehouse. A king could measure his power in the number of sweet cakes served to his guests on his birthday. And the taste of these riches begat a hunger for more.
The focus here on Europeans is not to say that the histories of sugar in China, Africa or Indochina are not important, but because of the outsized role the European political economy of sugar came to play in the history of capitalism.