The Rum Historian title
A TALE OF RUM
9. BEET SUGAR
In the first half of the 1800s the invention and diffusion of the Column Still changed the rum industry for ever (see “A Tale of Rum 7. The Column Still” in the June issue).
In those same years two others momentous changes took place, which modified deeply the world of rum and the landscape, the economy, the society and the very ethnic composition of the Caribbean. The first change is the arrival of on the European markets on a new kind of sugar, beet sugar; the second is the end, at long last, of slavery. Let’s begin with beet sugar.
It is always worth remembering that rum was born as a by-product of sugar making, for centuries the main focus of planters, merchants and politicians being sugar, not rum. In the 1600s and 1700s, sugar was probably the most important good of the Atlantic World. In order to understand its importance, it is necessary to take a step back in time and go over, albeit briefly, the history of sugar in Europe.
Originally from South East Asia, sugar cane took thousands of years to get to Europe. The Greeks and Romans did not use it, and the Bible contains no mention of sugar: honey was the main sweetener at the time. “the land of milk and honey” was the Biblical idea of the Garden of Eden. We know, instead, that in India and China it had been used for centuries. According to many scholars, the very name sugar too seems to come from an ancient Indian word signifying “dust”. During their victorious east-ward expansion, the Arabs discovered it in and took it to the western part of their empire: the Levant, Egypt, North Africa, Sicily and Spain.
In Latin Europe, probably, sugar entered for the first time in Venice in 996, an expensive and rare drug, rather than food. Only a century later, did Europeans actually discover that sugar was a foodstuff. It happened with the First Crusade. After the conquest of Jerusalem in 1099, the Crusaders created the Crusader States which lasted, with ups and downs, until 1291 when the Muslims re-conquered Acre, the last Christian stronghold in the Levant. And in the Levant, roughly present-day Middle-East, local peasants had learned for quite some time to grow cane and make sugar. The Crusaders tasted it and, like all the Europeans after them, fell in love with it, so much so that, after being expelled from the Continent, they started to grow cane in the island of Cyprus, already with those features that would become dominant: large plantations, slave labor, production destined to faraway export markets. People loved sugar, it was in that age a valuable spice, greatly used also in cooking to dress and preserve many kinds of food and not only for cakes and pastries, like today. It was expensive, reserved only for the rich.
Oversimplifying, in the 1400s and 1500s, sugar cane cultivation spread to the recently discovered Atlantic Islands and year after year the sugar production increased, the price tended to drop and consumption grew, spreading among the middle classes too. The big, final leap towards mass production and consumption happened in the 1600s with the great plantations in Portuguese Brazil and in the French and English Caribbean.
In the 1700s, consumption became widespread all over Europe, and especially in Great Britain, thanks also to the arrival of coffee, tea and chocolate; these new kinds of food became a well-established habit and they needed to be sweetened with sugar. Another reason for the increase in consumption was the rapidly growing custom of home-made jams and preserves. The market offered several kinds of sugar, from muscovado to refined sugar, obviously in all price ranges. By then, only the poor could not afford it.
Britons were huge consumers of sugar, while the French consumed less of it, but exported it in great quantities all over Europe. Before the French Revolution, sugar was one of the most important commodities in French foreign trade, and raw French sugar from the French West Indies dominated the European continental markets.
Around sugar revolved huge political and economic interests. This is hard to understand now, but for the French and British Governments, the little Caribbean Sugar Islands were worth more than the vast territories of the Continent. In order to get an idea, we may compare it to the importance of crude oil today, or better, until a few years ago. Needless to say, all the sugar consumed in the world came from sugar cane, but science and politics made their appearance and things changed.
That sugar could be extracted from sugar beet had been known to scientists at least since 1740, but the thing had not aroused any special interest. The first factory for producing beet sugar was established in 1802, having limited success. Then Napoleon discovered it. Beet sugar became a weapon in his economic warfare against Great Britain. In 1804, Napoleon – the son of the Revolution - crowned himself Emperor. The next year, with the victory of Austerlitz (2 December 1805), he was the undisputed Master of Europe. Only the Channel saved England from an invasion. Yes, for if on land the French armies were invincible, the French Navy had been heavily defeated at Trafalgar (21 October 1805) and wiped off the seas. Unable to invade Britain, Napoleon resorted to a strategy of economic war, endeavoring to strangle his enemy’s economy with the Continental Blockade. The European markets were closed to British ships and goods, among which the precious sugar. After centuries during which its consumption had increased steadily, Europeans were left without sugar.
Or better, without legal sugar, because smuggling blossomed. Consumers by then were too used to it and wanted it; moreover, especially in Germany there was an important refining industry. By buying smuggled sugar, European refiners and consumers enriched the enemy. Napoleon resorted to the rigors of the law and to heavy repressions, but that was not enough, he had to provide an alternative, something which was not dependent on the remote Caribbean islands. So, large public funds were devolved to the development of beet sugar and within two years a large sugar beet industry was operating in France. It foundered after the defeat of Napoleon in 1815, but soon returned to prosperity and by 1835 some four hundred factories were producing nearly 80,000,000 pounds of beet sugar, a third of the French market. Soon the example of France was followed all around the continent and as early as 1840, beet sugar surpassed cane sugar in the French and German markets.
