I Can’t Sleep - History of Sugar | Gentle Bedtime Reading for Sleep

Episode Date: October 13, 2024

Relax with this calm bedtime reading about the history of sugar, from its ancient beginnings to its global influence on trade, culture, and daily life. Benjamin’s soothing narration guides you through the fascinating journey of sugar across civilizations in a steady, comforting cadence. With fact-filled storytelling—no whispers, no hypnosis—this episode is designed to ease insomnia, reduce stress, and quiet restless thoughts while gently expanding your knowledge. Perfect for sleepless nights or moments of anxiety. Press play, unwind, and drift into peaceful rest with the story of sugar. Want More? Request a Topic: https://www.icantsleeppodcast.com/request-a-topic Ad-Free Episodes: https://icantsleep.supportingcast.fm/ Shop Sleep-Friendly Products: https://www.icantsleeppodcast.com/sponsors Join the Discussion on Discord: https://discord.gg/myhGhVUhn7 This content is derived from the Wikipedia article on History of Sugar, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) license. Read the full article: Wikipedia – History of Sugar. Happy sleeping! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to a Glassbox media podcast. What if I told you that most of the modern day self-help advice you've been hearing could actually make you worse? The key to a better life isn't about feel-good gimmicks that sound catchy. The Mentally Stronger Podcast gives you access to a licensed therapist who shares science-backed tools that will actually change your life. Hi, I'm Amy Morin, psychotherapist, mental strength trainer, and international best-selling author. In each episode, we cover research-back strategies, like how to stop relying on willpower and start creating habits for lasting change. And the five mental strength-building exercises you can do from your couch. I also speak to world-class experts like Dr. Nicole Kane, who shares how to permanently heal anxiety by addressing the root cause.

With over 200 episodes in our catalog, this podcast is for you if you're ready to crush self-doubt, conquer challenges, become stronger than ever with therapist-approved strategies that can change your life. Listen to Mentally Stronger with Therapist Amy Morin, wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the I Can't Sleep podcast, where I read random articles from across the web to bore you to sleep with my soothing voice. I'm your host, Benjamin Boster. Today's episode is from a Wikipedia article titled History of Sugar. Sugar was first produced from sugarcane plants in India sometime after the first century

AD. The derivation of the word sugar is thought to be from Sanskrit shakara meaning ground or candied sugar originally grit gravel. Sanskrit literature from ancient India written between 1500 and 500 BC provides the first documentation of the cultivation of sugar cane

and of the manufacture of sugar in the Bengal region of the Indian subcontinent. Known worldwide by the end of the medieval period, sugar was very expensive and was considered a fine spice, but from about the year 1500, technological improvements and new world sources began turning it into a much cheaper bulk commodity. There are two centers of domestication for sugarcane, one for Sacrum, officinarium by Papuans in New Guinea, and another for Sacram Sinans by Austronesians in Taiwan and Southern China. Popuins and Austronesians originally primarily use sugar cane as a food, as food for domesticated pigs. A spread of both S. aficionarum and S. Sinans is closely linked to the migrations of the Austronesian peoples. Sacram Barbary was only cultivated in India,

after the introduction of S. E. Efficient Aram. Sacram Efficient Aram was first domesticated in New Guinea and the islands east of the Wallace Line by Popwans, where it is the modern center of diversity. Beginning at around 6,000 BP, they were selectively bred from the native Sacram Robustum. From New Guinea, it spread westwards to island southeast Asia after contact with Austronesians,

where it hybridized with Sacrum Spontaneum. The second domestication center is mainland, southern China, and Taiwan, where S-Sinence was a primary cultogen of the Austronesian peoples. Words for sugarcane exist in the proto-Austronesian languages in Taiwan, reconstructed as Tebus or Sub-Bus, which became Tebu in Proto-Malayao-Polynesian. It was one of the original major crops of the Austronesian peoples from at least 5,500 BP. Introduction of the sweeter S. S. S. S. Efficientarum may have gradually replaced it throughout its cultivated range in island Southeast Asia. From island Southeast Asia, S. Efficient Aram was spread eastward into Polynesia and Micronesia by Austronesian Voyagers as a canoe plant by around 3,500 B.P.

It was also spread westward and northward by around 3,000 BP to China and India by Austronesian traders, where it further hybridized with Sacram Sinans and Sacram Barbary. From there it spread further into western Eurasia and the Mediterranean. India, where the process of refining cane juice into granulated crystals was developed, was often visited by imperial convoys, such as those from. from China to learn about cultivation and sugar refining. By the 6th century AD, sugar cultivation and processing had reached Persia. In the Mediterranean, sugar cane was possibly brought through the Arab medieval expansion.

