As it gradually begins to dawn on consumers that food doesn’t magically appear on supermarket shelves, the histories of those consumables – whose production has been key to capitalism, imperialism, slavery, and the staggering inequalities and entrenched racism of our times – also need to be put on the table. Often it is the most everyday commodities that carry the bitterest legacies: we need look no further than coffee or tea, with their obligatory doses of sugar.
Ah, sugar. Even the sound of the word feels comforting, like a mother hushing a fractious child, or a lover’s sweet-talk. It’s many a Muslim’s drug of choice; after a large night out on the baklava I’ve often been visited by headaches and irritability – the Muslim Hangover.
But the delirious effects of sucrose mask centuries of atrocities committed to support the sugar trade. Among the lesser-known episodes of this story is the moment when sugar production passed from Muslim Spain to Christian Europe, ushering in an unspeakably devastating period of slavery, loss of human life, and abuse of workforce (not to mention the environment), as well as the development of globalised capitalism and white supremacist theories and policies.
Ready to have your sweet tooth pulled? Allow me to scrub up.
A brief history
Originally domesticated in Papua New Guinea about 9,000 years ago, sugarcane was taken by canoe to other Polynesian islands and later to the Indian subcontinent. Sassanid traders brought to it Persia, planting it as far as the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers in the 4th century CE. When the Arabs conquered the Persians in 640 CE they had their first heady taste, gradually introducing it to other parts of the Abbasid caliphate and perfecting the manufacture of sugar crystals. Once Crusaders had a taste of the sweet stuff in 12th century Palestine, they were hooked.
What little sugar there was in medieval Europe was used for medicinal purposes. The Syrian polymath Ibn al-Nafis and the Andalusi “father of pharmacology” Ibn al-Baytar wrote extensively about the benefits of sugar as a “hot” and “gentle” humoral remedy that improved digestion and cured eye infections. Muslim physicians’ expertise was highly esteemed by Christian Europe1 – albeit sometimes grudgingly; “[s]ixteenth-century criticisms of sugar by medical authorities may even have formed part of a fashionable, anti-Islamic partis pris, common in Europe from the Crusades onward.”2
Sugarcane cultivation wasn’t suited for northern European climes, making sugar a luxury import; the average burgher could expect to enjoy no more than a teaspoon of it a year. But with a few adaptations, two areas of Europe could accommodate it: Sicily and the southern coast of Iberia, both of which were, at the time, under Muslim rule.
Muslim Spain
While Islamic rule in Sicily ended in 1091 CE, it continued in Al-Andalus – although gradually shrinking – for another five centuries. The Andalusian agronomist Yahya ibn al-Awwam mentions sugarcane in his 12th century canonical text on agronomy, Kitab al-Filaha. The warm, humid coastal areas of Malaga, Granada and Valencia, became home to green seas of elegantly swaying canes; in 1150 CE, there were 30,000 hectares of cane fields and fourteen sugar mills in the Granada region alone.3
After the initial military annexation of most of the Iberian Peninsula, beginning in 711 CE, came the agricultural revolution. Alongside numerous varieties of fruit trees and vegetable plants, Muslims also brought herbs and spices like saffron, coriander, cinnamon and aniseed – and the icing on the cake, sugarcane. The etymology of ‘sugar’ reveals this agricultural transfer, via the Old French sukere, Medieval Latin succarum, Arabic as-sukkar, Persian shakar, all the way back to the Sanskrit sharkara, meaning ‘gravel’.4
Hispano-Muslims cultivated sugarcane extensively from the 10th century onwards. In the Mediterranean Basin, it needed to be watered year-round, prompting the development of irrigation techniques and water engineering, such as the noria or waterwheel. In the Levant it had also ushered in the practise of sharecropping, or giving farm workers part of the crop in lieu of payment.
However, sugarcane also depleted soils, so Andalusi agronomists developed specific techniques to restore fertility. In Granada, At-Tighnari recommended applying cow manure directly to sugarcane fields, whereas around Seville, Ibn al-Awwam wrote that sheep manure was best, reapplied every eight days at the peak of the growing season.5
The Arabs had developed Indian techniques to turn sugarcane – a tough skinned member of the grass family, resembling bamboo – into non perishable sugar crystals. This laborious process involves crushing the canes, boiling the juice, skimming off impurities, and allowing the molasses to drain out of inverted clay cones, leaving behind unrefined sugar crystals.
The end product played a major role in Granada’s economy, second only to its famous silks.6 The “sugar capital” of the Granada coast was the port of Mutrayil (now Motril), which shipped locally-grown sugar to Genoa. The Spanish word for the sugarcane harvest, zafra, is derived from سفر (journey), as day labourers would travel down from the mountains to cut the cane, trim the leaves – which they fed to their donkeys, who repaid this sweet meal with their manure – and work the mills.7
But with the fall of the Emirate of Granada in 1492 CE, all of this would change.
