[...]... territories today’s major producers of sugar from sugar cane European colonial powers, whose prosperity owed so much to West Indian sugar cane production for 300 years, now shifted their source to domestic sugar beets In 2005, France was the leading producer of sugar derived from beets However, there have been several agreements, conferences, conventions and the like, aimed at preserving access to the... disintegrate and spatter) Historically, tropical and subtropical regions of the globe, such as Brazil, the West Indies, India, Fiji, the Southern USA and Northern Australia, provided sugar from sugar cane Today, sugar beets are the source of sugar in the temperate zones of Europe and Northern USA This sugar cane versus sugar beets demographic, presents a historical mirror to European colonialism There... the Ottoman Empire and, if by sea, had to negotiate the treacherous waters of the Cape of Good Hope By 1400, Portugal’s maritime excursions had probed the western coastline of ´ ˜o Africa, leading down to the island of Sa Tome off the coast of today’s Gabon They started to cultivate sugar cane, and to cope with the demands of this activity, slaves were engaged According to Elizabeth Abbott in Sugar, ... reported Hough’s then post-doctoral fellow, Dr Shashikant Pfadnis, provided a recollection of his legendary Eureka moment, when he discovered that chlorinated sugars are sweet I am grateful to Dr Earle Roberts of Jamaica’s Sugar Research Institute and His Excellency Mr Anthony Johnson, Jamaica’s Ambassador to London, for helping to me delve into Jamaica’s storied sugar history Jamaica’s National Library... Jamaica’s rank-and-file, white sugar was served only to impress hoi poloi visitors Upper class pretenders and expatriate notables sweetened their tea with exotic sugar cubes How interesting, that today brown sugar, which is championed by health mavens, is more expensive than white sugar, and “head sugar is even more expensive yet I was interested to know if the “Head Sugar of my youth, was still made... cobbled together from a little tractor And, instead of a four-inch-wide belt, there is the ubiquitous black, half-inch belt that you will see if you look into your car’s engine Ignition was effected in the old fashion way, by use of a draw cord to get the pistons moving There was no need to cut the stalks of cane into two-foot lengths, as with Mr Thyme’s puny machine of my childhood The long stalks of sugar. .. fight to free an empire’s slaves Houghton Mifflin, Boston 2 Macinnis P (2002) Bittersweet, the story of sugar, Chapter 1 National Library of Australia, Allen & Unwin 3 Abbott E (2008) Sugar, a bitter sweet history Penguin, Canada 4 Sheridan RB (1973) Sugar and slavery The economic history of the British West Indies 1623–1775 The John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore Further Reading Edwards B, History... journey from Mr Thyme’s sugar mill to the United States International Trade Commission, reliving some of the strange circumstances that lay between Jamaica and Washington But first an even briefer summary of Jamaica and sugar 1.2 1.2.1 A (Brief) History of Sugar and Jamaica Sugar and Jamaica Were Once Synonymous In Bury the Chains, Adam Hochschilds captures the wealth and riches of the Jamaican sugar. .. witness caused me to trace the relevant chemistry literature about the history of sucralose To my great surprise, the search led me back to Queen’s University, and to the stunning revelation, that the experiments to install chlorine atoms in sucrose, were being carried out in the Jones laboratory during my undergraduate internship in that very summer of 1958 My ignorance of this historical connection... by-product of the sugar cane industry is immune from the sugar beet incursion because the molasses obtained from sugar beets is not suitable for producing good rum Thus, while Tate & Lyle’s factories focused on sugar production, Appleton Estate, independently owned by Jamaica’s J Wray & Nephew, emerged as a producer of excellent rums, enhancing the image of Jamaica as the place “where de rum cum from References .