Sugar

Sugar in its original form is sugarcane, a tall grass first domesticated in New Guinea from the wild species Saccharum robustum, with genetic and archaeological evidence placing that domestication roughly eight to ten thousand years ago. For most of its early history sugarcane was simply chewed raw for its sweet juice as it spread through the Pacific islands and into South and East Asia; the technique for boiling cane juice down into a solid, storable form of sugar was developed later, in India, roughly twenty five hundred years ago, the innovation that turned sugarcane from a chewed treat into a traded commodity. That commodity status hardened into an industrial one after the Columbian Exchange. Portuguese growers were the first to move sugar production across the Atlantic, refining cane on Madeira from 1432 with African slave labor from the outset. Christopher Columbus carried cane to the Caribbean on his second voyage in 1493, and Brazil became the leading Atlantic producer by the late sixteenth century, worked first by enslaved Indigenous people and then overwhelmingly by enslaved Africans. The Dutch and French built the Caribbean plantation complex on the same model through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; the demand sugar created is credited by economic historians as a major driver of the growing volume of the Atlantic slave trade, and the system it built was overturned only by the slave rebellion that won Haiti its independence in 1804 under Toussaint Louverture.