The Mediterranean Sugar Industry

Abstract

OR almost a thousand years North Africa, the Middle East, and Europe received their supplies of sugar from an industry established around the shores of the Mediterranean. This industry began about A.D. 700, for centuries flourished in different parts of the region, and finally succumbed during the sixteenth century to competition from the new plantations in the Americas (Fig. I). The disappearance of sugarcane from the Mediterranean has been almost complete, leaving few legacies in the present landscape. Some fields of highly subsidized cane are still cultivated behind the tourist beaches of southern Spain near Motril. Ruins of stone sugar mills remain in Palestine and in the deserts of southern Morocco. The Gate of the Sugar Workers in the walls of Syracuse attests to the former importance of sugar cultivation in Sicily. Despite such remainders, the long association of sugar cultivation with the Mediterranean is largely forgotten, and its place in the historical geography of the region is little known. The Mediterranean is the most northerly part of the world in which sugarcane, a tropical crop, has been successfully cultivated. Hence, it provides an opportunity to study the adaptation of sugar cultivation to marginal environmental conditions. The organization of the Mediterranean industry, as it developed in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, heralds the organization of the Atlantic industry. Indeed, the Mediterranean sugar industry can be seen as a school for the colonizers of Madeira, the Canaries, and tropical America. It is an important link in the chain of diffusion and development that has taken sugar from indigenous garden plant in New Guinea to agro-industry in Jamaica, Hawaii, and other parts of the tropical world. In the standard histories of the Mediterranean in the medieval period, little attention has been given to the growth of the sugar industry. Sugar receives only passing reference as an exotic crop, an object of curiosity to Crusaders, and as an item of trade. Even Fernand Braudel in the most recent edition of his magisterial work on the Mediterranean world of the sixteenth century, gives sugar scant mention.1 The absence of any comprehensive study of the Mediterranean sugar industry by medievalists has left a gap that historians of sugar have found difficult to fill.2 Noel Deerr and Edmund von Lippmann, perhaps the most distinguished of these historians, made serious attempts to deal with the medieval period. Deerr's chapter on the