In ancient times, sugar was made by squeezing the cane to make sweet juice for drying in the sun. The product was invented by the Polynesians 5000 years before the birth of Christ and, later, they always exported it to other continents.
In 510 BC the Persians obtained sugar crystals from squeezed and dried vegetables but, only in 325 BC, this product reached Europe.
In 1200 the maritime republics began importing the very first rudimentary forms of cane sugar and, shortly thereafter, the vegetable began to be cultivated in southern Italy.
Following the colonization of America, Europeans began cane cultivation abroad (making the few crops in Europe disappear) and started the massive importation of sugar.
In 1575 a French cook discovered that cooked beetroot could provide a similar syrup, but the information remained completely ignored.
One or two centuries later, sugar consumption tripled and stimulated the slavery of the black race on foreign plantations.
In the mid-eighteenth century, a German chemist was able to demonstrate the presence of sucrose in beets. Due to the friction between England and France, with the Napoleonic advent (Berlin decree, 1806), cane sugar momentarily disappeared from the trade. More or less simultaneously, the aforementioned student of the German scientist conceived the first sugar-extraction factory for sugar from beets (1801); later, the establishments spread throughout France.
After the Congress of Vienna (1814-1815), cane sugar resurfaced but, while negatively affecting the beet trade, it failed to establish itself again and was surpassed already by the second half of the nineteenth century.
