The Origin of the Sugarcane Roller Mill JOHN DANIELS AND CHRISTIAN DANIELS Joseph Needham has described the cotton gin and sugarcane mill as “the ancestors of all steel-rolling mills, mangles and paper or textile machinery.”1 The ancestry and development of the sugarcane roller mill are clearly important for the history of technology, but they have been the subject of a surprising dilemma for over thirty years. The English-speaking world until recently has accepted as dogma that the three-roller sugarcane mill was invented by Pietro Spéciale in Sicily in 1449 without any evidence of two-roller milling in Europe. In 1955, a Brazilian scholar, Moacyr Soares Pereira, demonstrated that this dogma, first formulated by Edmund von Lippmann in 1890, was John Daniels was a sugarcane researcher in Fiji for twenty years, the last ten as director of agricultural research for the Fiji Sugar Corporation and its predecessor, CSR Limited Australia. He returned to CSR in Australia in 1973 and participated in research in sugar technology and information science until retiring as manager of information services in 1986. He and Christian Daniels are working on a history of sugar technology. Christian Daniels is a lecturer in Chinese history at Shujitsu Wom en’s University, Okayama, and a research fellow of the Toyo Bunko, Tokyo. He has published articles on the history of the premodern and modern Chinese sugar industry and is the coeditor and translator of State and Society in China: Japanese Perspectives on Ming-Qing Social and Economic History (Tokyo, 1984). He is also a collaborator on Joseph Needham’s Science and Civilisation in China project and is drafting the section on agro industrial technology (e.g., sugar, indigo, oil crops). The authors thank Dr. Charles Davis, formerly general manager technology, CSR Limited, Dr. Alex Keller of the University of Leicester, and Dr. Joseph Needham of the East Asian History of Science Library, Cambridge, for a critical reading of an early version of the manuscript. They also express their appreciation for valuable suggestions from the Technology and Culture referees and acknowledge stimulus from the publications of Drs. J. H. Galloway and Stuart Schwartz cited in the text. Finally, they thank CSR Limited for encouragement and help with information services. ‘Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 4, Physics and Physical Technology, pt. 2, Mechanical Engineering (Cambridge, 1965), p. 92.© 1988 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/88/2903-0007$01.00 493 494 John Daniels and Christian Daniels clearly incorrect.2 Nevertheless, the controversy has continued be cause of the immense prestige of von Lippmann and because of the considerable authority of Noel Deerr, who independently advanced the dogma in a series of publications culminating in his widely used The History of Sugar (1949-50).3 An additional factor has been the general ignorance of English-speaking scholars in this field about Soares Pereira’s work and the discussion on his findings published in French and Portuguese.4 Even though they were alerted to the con troversy by the excellent study ofJ. H. Galloway in 1977,5 we still find the 1449 Sicilian origin cited without reservations in recent authori2Moacyr Soares Pereira, A Origem dos Cilindros na Moagem da Cana (Rio de Janeiro, 1955). Soares Pereira’s findings were announced earlier in 1953 by Gil de Methodio Maranhâo, “Investigaçâo sobre a Origem dos Cilindros em Moagem da Cana,” Brasil Açucareiro 41 (January 1953): 59—61, and this appeared as the preface to Soares Pereira (above). Soares Pereira proposed an Asian origin of the two-roller horizontal mill that was made vertical, with a roller added, in Brazil. We have called the von Lippmann hypothesis a dogma because of the uncritical acceptance of a hypothesis that had obvious inconsistencies; see Edmund O. von Lippmann, Geschichte des Zuckers: Seit den atiesten Zeiten bis zum Beginn der Rübenzuker-Fabrikation (Wiesbaden, 1970, repr. of 2d ed., 1929), p. 338 (1890 ed., p. 217). Von Lippmann is widely quoted by Latin American scholars from a Portuguese translation, Rodolfo Coutinho, História do Açùcar, 2 vols. (Rio de Janeiro, 1941-42). 3Deerr first advanced the dogma in 1921 and...