Excerpt from The World’s Sugar Supply: Its Sources and Distribution
Very seldom has it been possible to trace clearly the original home of any food staple, or to find the paths by which it was carried over the civilized world. This is the case with cane sugar. Here and there, in a chance allusion by some writer, we get a glimpse of the roads over which the knowledge of sugar came down to us, but these are only rare flashes at long intervals. Appar ently Gangetic India had long known the sugar cane and the art of boiling sugar from it. The Chinese acquired the knowledge from India in the first half of the seventh century. However, sugar cane must have been grown in Egypt at the same time that its growth was developing in India, for it is known that the Chinese, in the Mongol period, acquired the art of sugar refining from Egyptian visitors. It was the Arabs, the transmitters of more than one priceless practical art, who finally brought the culti vation of the sugar cane to the knowledge of western Europe. They probably acquired the knowledge of its cultivation from the locality about Khuzistan. In Persia, and in the days of their westward march they carried it to Morocco and even into Spain.
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