Christian Iberia
After the Morisco Rebellion, from1568 to 1570 CE, most Cryptomuslims (i.e. those who were forced to practise Islam secretly to avoid persecution) were expelled, their plantations confiscated by the church and the oligarchy of Christian Granada. Mixed orchards were cut down to plant massive monocultures of sugarcane. Records from this period lament the damage to Valencian sugarcane production after the expulsion of the Muslims.8
The previous system of smallholdings, owned or rented by peasant farmers and worked mostly by labourers on contract, reverted back to the huge, Roman-style “protocapitalist” estates, called latifundias, owned by a small élite and worked by serfs. Moriscos (forcibly baptised Muslims) were kept on to work in sugar production, and many Christian sugar mill managers overlooked the fact that they secretly practised Islam, even begging the King for their forgiveness.9
The capture of the Emirate of Granada in 1492 represented the end of nearly 800 years of Christian efforts to (re)capture Muslim-ruled areas of Iberia. For about the last 250 years of its existence, Al-Andalus had been confined to the Emirate of Granada. This kingdom was home to about a million people, roughly equivalent to the entire rest of Spain, many of them having migrated there to flee the Christian invasion (later rebranded as a “Reconquista” to construct the legitimacy of the takeover).10
During this time, Christian Spanish gentry, or hidalgos, had started to manage matters of local politics. Many enjoyed the privilege of tax exemption, but lacked land to extract a living from. Believing that their nobility forbade them from performing manual labour, they had no desire – or knowledge – to perpetuate the Hispanomuslims’ source of wealth: agriculture.
The Spanish Muslims’ combined inheritance of Arab, Greek and Persian agronomy had turned the previously inhospitable mountain region around Granada into gardens of plenty, and the city to which they paid tributes into a wealthy metropole supporting scholarship, arts and crafts, and international trade.
But a series of weak leaders, combined with heavy taxation as a vassal state, and a 20-year siege by Isabella and Ferdinand’s combined Castilian and Aragonese forces, culminated in the fall of Granada, the last Muslim governed city in Europe, on the 2nd of January, 1492 CE.
Enter Columbus
Barely eight months later, on August 3rd of 1492, Christopher Columbus set sail, theoretically for India. We might well ask ourselves what all the rush was about. Once Al-Andalus was conquered, the self-important – but often poor – hidalgos found themselves at a loss for lands to conquer and plunder. So they turned their attentions elsewhere, initially to the idea of abundant, exotic India, with its lucrative Asian trade networks.
Columbus was aware of sugarcane production in the coastal plains of Granada. He had visited the soon-to-be Catholic Kings of Spain, Ferdinand and Isabella, at their royal encampment in Santa Fe, on the outskirts of the besieged city, to request their financial support for his quest. When he arrived in what is now part of the Bahamas, he noticed that the climatic conditions of these islands were not dissimilar to those along the coast of Granada.
At first, Columbus was blinded by the glitter of gold, which he noticed the native Taíno people wore as jewellery, and forced them into mining it for him. However, these gold reserves ran out by the early 16th century, and the arduous labour decimated the indigenous population, so he began to focus on “oro blanco”: white gold.
On his second voyage in 1493 CE, Columbus had taken along a Catalan named Miguel Ballester, who is recorded as the first white European to plant sugarcane in the West Indies and extract its juice, in 1505 CE.
Initially, Columbus suggested transporting indigenous people from the lands he had captured to Granada to work on the existing sugarcane plantations there, but Isabella demurred. Not one to listen to a woman’s authority, Columbus kidnapped between 10 and 25 native people to present at the Spanish court, though only 8 survived the journey. Isabella – who apparently had much more compassion for Indigenous Americans than she did for Moors or Africans – sent them back.
However, after Isabella’s death in 1504, Ferdinand agreed to Columbus’ proposal. Hungry for labourers since the demise of the Taíno, who were virtually exterminated by Spanish colonisation, Ferdinand sanctioned trafficking West African slaves en masse to work in the burgeoning Spanish sugar industry.11 The Portuguese, British, French and Dutch clamoured to follow suit.12
Christian Europe had actually earmarked African slaves to work in sugarcane plantations as far back as 1444 when Henry the Navigator, cruising around West Africa in search of trade routes beyond Muslim control, found people he thought would be suited for the conditions of sugarcane plantations. He trafficked 235 slaves from Lagos to Seville.
Meanwhile, a debate was springing up among Spanish Catholics over the morality of having indigenous slaves in relation to their supposed degree of humanity. This was the birth of “scientific racism” and a cornerstone in the evolution of white supremacy.
Bartolomé de las Casa, a 16th century Spanish landowner and later Dominican friar in Hispaniola, campaigned for an end to the cruel and unjust enslavement of indigenous people on the encomiendas (land and serfs given to Conquistadors by the Spanish Crown). At the Valladolid debate of 1550 CE, he challenged Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda’s argument that indigenous people were subhuman and required Spanish subjugation to civilise them. However, in an attempt to protect indigenous people, de las Casas initially suggested using Black and white slaves instead.
