The mark of cane

Sugar transformed our world. From its origins in New Guinea, this tall sappy grass initially made slow progress around the globe. It reached India in 500 BC, and then travelled harmlessly to Persia, arriving 1,000 years later. But, in the early 15th century, it reached Europe, and suddenly everything changed. Sugar would become the catalyst for the greatest and most rapacious expansion that humankind has ever seen.

Europeans couldn’t get enough of it, and were soon rearranging the world. No longer was foreign adventure a matter of pilfering and persecution; by the early 1600s, the newly emerging seapowers were competing for land. Huge tracts of South America and the Caribbean were snapped up, and then fought over for the next 200 years — often with devastating ferocity (Britain’s attack on Cuba in 1741 involved 28,000 troops, of whom 22,000 perished). West Africa, meanwhile, was plundered for its labour, and maintained in a state of perpetual war.