alternatehistory.com

POD: In the middle ages at a precise point that remains vague and unrecorded, a monk in a Polish monastery notes that certain beets are sweeter than usual, and they get cultivated and spread around monastic lands and the region over several years, when another monk discovers that you can create sugar crystals from those particularly sweet beets. The discovery allows for the monastery to start producing sugar, and it isn't long before sugar production follows the sugar beet in spreading through Poland, Prussia, and the Baltic coast.

In the late middle ages, this sugar also feeds the production of distilled alcoholic beverages, such as the notorious Baltic rum.

So, we have Central and Eastern Europe producing sugar beets and sugar early on--I presume that this would lower sugar prices, but it'd still be a reasonably valuable trade good. How might this affect Mediterranean trade in sugar, and the cultivation of sugar there? How would sugar beet production in Europe change the attractiveness of plantation agriculture in Brazil and the Caribbean?
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