The Spread of Sugar Cane Cultivation
The people of New Guinea were probably the first to domesticate sugarcane, sometime around 8,000 BC. After domestication, its cultivation spread rapidly to Southeast Asia, southern China, and India, where refining the juice into granulated crystals developed. By the sixth century AD, sugar cultivation and processing had reached Persia, whence they were carried into the Mediterranean by the Arab expansion. "Wherever they went, the Arabs brought with them sugar, the product and the technology of its production."
Spanish and Portuguese exploration and conquest in the fifteenth century carried sugar south-west of Iberia. Henry the Navigator introduced cane to Madeira in 1425, while the Spanish, having eventually subdued the Canary Islands, introduced sugar cane to them. In 1493, on his second voyage, Christopher Columbus carried cane seedlings to the New World, in particular Hispaniola.
Read more about this topic: History Of Sugar
Famous quotes containing the words spread, sugar, cane and/or cultivation:
“none
Thought of the others they would never meet
Or how their lives would all contain this hour.
I thought of London spread out in the sun,
Its postal districts packed like squares of wheat:”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1985)
“Naughty Paughty Jack-a-Dandy,
Stole a Piece of Sugar Candy
From the Grocer’s Shoppy-Shop,
And away did hoppy-hop.”
—Henry Carey (1693?–1743)
“Old rockin’ chair’s got me, cane by my side;”
—Hoagy Carmichael (1899–1981)
“The cultivation of one set of faculties tends to the disuse of others. The loss of one faculty sharpens others; the blind are sensitive in touch. Has not the extreme cultivation of the commercial faculty permitted others as essential to national life, to be blighted by disease?”
—J. Ellen Foster (1840–1910)