i think that they would of come up with other crops or activities for their slaves.
Like what? It's not like the Carribean is suited to much else, and tobacco's taken care of. snip.
cacao, vanilla, nutmeg, coffee, cinamon, dye logs ? They will find other things to grow on plantations. Onthe other hand most of these crops are less labor intensive and the processing is less dangerous so the life expectancy for the slaves might go up, and demand for slaves might be lowered.
I'm not sure. The method allowing the production of beet sugar on a large scale was developed at the turn of the 19th century, with the first processing plant opened in Prussia in 1803, and then the method being further refined in France in 1811 as a response to the British maritime blocus. And that's with the first experiment to extract sugar from beetroot having taken place in 1747 (the lag can be explained to a large extent by the absence of incentive to pursue the research further, since cane sugar was at hand).http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugar_beet
Look at the amount of processing required to get sugar out. Not going to happen in 1200s. Probably not going to happen until the Industrial Revolution.
Bright day
Ahem, wasn't sugar cane grown in mediterrean long before America was discovered?
cacao, vanilla, nutmeg, coffee, cinamon, dye logs ? They will find other things to grow on plantations. Onthe other hand most of these crops are less labor intensive and the processing is less dangerous so the life expectancy for the slaves might go up, and demand for slaves might be lowered.
Acquired taste, perhaps. Having grown up in a family from French Flanders, I for one have developed a fondness for cassonade, a lumpy, brown subtype of beet sugar (purists insist on calling it vergeoise) that is very popular in northern France and Belgium.It is saying something that even with modern variants that are much richer in sugar and with a heavily industrialised process, it still can't compete with cane on an open world market. It is hard to see how this would come about in the Middle Ages.
Acquired taste, perhaps. Having grown up in a family from French Flanders, I for one have developed a fondness for cassonade, a lumpy, brown subtype of beet sugar (purists insist on calling it vergeoise) that is very popular in northern France and Belgium.