Sugar beet replaces sugar came as early human's source of sugar

Basically what the tin says, what if sugar beets replaces sugar cane as the preferred source of sugar. The benefit of beetroot would be that it could be grown in England. What effect would this have on slavery and colonialism.
 
Are not sugar beets harder to get sugar from?
once the sugar beets cultivar is developed, no, is not more difficult to make sugar from beets than is from cane.
What took time was the development of the cultivar of beets good enough to make them Sugar beets
 
Sweet beetroots really appeared in the late modern era : beetroots were cultivated before, but were either used as salad, boiled or for animal consumption.
You could have equivalent to sweet beetroots appearing earlier, but it would imply enough chemistry knowledge and practice to isolate sugar in vulgar beetroots and attempt crossings and selections to obtain something usable, and of course an interest on biology.

So, while sugar cane is readily avaible,it requires significant technological development to make it so with beetroots.
Note that the first human source of sugar was certainly honey, not sugar cane.
 
Would be neat to see honey become the main source. Giant bee plantations.
Giving my two cents, so don't quote me on this, I'm under the impression that honey production requires a decentralized and limited network of hives, regarding both "rivalry" between them and enough avaible nectar.
On the other hand, you can make whole plantation of sugarcane providing with a more regular supply of sugar, trough cash-crop production : note that it was a fructious but limited production up to the Late Middle-Ages, where Italian financials and Iberian producers went toward a plantation economy.

Among the other alternatives, you had in ancient and medieval times : dates and date honey/syrup, which obviously wouldn't fit British climate;and grape syrup (defrutum and arrope) which really was one of the main sweeteners.

But really, honey was the main source eventually due to its really wide and decentralized presence in Europe.
 
Giving my two cents, so don't quote me on this, I'm under the impression that honey production requires a decentralized and limited network of hives, regarding both "rivalry" between them and enough available nectar
Is more the Later than the former, given enough available nectar, you could have a high concentration of honey combs and bees, but those conditions are extremely rare, localized and short lived so you can not really do a industrialization of the Honey production

EDIT
Here a source where they explain how millions upon millions of bees are relocated to California every spring to participate in the Almond pollination processes, where you see an overabundance of both, nectar and bees in a relatively small area
 
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Would be neat to see honey become the main source. Giant bee plantations.

Honey was a major medieval trade good, even in the era of collecting it from the wild - at least in Eastern Europe. It was absolutely exported in large quantities. Maybe have someone invent the modern hive which is sparing of the bees earlier, and then afterwards the inertia could carry this onwards for a fairly long time?
 
Giving my two cents, so don't quote me on this, I'm under the impression that honey production requires a decentralized and limited network of hives, regarding both "rivalry" between them and enough avaible nectar.
On the other hand, you can make whole plantation of sugarcane providing with a more regular supply of sugar, trough cash-crop production : note that it was a fructious but limited production up to the Late Middle-Ages, where Italian financials and Iberian producers went toward a plantation economy.

Among the other alternatives, you had in ancient and medieval times : dates and date honey/syrup, which obviously wouldn't fit British climate;and grape syrup (defrutum and arrope) which really was one of the main sweeteners.

But really, honey was the main source eventually due to its really wide and decentralized presence in Europe.

Date sugar could develop onto industrial scale production in the Maghreb and Levant fairly easily and early on, given the date palm's ability to thrive in those regions close to early civilizations on land that's otherwise not very useful for grain agriculture. As we see from the adoption of major sugar industries in Morocco fairly early on (Their plantation system served as a real template for later Caribbean and other New World sugar plantations) there was certainly a regional demand for sweeteners (Especially after the Islamic conquests and, likely, the popularization of coffee) and it would be connected to the broader Mediterranean trade networks. I could see thePhoenicians and their decedents (Carthage in particular) really helping this take off via trade/tribute with the nomadic and semi-nomadic populations of the hither lands, for whom dates were a staple, and slowly developing larger orchards.
 
Date sugar could develop onto industrial scale production in the Maghreb and Levant fairly easily and early on, given the date palm's ability to thrive in those regions close to early civilizations on land that's otherwise not very useful for grain agriculture. As we see from the adoption of major sugar industries in Morocco fairly early on (Their plantation system served as a real template for later Caribbean and other New World sugar plantations) there was certainly a regional demand for sweeteners (Especially after the Islamic conquests and, likely, the popularization of coffee) and it would be connected to the broader Mediterranean trade networks. I could see the Phoenicians and their decedents (Carthage in particular) really helping this take off via trade/tribute with the nomadic and semi-nomadic populations of the hither lands, for whom dates were a staple, and slowly developing larger orchards.

Plantation system in the Islamic West (at the difference of what existed on the Near East) had a fair influence on Late medieval cash-crop business and later Carribean plantations, but they suffered from being essentially a local (if widespread) production and consumption.
It really asked for Italian financing in Christian Sicily and Spain, turned to European markets, to really have a plantation economy while not restricted to Christian lands : Nasrid Grenada seems to have enjoyed something similar, but that was happening in the same time than in Christian Spain.
Note that grape syrup really made its way in European markets, more readily preservable than dates or date honey IRRC.

Another problem might be, at least for Maghreb, irrigation limitations that really prevented to full-blown plantation economy elsewhere than on the coastal band (you'd argue that the Bled al-Barud was unfit for a tightly controlled production, politically-wise anyway). It's maybe why sugar consumed in Ifriqya came from Sicily.

As for Phoenicians, I tend to agree that they could master sweetener markets, while not in African production (most of agricultural production was taken as tribute from neighbouring peoples, and the rest that was produced on their territory seems to have importantly served to their own consumption except for prestige goods as wine, olive and fruits) but in a TL where they keep Sicily or Spain. Altough I'd rather see a grape syrup for conditioning and transport (in fact, I did searched a bit about this for my current TL) rather than dates except as a secondary product in no small part because these were obtained from Numids, rather than directly cultivated IIRC.

How about increased use of fruit syrups?
Grape syrup was quite traded in Late Middle-Ages and might have been the second most used sweetener in late medieval Europe.
With an aformentioned PoD, we might see Carthage adding defrutum to her colonial exports.
 
The benefit with cane over beets are that cane deliver its own fuel for the process, it's why sugar extraction from beets are so complex to lower the fuel cost.
 
The biggest problem was the fact that sugar beets needed to be selectively bred in order to be competitive.

Birch syrup too--it's a relative of maple syrup although it requires much more sap to make the syrup.

Somehow getting the Vinlanders to find maple syrup and export it would be nice too.

Honey was a major medieval trade good, even in the era of collecting it from the wild - at least in Eastern Europe. It was absolutely exported in large quantities. Maybe have someone invent the modern hive which is sparing of the bees earlier, and then afterwards the inertia could carry this onwards for a fairly long time?

That could be huge. Better beehives means more honey products, and also cheaper honey products. It could mean that mead is more much popular than OTL in Northern Europe. Maybe even elsewhere too, since there's no reason that a dessert wine might win favour over a rarer and more expensive good like an aged mead.
 
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