History of sugar production

Sugarcane was first domesticated in Papua New Guinea, from here is cultivation spread throughout the Pacific and to India, where the first crude forms of sugar was produced around 2000 years ago.

The earliest references to sugar making appear in Sanskrit literature of the fourth century BC, but sucrose was practically unknown in Northern Europe until around 1000 AD.

It was only several century later that sugar began to reach Europe in sizeable quantities, both overland and via the Mediterranean. In the mid of 8th century, sugar cane was planted for the first time, sugar made from it, on European soil along Spain’s southern littoral.

A century birth of Islam established from Arabian peninsula to Southern Spain, an administrative and culturally allowed the development of the technology required to successful production of the novel sugar cane crop.

Sugar production in the early Islamic world harnessed both water and wind power to drive the crushing mills.

These technologies , as well as the practice of refining, were transferred to the Americas via the Atlantic islands.

With the development of the African slave trade in the mid 1400s the processing and ready accessibility of sugar became quickly established.

Until the mid nineteenth century sugar remained an extremely expensive luxury good in Europe, more properly thought of a spice than a food per se.

The first attempt at applying power to sugar production was made by John Stewart in 1768 in Jamaica. The first steam engine reported in Cuba was at the Ingenio Seibabo of the Conde de Mopox y Jaruco in 1769.

Although these steam engine=s made use of the crushed canes as fuel. They often depend on coal and other non-renewable resources, on contrast to the renewable of animal, wind and waterpower of earlier centuries.

The introduction of vacuum heating technology later revolutionized the boiling process and the introduction of the centrifugal machine likewise revolutionized the curing processed.  

History of sugar production

Ancient sugar processing

The processing of sugar products was one of the first extensive agro-industrial operations in the world.

In ancient and early medieval times, the Mediterranean did not know sugar; sweetening came from honey and fruit juices.

Sugarcane’s early use in southeast Ailsa was restricted to chewing and it was cultivated strictly for this purpose. It is believed that the technique of boiling cane juices to make solid sugar was not discovered until the 1st century BC in the Indian subcontinent.

By 325 BC when the armies of Alexander the Great entered the Punjab, they encountered sugar cane.

Perhaps the earliest Islamic era of sugar mill to be excavated is one located in the vicinity of the ancient Achaemenid palace at Susa, in Kuzistan. This region benefited from an extensive irrigation system established during the Parthian and Sasanian dynasties.

Small sugar processing plants appeared in the Jordan valley prior to 1st century spreading to larger operations in Egypt, Cyprus, Sicily and Spain by the 13th century.

Previously, the processing of sugar had been done by crushing the cane, extracting the juice, and boiling it down into a black paste.

Sugar was used as a medicinal agent as well as a sweetener. And then the method of adding potash to clarify the sugar in the refining process was invented. The raw sugar is further refined to produce white and other kinds of sugar.

From Kuzistan, Middle Eastern center for sugarcane cultivation, sugar processing spread to Baghdad which lasted as a refining center until the end of the middle Ages.

The sugar beet extraction was developed late, but sugar cane processing is ancient, When Europeans came to known the product call sugar, it was cane sugar.

During the European Renaissance, and for the succeeding two centuries, sugar manufacturing constituted one of the largest pre-modern industrial operations in the world.
Ancient sugar processing