of the 13th Century, refers to “a great many sugar factories in South China, where sugar could be freely bought at low prices.”  The Mohammedan records of that period also show the manufacture, in India, of crystallized sugar and candy.  The area of production at that time covered, generally, the entire Mediterranean coast.  The crusaders found extensive plantations in Tripoli, Mesopotamia, Palestine, Syria, and elsewhere.  The plant is said to have been introduced in Spain as early as the year 755.  Its cultivation is said to have been a flourishing industry there in the year 1150.  Through China, it was early extended to Japan, Formosa, and the Philippines.  The records of the 14th Century show the production and distribution of sugar as an important commercial enterprise in the Mediterranean region.  The Portuguese discoveries of the 15th Century carried the plant to the Azores, the Cape Verde islands, and to possessions in the Gulf of Guinea.  The Spaniards took it to the Western Hemisphere in the early years of the 16th Century.  The Portuguese took it to Brazil at about the same time.  While a Chinese traveller, visiting Java in 424, reports the cultivation of sugar cane, it was not until more than twelve hundred years later that the island, now an important source of sugar supply, began the production of sugar as a commercial enterprise.  By the end of the 18th Century there was what might be called a sugar belt, girdling the globe and extending, roughly, from thirty-five degrees north of the equator to thirty-five degrees south of that line.  It was then a product of many of the countries within those limits.  The supply of that time was obtained entirely from cane.

The early years of the 19th Century brought a new experience in the sugar business.  That was the production of sugar, in commercial quantities, from beets.  From that time until now, the commodity has been a political shuttlecock, the object of government bounties and the subject of taxation.  In 1747, Herr Marggraf, of the Academy of Sciences, in Berlin, discovered the existence of crystallizable sugar in the juice of the beet and other roots.  No practical use was made of the discovery until 1801 when a factory was established near Breslau, in Silesia.  The European beet-sugar industry, that has since attained enormous proportions, had its actual beginning in the early years of the 19th Century.  It was a result of the Napoleonic wars of that period.  When the wars were ended, and the blockades raised, the industry was continued in France by the aid of premiums, differentials, and practically prohibitory tariffs.  The activities in other European countries under similar conditions of governmental aid, came a little later.  The total world supply of sugar, including cane and beet, less than 1,500,000 tons, even as recently as 1850, seems small in comparison with the world’s requirement of about twelve times that quantity at the present time.  The output of beet sugar was then only about 200,000 tons, as compared with a present production of approximately 8,000,000 tons.  But sugar was then a costly luxury while it is today a cheaply supplied household necessity.  As recently as 1870, the wholesale price of granulated sugar in New York was thirteen and a half cents a pound, or about three times the present average.