The Sugar Industry

Abstract

THE world's sugar industry was the subject of the Streatfeild Memorial Lecture delivered at the Institute of Chemistry by Mr. Lewis Eynon, on Nov. 22, 1929, and recently published. Sugar cane, which until about 130 years ago, was the only source of sugar, was known before the Christian era, and is supposed to have originated in India. Arabs and Egyptians, however, were the pioneers in the art of crystallising sugar many centuries later. Sugar appears to have been first imported into England from the Mediterranean countries in the fourteenth century, and the art of refining introduced during the reign of Henry VIII. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, however, the bulk of the world's sugar was derived from America and the West Indies, where abundant slave labour and good growing conditions particularly favoured the industry.