Cut sugarcane stalks beside a broken cone of pale sugar and a scatter of coarse crystals on a worn wooden table

Sugar: From Luxury Spice to the Commodity That Changed the World

For most of recorded history, the sweetener in a European kitchen was honey, and sugar was something else: a costly spice and a medicine. The history of honey article covers the long age of sweetness before sugar. Sugar's own story runs from a reed in New Guinea across India, Persia and the Mediterranean to the Atlantic plantation system, and ends with an everyday staple.

A reed that made honey without bees

Sugarcane, Saccharum officinarum, was domesticated from the wild species S. robustum around 8,000 years ago in New Guinea and the nearby islands, according to a 2025 genome study published in Cell by researchers at the French agricultural research center CIRAD. From there it spread west, eventually reaching India.

In India, cane juice became crystals. Around 327 BCE, Nearchus, a general of Alexander the Great, reported that "a reed in India brings forth honey without the help of bees," as AramcoWorld's history of sugar recounts. Crystallized sugar was being made from cane juice there 2,000 or more years ago. The juice was boiled promptly, poured into pots and left to cool until the concentrated syrup crystallized.

The words traveled with the crystals, and they still carry the route. English "sugar" comes through Old French sucre, Medieval Latin succarum, Arabic sukkar and Persian shakar from the Sanskrit word for ground or candied sugar, which first meant "grit, gravel." "Candy" follows a parallel path: Old French çucre candi, Arabic qandi, Persian qand, "cane sugar," probably from Sanskrit khanda, "piece (of sugar)."

Persia and the Arab world

Arab conquerors met the plant in Persia in the mid-600s, after the fall of the Sasanian Empire. Over the following centuries, sugarcane cultivation appears in the records of the Nile Valley and Delta, Syria, Palestine and North Africa, and in Spain, Cyprus, Malta, Sicily and Crete. From about a thousand years ago, at Tawahin es-Sukkar, south of the Dead Sea in present-day Jordan, sugar was produced at a scale that points toward mass production: mills, water channels and thousands of sugar pots.

Sugar was already doing double duty as medicine and spice across the eastern Mediterranean and North Africa. It was also already architecture. The anthropologist Sidney Mintz records an 11th-century caliph who celebrated feast days with table-sized models of palaces built of sugar.

A spice and a medicine in Europe

Crusaders in the 11th century noticed the Levantine sugar trade, and after they settled Cyprus in the late 12th century, much of the island's sugar went to Venice. By the early 1200s more of it was reaching continental Europe, and by the early 1300s it had a following in Britain, at two shillings a pound, roughly $78 in 2012 dollars. At that price, serving sugar was a statement of wealth.

In Sweetness and Power (1985), Mintz identified five uses sugar had in Europe: medicine, spice-condiment, decorative material, sweetener and preservative. Sweetener comes fourth. European physicians learned sugar's uses from Arab pharmacology and put it into remedies for the Black Death, none of which worked. Confectioners modeled it into "subtleties," sculpted sugar centerpieces, a tradition that runs from the caliph's sugar palaces to the pastry cook Marie-Antoine Carême, who is said to have called confectionery the principal branch of architecture.

The Atlantic model

What changed sugar from a spice into a commodity was the plantation, and the plantation was built first on islands off Africa. On Madeira, Portuguese sugar mills cast sugar in cone-shaped molds, and by the mid-1400s the island was Europe's leading sugar supplier. In the late 15th century the Portuguese settled São Tomé, in the Gulf of Guinea, and forced convicts, Jewish children and enslaved Africans to harvest and process cane and to build and maintain the mills. Archaeologists working at Praia Melão, a 16th-century mill site on the island, found a two-story stone building with a boiling room below and living quarters above, and fragments of sugar molds like those from Madeira. By 1530 the plantations were profitable enough that more mills were built. In the early 17th century the Portuguese moved much of their production to Brazil.