Wherever they went, the medieval Arabs brought with them sugar, the product and the technology of its production. Spanish and Portuguese exploration and conquest in the 15th century carried sugar southwest of Iberia. Henry the Navigator introduced cane to Madeira in 1425, while to Spanish, having eventually subdued the Canary Islands, introduced sugarcane to them. In 1493 on his second voyage, Christopher Columbus carried sugarcane seedlings to the New World, in particular Hispaniola. Sugarcane originated in tropical Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia. Different species likely originated in different locations, with S. Barbary originated in India,

and S. Adule and S. Aficionaram coming from New Guinea. Originally, people chewed sugar cane raw to extracted sweetness. Indians discovered how to crystallize sugar during the Gupta Empire, circa 350 AD, although literary evidence from Indian treatises such as, Arthashastra in 2nd century AD indicates that refined sugar was already being produced in India. Indian sailors, consumers of clarified butter and sugar, carried sugar by various trade routes. Traveling Buddhist monks brought sugar crystallization methods to China. During the reign of Harsha and North India, Indian envoys in Tang China taught sugarcane cultivation methods

after Emperor Taizong of Tang made his interest in sugar known. And China soon established its first sugar king cultivation in the 7th century. Chinese documents confirm at least two missions to India, initiated in 647 AD for obtaining technology for sugar refining. In India, the Iran and China, sugar became a staple of cooking and desserts. Early refining methods involved grinding, or pounding in the cane in order to extract the juice, and then boiling down the juice, or drying it in the sun to yield sugary solids that looked like gravel.

The Sanskrit word for sugar, shakara, also means gravel or sand. In Persian, shakar, the root of the world word sugar from Persian shakar, which is from Sanskrit shakar, meaning sweetening seeds. in Farsi. Similar, the Chinese used the term gravel sugar, or what is known in the West as table sugar. In 1792, sugar prices soared in Great Britain. On the 15th of March, 1792, His Majesty's ministers to the British Parliament presented a report related to the production of refined sugar in British India. Lieutenant Jay Patterson of the Bengal Presidency, reported that refined sugar could be produced in India with many superior advantages,

and a lot more cheaply than in the West Indies. There are records of knowledge of sugar among the ancient Greeks and Romans, but only as imported medicine and not as a food. For example, the Greek physician diascorities in the first century A.D. wrote, there was a kind of coalesced honey called Sacram, i.e. sugar, found in reeds and India and utaman Arabia, i.e. Yemen. Similar inconsistency to salt and brittle enough to be broken between the teeth like salt. It is good, dissolved in water for the intestines and stomach, and can be taken as a drink to help relieve a painful bladder and kidneys. Plenty the elder,

a first century A.D. Roman, also describes sugar as medicinal. Sugar is made in Arabia as well, but Indian sugar is better. It is a kind of honey found in cane, white as gum, and it crunches between the teeth. It comes and lumps the size of a hazelnut. Sugar is used only for medicinal purposes. During the medieval era, Arab entrepreneurs adopted sugar production techniques from India

and expanded the industry. Medieval Arabs, in some cases, set up large plantations, equipped with on-side sugar mills or refineries. The cane sugar plant, which is native to a tropical climate, requires both a lot of water and a lot of heat to thrive. The cultivation of the plant spread throughout the medieval Arab world using artificial irrigation. Sugar cane was first grown extensively in medieval Southern Europe

during the period of Arab rule in Sicily, beginning around the 9th century. In addition to Sicily, Al-Andalus in what is currently southern Spain was an important center of sugar production, beginning by the 10th century. From the Arab world, sugar was exported throughout Europe. The volume of imports increased in the later medieval centuries, as indicated by the increasing references to sugar consumption in late medieval Western writings. But cane sugar remained an expensive import.

Its price per pound in 14th and 15th century England was about equally as high as imported spices from tropical Asia, such as mace, nutmeg, ginger, cloves, and pepper, which had to be transported across the Indian Ocean in that era. Clive Pontine traces the spread of the cultivation of sugar cane from its introduction into Mesopotamia. then the Levant on the islands of the eastern Mediterranean, especially Cyprus by the 10th century. He also notes that it spread along the coast of East Africa to reach Zanzibar.

