Sugarcane
Sugarcane, or Sugar cane, is any of six to 37 species of tall perennial true grasses of the genus Saccharum, tribe Andropogoneae, native to the warm temperate to tropical regions of South Asia. The world demand for sugar is the primary driver of sugarcane agriculture.
In India., between the sixth and fourth centuries BC, the Persians, followed by the Greeks, discovered the famous “reeds that produce honey without bees”. They adopted and then spread sugar and sugarcane agriculture. A few merchants began to trade in sugar—a luxury and an expensive spice until the 18th century. Before the 18th century, cultivation of sugar cane was largely confined to India. Sugarcane plantations, like cotton farms, were a major driver of large human migrations in the 19th and early 20th century, influencing the ethnic mix, political conflicts and cultural evolution of various Caribbean, South American, Indian Ocean and Pacific island nations.
Crystallized sugar was reported 5,000 years before the present in the Indus Valley Civilization, located in modern-day Pakistan and north India.Around the eighth century AD, Arab traders introduced sugar from South Asia to the other parts of the Abbasid Caliphate in the Mediterranean, Mesopotamia, Egypt, North Africa, and Andalusia. By the 10th century, sources state that there was no village in Mesopotamia that did not grow sugarcane. It was among the early crops brought to the Americas by the Andalusians from their fields in the Canary Islands, and the Portuguese from their fields in the Madeira Island.
Boiling houses in the 17th through 19th centuries converted sugarcane juice into raw sugar. …
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugar_cane
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