What was sugar used for in 16th and 17th centuries?

Answer 1

It was used to sweeten foods and make confections, as well as being an important ingredient in rum production.

Sugar as a commodity in its own right can be traced back several thousand years in China and India. A definite reference dates to 510 B.C. when soldiers of the Persian Emperor Darius saw sugar cane growing on the banks of the River Indus. They called it the reeds which produce honey without bees.

Much later it was grown in Persia and the Arabs took it to Egypt. The word sugar is itself derived from an Arabic word.

Sugar cane, to which all the earliest references refer, is a member of the grass family. It can grow up to 15 feet tall, with leaves at the top and a hollow stalk filled with a sweet juice or sap from which sugar can be extracted. A perennial tropical plant, it grows best in very warm climates. It is ready for harvesting after 10 to 20 months.

Alexander the Great (356-232 B.C.) introduced sugar to the Mediterranean countries, from whence it spread down the east coast of Africa.

By 600 A.D. the practice of breaking up the sugar cane and boiling it to produce sugar crystals was widespread. Six hundred years later, when Marco Polo visited China, he saw flourishing sugar mills.

The mediaeval world was quick to recognise the difference sugar made to food, and a flourishing trade built up.

By the middle of the fifteenth century there were plantations in Madeira, the Canary Islands and St. Thomas, and they supplied Europe with sugar until the sixteenth century, when manufacture spread over the greater part of tropical America, followed in the next century by the development of sugar exports from the West Indies. Old records show that raw cane sugar was being refined in Dublin and Belfast in the middle of the seventeenth century.

The other main source of sugar, sugar beet, although known as a sweet vegetable, was not used as a commercial source of sugar until the second half of the eighteenth century, when Margraf, working in Berlin, discovered a technique for extracting sugar from the beet. This was later further developed by his pupil Achard. Its further development was due in large part to the activities of two major historical figures, Nelson and Napoleon.

Nelson's victory at Trafalgar in 1805 was followed by a blockade which cut off continental Europe from cane sugar. Napoleon, hearing of the new technique for extracting sugar from sugar beet, decided in 1811 that sugar beet was henceforth to be the source of sugar for Europe. Thereafter cane sugar and beet sugar developed in parallel and often in competition.

From the Middle Ages on sugar was for several centuries a commodity a little like pepper in price and usage. King Henry III of England had difficulty in obtaining as much as 3lbs for a banquet in 1226.

It was given as a special present to lovers in Southern France and elsewhere. It formed the basis of trade between Barbary (Morocco) and England in Henry VIII's day. The demand for sugar was one of the major reasons for the slave trade for two centuries or more. During the whole of the eighteenth century it was the direct or indirect cause of many an Anglo-French naval battle in the Caribbean.

Answer 2

a million. bathe 2. Juice 3. Marker 4. Checkers 5. Sugar 6. dogs 7. movie 8. footwear 9. culmination 10. Black 11. Mum 12. video sport 13. coastline 14. Boy 15. espresso sixteen. soccer 17. evening 18. Yahoo 19. activity 20. Coke 21. skinny 22. Glue Stick 23. Carpet floor 24. humorous movie 25. Fly relaxing poll! :)

Answer 3

same thing as today...It is sweet

Answer 4

alcohol, didnt they have fun!!