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By A.I. Makki


  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.

   

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