Crusaders brought sugar home with them to Europe after their campaigns in the Holy Land, where they encountered caravans carrying what they called sweet salt. Early in the 12th century, Venice acquired some villages near Tyre and set up estates to produce sugar for export to Europe, where it supplemented honey as the only other available sweetener. Crusade Chronicleer William of Tyre, writing in the late 12th century, described sugar as a most precious product, very necessary for the use and health of mankind.

The first record of sugar in English is in the late 13th century. During the 1390s, a better press was developed, which doubled the amount of juice that was obtained from the sugar cane and helped to cause the economic expansion of sugar plantations to Andalusia and to the Algarve. It started in Madeira in 1455, using advisors from Sicily and largely Genoese capital for the mills. The accessibility of Madeira attracted Genoese and Flemish traders, keen to bypass Venetian monopolies. By 1480, Antwerp had some 70 ships engaged in the Madeira sugar trade, with the refining and distribution concentrated in Antwerp.

The 1480s saw sugar production extended to the Canary Islands. By the 1490s, Madira had overtaken Cyprus as a producer of sugar. The Portuguese took sugar to Brazil. By 1540, there were 800 cane sugar mills in Santa Catarina Island, and there were another 2,000 on the north coast of Brazil, Demerara, and Suriname. The first sugar harvest happened in Hispaniola in 1501, and many sugar mills had been constructed in Cuba and Jamaica by the 1520s. The approximately 3,000 small sugar mills that were built before 1550 in the New World created an unprecedented demand for cast iron gears, levers, axles, and other implements.

Specialist trades in mold making and iron casting developed in Europe due to the expansion of sugar production. Sugar milk construction sparked development of the technological skills needed for a nascent industrial revolution in the early 17th century. After 1625, the Dutch transported sugar cane from South America to the Caribbean Islands, where it was grown from Barbados to the Virgin Islands. Contemporaries often compared the worth of sugar with valuable commodities, including musk, pearls, and spices. Sugar prices declined slowly as its production became multi-sourced

throughout the European colonies. Once an indulgence only of the rich, the consumption of sugar also became increasingly common among the poor as well. Sugar production increased in the mainland North American colonies in Cuba and in Brazil. During the 18th century,

sugar became end up. enormously popular. Great Britain, for example, consumed five times as much sugar in 1770 as in 1710. By 1750, sugar surpassed grain as the most valuable commodity in European trade. It made up a fifth of all European imports, and in the last decades of the century, four-fifths of the sugar came from the British and French colonies in the West Indies. From the 1740s until the 1820s, Sugar was Britain's most valuable import. The sugar market went through a series of booms. The heightened demand and production of sugar came about to a large extent

due to a great change in the eating habits of many Europeans. For example, they began consuming jams, candy, tea, coffee, cocoa, processed foods, and other sweet victuals in much greater amounts. reacting to this increasing trend, the Caribbean islands took advantage of the situation and set about producing still more sugar. In fact, they produced up to 90% of the sugar that the Western Europeans consumed. Some islands proved more successful than others when it came to producing the product. In Barbados and the British Leward Islands, sugar provided 93% and 97% respect

of exports. Planters later began developing ways to boost production even more. For example, they began using more farming methods when growing their crops. They also developed more advanced mills and began using better types of sugarcane. In the 18th century, the French colonies were the most successful, especially St. Domingue, where better irrigation, water power, and machinery, together with concentration on newer types of sugar increased profits. Despite these and other improvements, the price of sugar reached soaring hides, especially during events such as the revolt against the Dutch and the Napoleonic Wars.

Sugar remained in high demand, and the island's planters knew exactly how to take advantage of the situation. As Europeans established sugar plantations on the larger Caribbean islands, prices fell in Europe. By the 18th century, all levels of society had become common consumers of the former luxury product. At first, most sugar in Britain went into tea, but later confectionery and chocolates became extremely popular. Many Britons, especially children, also ate jams. Suppliers commonly sold sugar in the form of a sugar loaf, and consumers required sugar nips, a pliers-like tool, to break off.

pieces. Sugar cane quickly exhausts the soil in which it grows, and planters pressed larger islands with fresher soil into production in the 19th century, as demand for sugar in Europe continued to increase. Average consumption in Britain rose from four pounds per head in 1700 to 18 pounds in 1800, 36 pounds by 1850, and over 100 pounds by the 20th century. In the 19th century, Cuba rose to become the richest land in the Caribbean, with sugar as its dominant crop, because it formed the only major island landmass free of mountainous terrain. Instead, nearly three quarters of its land formed a rolling plain, ideal for planting crops. Cuba also prospered above other islands because Cubans used better methods when harvesting the sugar crops.

