The Sugar Industry


 
 
Concept Explanation
 

The Sugar Industry

The Sugar Industry: Till the coming of the British, sugar-making in India was a cottage industry. Sugar was first produced from sugarcane plants in Northern India sometime after the first century AD.The derivation of the word “sugar” is thought to be from Sanskrit (Å›arkarā), meaning "ground or candied sugar," originally "grit, gravel". Sanskrit literature from ancient litreature, written between 1500 - 500 B.C provides the first documentation of the cultivation of sugar cane and of the manufacture of sugar in the Bengal region of the Indian subcontinent. The Sanskrit name for a crudely made sugar substance was guda, meaning “to make into a ball or to conglomerate.But the huge demand for sugar from Europe led to the large-scale production of refined sugar in factories in Europe. The need to start the production of sugar Locally in India was soon felt. Sugar factories were concentrated in Maharashtra because of the availability of sugarcane

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Pointing recounts the reliance on slavery of the early European sugar entrepreneurs:

  • The crucial problem with sugar production was that it was highly labour-intensive in both growing and processing. Because of the huge weight and bulk of the raw cane it was very costly to transport, especially by land, and therefore each estate had to have its own factory.
  • There the cane had to be crushed to extract the juices, which were boiled to concentrate them, in a series of backbreaking and intensive operations lasting many hours. However, once it had been processed and concentrated, the sugar had a very high value for its bulk and could be traded over long distances by ship at a considerable profit.
  • The [European sugar] industry only began on a major scale after the loss of the Levant to a resurgent Islam and the shift of production to Cyprus under a mixture of Crusader aristocrats and Venetian merchants.
  • The local population on Cyprus spent most of their time growing their own food and few would work on the sugar estates. The owners therefore brought in slaves from the Black Sea area (and a few from Africa) to do most of the work.
  • The level of demand and production was low and therefore so was the trade in slaves — no more than about a thousand people a year. It was not much larger when sugar production began in Sicily.
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