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:
“Isolate city spread alongside water,
Posted with white towers, she keeps her face
Half-turned to Europe, lonely northern daughter,
Holding through centuries her separate place.”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)
“The sugar maple is remarkable for its clean ankle. The groves of these trees looked like vast forest sheds, their branches stopping short at a uniform height, four or five feet from the ground, like eaves, as if they had been trimmed by art, so that you could look under and through the whole grove with its leafy canopy, as under a tent whose curtain is raised.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“But a blind man’s cane poking, however clumsily, into the inmost corners of the house.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“We are on a mission: we are called to the cultivation of the earth.”
—Novalis [Friedrich Von Hardenberg] (1772–1801)