The much-vaunted fertility of the so-called New World stoked the fires of the Spanish landed gentry’s greed, and the experience of growing sugar in Spain was exported to these newly-captured territories. Sugar production is therefore “considered the world’s first capitalistic venture and it was European aristocracy and merchants who happily stumped up the cash to get the cogs whirring.”13
Over the next three centuries, at least 12 million slaves would be trafficked from Africa to perform the back-breaking work of growing sugarcane, and the lethally dangerous work of turning it into sugar, supercharging these European economies and transforming the world as we know it.
Sugarcane plantations were also the cauldron where white supremacist notions were cooked up and crystallised into law. Here, not only did overseer morph into law enforcement officer, but white slavers whipped up fear of Black people who outnumbered them on plantations, sowing the seeds for the absurd Great Replacement conspiracy theory that stokes white extinction anxiety even today.14
Although there were a few European voices in favour of abolition, it was only when the sugar-slave complex ceased to be economically viable for the British, as Eric Williams famously demonstrated in Capitalism and Slavery, that the movement eventually succeeded. When slavery was officially abolished by British law in 1833 CE, the government borrowed £20 million to pay off the investors for the loss of their valuable “possessions”, in 1835.15 The debt was only paid off, by British taxpayers, in 2015.16
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Sugar’s 9,000-year odyssey westwards charts episode after episode of conquest and imperial expansion. It played a potent role in changes to farming and society, and fuelled the explosion of European imperialism, mass enslavement of Africans, neoliberalism, and white supremacist ideas. As the world’s first major monoculture, it also continues to wreak extensive damage to the environment.
Whether we like it or not, Muslims have played a part in this story. The sugarcane plantations of Al-Andalus did use slave labor to supplement a free workforce, mainly saqaliba, Christian prisoners of war. One of the very first African slaves captured by Europeans in 1441 CE was an Arabic-speaking Sanhaja, who reputedly negotiated his release in exchange for helping the Portuguese acquire more African slaves.17
While the insatiable sugar-slave complex was undeniably a Western project, the participation of Muslims in the global slave trade is a stain on our conscience that needs to be cleansed.
The sugar trade is still plagued by problematic working conditions;18 nearly half of all sugar entering the UK is from areas with documented forced and child labour.19
To add even more guilt to this guilty pleasure, sugar is a major offender when it comes to the environment. Sugar plantations in Madeira, the Canary Islands, and across the New World decimated virgin forests, leading to famine and irreparable damage to ecosystems. Contemporary sugar plantations produce greenhouse gas emissions, overconsume water in water-stressed areas, and pollute waterways with pesticides and fertilisers. According to the World Wildlife Fund, “sugar is ‘responsible for more biodiversity loss than any other crop.’”20
As troubling as it is to witness the catastrophes of human action, both past and present, it’s essential for us to understand and acknowledge the role Muslims played to prevent the same crimes from being replicated. To reclaim the Muslim history of sugar is to claim a stake in its future, and the power to choose a more just path.
Footnotes
1 Sato, Tsugitaka, Sugar in the Social Life of Medieval Islam, BRILL, 2014.
2 Sidney Mintaz, Sweetness and Power, Penguin Books, 1986, p.102.
3https://archive.aramcoworld.com/issue/200407/arabs.almonds.sugar.and.toledo-.compilation.htm
4 https://www.etymonline.com/word/sugar
5 https://www.medievalists.net/2020/10/medieval-sugar/
6 Helen Rodgers and Stephen Cavendish, City of Illusions: A History of Granada, Hurst 2022, p. 65.
7 Materials available at the Museo Preindustrial de Azúcar, Calle Zafra, 6, 18600 Motril, Granada.
8 Trujillo, Carmen, Agua, tierra y hombres en Al-Andalus: La dimension agrícola del mundo nazarí, Ajbar Colección, Granada, 2004.
9 Trujillo, ibid., p. 203, quoting A. Malpica Cuello, Medio físico y territorio: el ejemplo de la caña de azúcar a finales de la Edad Media», in MALPICA CUELLO. A. (ed.): Paisajes del Azúcar. Actas del Quinto Seminario Internacional sobre la Caña de Azúcar. Granada, 1995.
10 See Chapter 6, ‘A Blessed Tree: Digging for Andalusian Roots’ in my book The Invisible Muslim (Hurst, 2020) for more on this topic.
11 Kathleen A. Deagan, José María Cruxent, Columbus’s Outpost Among the Taínos: Spain and America at La Isabela, 1493-1498, Yale University Press, 2002.
12 Duffy, William, Sugar Blues, 1975 p. 32-3.
13 Buttery, Neil, A Dark History of Sugar, Pen & Sword, 2022, p. 16.
14 Buttery, ibid, p.183-5.
15 Williams, Eric, Capitalism and Slavery, 1944, (republished Penguin 2022).
16 https://reparationscomm.org/reparations-news/britains-colonial-shame-slave-owners-given- huge-payouts-after-abolition/
17 Macinnis, Peter, Bittersweet, p. 41.
18 https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/what-kafala-system
19 https://theconversation.com/child-labour-poverty-and-terrible-working-conditions-lie-behind- the-sugar-you-eat-95242
