Wednesday 11 June 2008

How Sugar Changed the World

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How Sugar Changed the World: Heather Whipps writes "It's unlikely that many candy-lovers in the United States think about history while quaffing an estimated 100 pounds of sugar per year, but sweet stuff once played a major role in one of the sourest eras in modern times.

White Gold, as British colonists called it ... Profit from the sugar trade was so significant that it may have even helped America achieve independence from Great Britain."

we're often told of the Caribbean slave trade, both african and Cromwell's 'black irish' slaves trucked into the Americas, but they never seem to mention just what it was all those plantation slaves were actually doing.

Stoking the boilers on a whopping one-third of the the western world's economy, that's what!