The model had already crossed the ocean. According to AramcoWorld, Columbus took cane plants from the Canary Islands on his second voyage in 1493 and planted them on Hispaniola. In Barbados, sugar arrived in the early 1640s, and the "sugar revolution" that followed brought the near-complete replacement of indentured servants by enslaved Africans. The John Carter Brown Library's exhibition on sugar in the Atlantic world puts it plainly: sugar "was the engine driving a large part of the slave trade and colonial commerce of the Americas, especially in the Caribbean and South America." A UK House of Lords Library briefing describes the circuit: European goods traded in Africa for enslaved people, who were shipped across the Atlantic to plantations, whose sugar, cotton and tobacco went back to Europe.

From luxury to necessity

The result showed up on British tables. British consumption per head, estimated at four pounds a year in 1700, reached eighteen pounds by 1800, a 4.5-fold rise in a century. The historian J.H. Elliott, reviewing Mintz, summarized the argument in one line: "until around 1700 the men who have the power have the sugar, but increasingly thereafter the men who have the sugar have the power." Elliott also highlighted the question Mintz raises about the British teapot: why did the English, unlike the Chinese, insist on sugar in their tea?

Boycott and abolition

Once sugar sat on ordinary British tables, refusing it became a form of protest. Anti-slavery campaigners organized two major sugar boycotts, in 1792 to 1793 and in 1825 to 1829; the Victoria and Albert Museum estimates that about 300,000 people took part. Sugar bowls inscribed in gilt with the slogan "East India Sugar, Not Made by Slaves" belonged to the same campaign. A rare glass example is in the Victoria and Albert Museum's collection.

Parliament passed the Slave Trade Abolition Act on 25 March 1807, making the trade illegal throughout the British colonies. Slavery itself continued until the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 freed enslaved people in the British Empire from 1834. Under the Act, slave owners received £20 million in compensation, and freed people over the age of six were bound as "apprentices" to their former owners, four years for domestic servants and six for field hands.

The beet

The last turn in the story happened in a laboratory. In 1747 Andreas Marggraf, a chemist at the Royal Academy of Science and Literature of Berlin, showed that beets contain sugar and that it could be extracted and crystallized. For decades the finding was treated as a curiosity. In 1786 his pupil Franz Karl Achard set out to make it practical, and with money from Frederick William III of Prussia he built the first real sugar factory in Germany, at Cunern in Silesia, which began operating in 1802: 55 years from the laboratory to the factory. War did the rest. On 25 March 1811, with the continental blockade cutting off imports of cane sugar, Napoleon issued the decree that established beet sugar manufacture in France. Sugar could now be grown in temperate Europe.

The route, in one table

Stage Where When What changed The word
Domestication New Guinea and nearby islands About 8,000 years ago Wild cane bred into a sweet crop
Crystallization India 2,000 or more years ago; noted by Nearchus about 327 BCE Juice boiled into crystals Sanskrit sharkara ("grit"); probably khanda ("piece")
Spread west Persia, then the Arab world From the mid-600s Cane planted from the Nile to Spain and Sicily shakar, qand; Arabic sukkar, qandi
Luxury import Cyprus to Venice, then northern Europe Late 12th to early 14th century Sold as spice and medicine, two shillings a pound in Britain Old French sucre, çucre candi
Plantation Madeira, São Tomé 15th and 16th centuries Mills worked by forced labor
Atlantic scale Hispaniola, Brazil, Barbados 1493 to the 1640s Plantations worked by enslaved Africans
Mass market Britain 1700 to 1800 Consumption per head up from 4 to 18 pounds
Abolition Britain and its colonies 1807, 1833 Trade banned, then slavery
Beet Berlin, Silesia, France 1747, 1802, 1811 Sugar grown in temperate Europe

Sugar in the pantry now

Cooked until it browns, sugar becomes caramel, covered in the caramel guide. Whipped with honey, egg white and nuts, it becomes nougat and torrone; the torrone and nougat recipe guide starts there. Ground with cacao, it became European chocolate, the subject of the history of chocolate article. Burlap & Barrel's panela comes from heirloom cane in the mountains of Colombia, cut by hand, pressed at the estate's own trapiche and cooked into sugar (shop Burlap & Barrel Panela Cane Sugar).

The shop is at 263 Josephine Street in Cherry Creek, Denver, and visitors can ask staff questions in the shop. Products ship nationwide from theambrosianpantry.com.

Sources & Further Reading

Back to blog

Shop this story

Shop this story (1)

Keep reading

More from The Pantry Dispatch