More Sugar
Sugar cubes
When the Abbasid army conquered northern India about 750 AD, the troops brought back sugar cane to the rest of the Islamic empire. Sugar soon reached North Africa and Spain, because they were part of the Islamic Empire. Sugar was a big hit, and farmers began to grow sugar cane all over West Asia. Islamic food scientists invented new presses to get more juice out of the sugar cane. Islamic traders also brought sugar to the east coast of Africa, as far south as Zanzibar, and possibly also across the Sahara desert to West Africa.
It took another 400 years before people in northern Europe began to use sugar. Northern Europeans learned about sugar about 1100 AD from Crusaders who brought sugar with them when they came back from fighting in West Asia. The English word "sugar" comes from the Indian word "sakkara", and the English word "candy" comes from the Arabic word for sugar, "qand", from the Indian word "khanda", meaning "lump". At first the Europeans bought sugar from West Asia, but when Salah al-Din reconquered West Asia from the Crusaders in 1187, the Europeans began to try to grow sugar cane closer to home. Sugar cane wouldn't grow in Northern Europe, but they grew it in Cyprus, and in southern Spain, and in the Canary Islands.
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Sugar cane needed a lot of workers to harvest it and crush it, so the Europeans began to force people from the Black Sea area and from West Africa to work as slaves on the sugar cane farms. Even so, sugar was very very expensive in Europe, and only very rich people could afford it.
Sugar in North America
For more information about sugar, check out these books from Amazon.com or from your library:
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