In 1700, a pound of sugar in England cost the equivalent of several weeks of a laborer’s wages. It was stored in locked boxes and used in tiny amounts, as much for display as for flavoring. By 1800, per capita consumption in Britain had grown fivefold. By 2000, Americans were eating 40 times what 18th-century English people ate, and governments were taxing it to reduce consumption.

No other commodity has made that journey so completely, or so fast.

Where Sugar Came From

Sugarcane (Saccharum officinarum) is native to New Guinea, where people were chewing the stalks for sweetness by around 8000 BCE. Cultivation spread gradually westward, reaching India by 6000 BCE, where people eventually developed a way to crystallize it.

The word “sugar” traces back through Arabic (sukkar) to Sanskrit (sharkara), meaning something like “gravel” or “grit”. A reference to crystallized raw sugar’s texture. The linguistic path tells you where the knowledge came from.

The first crystallization of sugar into transportable form happened in India around 350 CE. The technique spread to Persia. Arab armies arrived in the 7th century, recognized a valuable trade commodity, and carried both the crop and the processing knowledge westward across the Mediterranean.

By the Middle Ages, sugar from Arab-controlled territories was reaching Europe at spice prices. In England, it cost roughly the same per pound as saffron and pepper.

The Crusades and Colonial Sugar

European contact with sugar production accelerated during the Crusades. Crusaders encountered sugarcane in the Levant and Palestine, and some military orders established their own plantations. When Crusader territories fell, cultivation moved to Cyprus, then Sicily, then to the Atlantic islands, Madeira, the Canary Islands, São Tomé, as Portuguese navigators pushed south along the African coast in the 15th century.

The economics changed here permanently. Sugarcane is a demanding crop: tropical climate, abundant water, enormous and continuous labor inputs. The profits are high but only at scale, and scale requires labor the colonizers weren’t willing to pay for. The Portuguese solution, which would define the next four centuries of Atlantic history, was enslavement.

São Tomé, a small island in the Gulf of Guinea settled by Portugal in the 1480s, became the first major sugar colony run on enslaved African labor. By 1530, it was the world’s largest sugar producer. The model was then transplanted wholesale to Brazil, where production quickly eclipsed the islands.

Sugar and the Slave Trade

Between roughly 1500 and 1900, approximately 12.5 million Africans were transported to the Americas in the transatlantic slave trade. About 40% of them went to sugar colonies. Sugar wasn’t the only driver (tobacco, cotton, and rice also relied on enslaved labor) but it was the most labor-intensive crop and the first to establish the plantation model at scale.

The Caribbean sugar colonies of the 17th and 18th centuries — Barbados, Jamaica, Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti), Cuba, Martinique, were among the most profitable pieces of land in the world. For the people working them, they were also among the most lethal. Sugar production required year-round labor: planting, cutting, and processing (the cane had to be crushed and boiled immediately after harvest before the juice fermented). Death rates on sugar plantations were higher than on tobacco or cotton. Population was maintained through continuous importation of enslaved people rather than natural reproduction.

By 1750, Britain was consuming roughly 4 pounds of sugar per person per year. By 1800, 18 pounds. The machinery enabling that growth ran on enslaved labor.

Haiti’s revolution (1791-1804). The only successful slave revolt in history to produce an independent nation — destroyed Saint-Domingue’s sugar production and permanently restructured the global sugar economy. The sugar powers shifted capital to Cuba and Brazil, both of which continued slavery into the late 19th century.

Napoleon’s Beet Sugar

Napoleon’s naval blockade changed sugar’s geography more than any other single event since the Crusades.

When Britain blockaded French ports during the Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815), cutting off Caribbean sugar imports, Napoleon commissioned the development of a domestic alternative. Sugar beets had been shown to contain sucrose in the 1740s by German chemist Andreas Sigismund Marggraf. Napoleon established the first sugar beet extraction schools in 1811.

Beet cultivation spread across Europe and, after the Civil War, into the United States, primarily California, Colorado, and Michigan. Today roughly 20% of the world’s sugar comes from sugar beets. The sucrose produced is chemically identical to cane sugar.

Beet sugar matters for the history of abolition too. When tropical slave labor became less economically essential, some of the political resistance to abolition in Europe softened. Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807 and slavery in its colonies in 1833, on moral grounds, but also because the economic calculus had shifted.

The 20th Century

The 20th century added sugar to the food supply faster than any previous era, through a combination of technology, economics, and deliberate misdirection.

Sugar is cheap, extends shelf life, improves texture, masks bitterness, and makes almost anything more palatable. Once food manufacturers understood this in the postwar era, they added it to products that had never contained it — bread, salad dressing, pasta sauce, canned vegetables, deli meats. High-fructose corn syrup, developed in Japan in the 1960s and commercialized in the US around 1975, made this easier and cheaper. By 1984, both Coca-Cola and Pepsi had switched their US formulas from cane sugar to HFCS entirely.

The fat-free movement of the late 1970s and 80s made things considerably worse. Dietary fat became the public health villain, partly on legitimate evidence, partly on pressure from an industry that had a lot to gain from the narrative shifting away from sugar. Food companies created fat-free versions of everything, replacing fat with sugar to keep the products palatable. Fat-free Oreos had more sugar than the originals. Reduced-fat peanut butter has more sugar than regular. The decade-long push to eat less fat likely increased sugar consumption substantially.

The most damaging part of this story is the most documented. In 2016, researchers at UCSF published internal Sugar Research Foundation documents from the 1960s showing that the industry paid Harvard scientists to publish work blaming fat for heart disease while minimizing sugar’s role. The studies shaped decades of dietary guidelines. The scientists’ own correspondence, which had survived in university archives, showed exactly what happened and who paid for it.

The Current Picture

Global sugar production runs around 175-180 million metric tons per year. Brazil and India are the largest producers. Several countries and US cities have implemented sugar taxes on sweetened beverages, Mexico in 2014, Berkeley CA in 2015, Philadelphia in 2017, the UK in 2018. Early evidence shows modest consumption reductions, though the magnitudes are debated.

Key Dates

Year Event
~350 CE First crystallized sugar produced in India
7th century Arab expansion carries sugar westward
1480s Portuguese establish sugarcane/slave labor model on São Tomé
1600s-1700s Caribbean sugar colonies at peak production
1791 Haitian Revolution begins
1811 Napoleon establishes sugar beet schools
1833 Britain abolishes slavery in colonies
1975 HFCS introduced to US food supply
1984 Coca-Cola and Pepsi switch to HFCS
2016 Sugar Research Foundation documents published

See Also

Where to Read More