For the first time, Europe could have sugar in great quantities, produced at home, without having to depend on far away tropical colonies and large, expensive fleets. Beet sugar was good and cheap and it threatened to put out of business traditional cane sugar. French producers of beet sugar had the advantages of lower production and transportation costs, as well as much more advanced technology for refining sugar than Caribbean cane sugar producers.
French Caribbean Planters didn’t give up; with the help of the Government, and of a steady increase in consumption, they got important loans to develop new sugar plantations and had the monopoly on the French cane sugar market. The production grew, but cane sugar could not yet compete in quality or price with beet sugar.
The situation changed in 1841, when French industrialist Paul Daubrée suggested that the planters of Guadeloupe and Martinique follow the example of beet sugar producers by separating farm work from industrial work. This could be accomplished by building totally mechanized usines centrales (that is, more or less, central factories) to process large quantities of sugarcane cultivated simultaneously on several plantations. These factories would be capable of producing more than 1,000 tons of sugar after processing the cane of six or eight plantations which would simply cultivate sugarcane, leaving the processing phase to the industrialized central factory. The idea was discussed extensively in Guadeloupe and Martinique for two years, but no one was motivated to build factories until after the earthquake of February 8, 1843, which destroyed more than 400 sugar mills on Guadeloupe alone. In order to rebuild the devastated sugar industry, the colonial government authorized the creation of a steam-powered central factory capable of grinding the sugarcane of the ten or twelve planters which had lost their mills. The first central factories were built between 1844 and 1848.
History of the Carribean
According to Frank Moya Pons in his “History of the Caribbean” 2007, “The revamping of the sugar industry, which began in the French Antilles, had revolutionary consequences throughout the Caribbean. Everywhere planters were willing to stop producing sugar and simply grow sugarcane. Thus the strategy of building factories equidistant from several plantations became a popular solution. … By the end of the century, the sugar industry in the French colonies consisted of a small number of central mills, with large tracts of land cultivated by contracted foreign workers and the descendants of slaves.”
The success of beet sugar forced French Sugar Planters to specialize and concentrate their production and not only did they survive but they developed advanced production methods. In this way they were able to survive as sugar producers and to produce plenty of rum too, and of good quality. I do not have specific figures, but surely the central factories, with their great investments, their mechanization and so on, promoted the adoption of the new distillation techniques, the Column Still, which we spoke about in June. Actually, if up to the beginning of the 1800s British producers made the best rum, in the second half of the century French producers adopted the most advanced techniques and the quality of their rum improved greatly; so, after a long history of bad quality, by the 1850s French rum producers were offering rum equal or even better to that found in the British Caribbean. On the contrary, British Planters lagged behind, as has often happened in economic history when backward countries and producers were quicker to adopt new techniques than more advanced ones. In France, rum consumption grew all the time. As well as from a spontaneous evolution of taste, and possibly the first signs of escapism and attraction for all things exotic, French rum benefited also from two devastating blights on the vineyards of France. “In the 1850s, European vineyards faced a species of fungus known as Oïdium tuckerii. The Oïdium, which probably originated from the introduction of North American grapevines into Europe, severely damaged European viticulture. French wine production fell from an annual average of more than 1,1 billion gallons in the 1840s to only 290 million gallons in 1854. Because American grape vines were resistant to attack by Oïdium, many wine makers imported and cultivated American vines to save their operations. Although devastating, the Oïdium crisis was largely over in the early 1860s. … Unfortunately, however, the Oïdium-resistant American vines introduced an aphid known as the phylloxera. In the 1860s, the aphid phylloxera began destroying vineyards throughout Europe.” (F.H Smith “Caribbean Rum” 2005)
Lacking their beloved wine and brandy, the French turned to rum: while between 1816 and 1845 the import of rum into France was in the order of about 1 million liters per year, later it increased steadily and in 1896 it reached about 20 million liters! At the end of the century, France was producing and importing as much rum as Britain, if not more. Meanwhile, throughout the 1800s, numerous other countries joined the club of the exporters of rum: Australia, South Africa, India, Philippines etc.
Above all, new, great Central Factories were built in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Venezuela and other Spanish speaking Caribbean and South American Countries, which until then had been marginal in sugar and rum making, to the point that in the 1900s, thanks also to Prohibition in the USA, Cuban rum became one of the most consumed all over the world. We will come back to this in the future. Ok, I think it’s enough about beet sugar and its influence in the Rum World. See you next month.
Marco Pierini
POST SCRIPTUM
According to the law of the E.U., U.S., and of many producing countries, rum can be made only from sugar-cane, or, in other words, you can call rum a spirit only if it is made entirely from sugar-cane products. Thanks to Kenny Denruyter, I know that on the market there exist some spirits made from sugar beet, but I have never tasted them.