They adapted modern milling methods, such as water mills, enclosed furnaces, steam engines, and vacuum pans. All these technologies increased productivity. After the Haitian Revolution established the independent state of Haiti, sugar production in that country declined, and Cuba replaced St. Domingue as the world's largest producer. Long established in Brazil, sugar production spread to other parts. of South America, as well as to newer European colonies in Africa and in the Pacific, where it became especially important in Fiji. Mauritius, Natal, and Queensland in Australia started growing sugar. Sugar was a luxury in Europe until the early 19th century, when it became more widely available

due to the rise of beet sugar in Prussia, and later in France under Napoleon. Beat sugar was a German invention since in 1747 Andreas Sigismund Margraff announced the discovery of sugar in beads and devised a method using alcohol to extract it. Margraff student Franz Karl Ackard devised an economical industrial method to extract the sugar in its pure form in the late 18th century. Haccard first produced beet sugar in 1783 in Kalsdorf. In 1801, under the patronage of King Frederick William III of Prussia, the world's first beet sugar production facility was established in Cooner and Silesia,

then part of Prussia. While never profitable, this plant operated from 1801 until its destruction during the Napoleonic Wars. The works of Margraff and Accard were the starting point for the sugar industry in Europe and for the modern sugar industry in general, since sugar was no longer a luxury product and a product almost only produced in warmer climates. In France, Napoleon cut off from Caribbean imports by a British blockade, and at any rate not wanting to fund British merchants banned imports of sugar in 1813, and ordered the planting of 32,000 hectares with beetroot.

A beet sugar industry emerged, especially after Jean-Baptiste Karel industrialized the operation of Benjamin de Lesser. The United Kingdom Beatroot Sugar Association was established in 1832, but efforts to establish sugar beet in the UK were not very successful. Sugar beets provided approximately two-thirds of world sugar production, in 1890. 46% of British sugar came from Germany and Austria. Sugar prices in Britain collapsed towards the end of the 19th century.

The British Sugar Beat Society was set up in 1915, and by 1930 there were 17 factories in England, and one in Scotland, supported under the provisions of the British Sugar Act 1925. By 1935, homegrown, sugar was 27.6% of British consumption. By 1929, 109,201 people were employed in the British sugar beet industry with about 25,000 more casual laborers. Beginning in the late 18th century, the production of sugar became increasingly mechanized. The steam engine first powered a sugar mill

in Jamaica in 1768, and soon after steam replaced direct firing as a steam engine. as a source of process heat. In 1813, the British chemist Edward Charles Howard invented a method of refining sugar that involved boiling the cane juice, not in an open kettle, but in a closed vessel, heated by steam and held under partial vacuum. At reduced pressure, water boils at a lower temperature, and this development both saved fuel and reduced the amount of sugar lost through caramelization. Further gains and fuel efficiency came from the multiple effect evaporator,

designed by the United States engineer Norbert Riu, perhaps as early as the 1820s, although the first working model dates from 1845. This system consisted of a series of vacuum pans, each held at a lower pressure than the previous one. The vapors from each pan serve to heat the next, with minimal heat wasted. Modern industries used multiple effect evaporators for evaporating water.

The process of separating sugar from molasses also received mechanical attention. David Weston first applied the centrifuge to this task in Hawaii in 1852. In the United States and Japan, high fructose corn syrup has replaced sugar in some uses, particularly in soft drinks and processed foods. The process by which high fructose corn syrup is produced was first developed by Richard O. Marshall and Earl K. K. K. Cui in 1957. The industrial production process was refined by Dr. Y. Takasaki at Agency of Industrial Science and Technology of Ministry of International Trade and Industry of Japan in 1965 to 1970. High fructose corn syrup was rapidly introduced to many processed foods

and soft drinks in the United States of around 1975 to 1985. A system of sugar tariffs and sugar quotas imposed in 1977 in the United States significantly increased the cost of imported sugar and U.S. producers sought cheaper sources. High fructose corn syrup derived from corn is more economical because the domestic U.S. price of sugar is twice the global price, and the price of corn is kept low. through government subsidies paid to growers. High fructose corn syrup became an attractive substitute and is preferred over cane sugar among the vast majority of American food and beverage manufacturers.

Soft drink makers such as Coca-Cola and Pepsi use sugar in other nations, but switched to high-fructose corn syrup in the United States in 1984.