WI Earlier sugar beet?

Suppose the sugar beet had been cultivated in Europe earlier? Say some monks with a sweet tooth develop it by 1200 AD. Now Europeans won't have to import it from lands that grow sugar cane. Can this prevent or decrease slavery in the Caribbean and the New World?
 
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.

Hrmm. Depending on how important you believe the profits from the East Indies were, you may have just knifed the Industrial Revolution in the gut.
 
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.
 
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 think it's hard to believe that the Carribean could prosper with enormous nutmeg and cinnamon plantations. Especially since the Dutch, being no fools, were very careful not to let live truly valuable spice plants head out of Indonesia.
 

Hendryk

Banned
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.
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).

So I think that if the first empirical experimentation begins in the 11th century, by the late middle ages Europeans should have mastered a rough method of sugar production from beets.

BTW, I found this as a source, but it's in French.
 
As long as cane-sugar was competitive price-wise you didn't get to invest in beet sugar.
As slavery was abolished in the West Indies cane sugar prices went up allowing for beet sugar to take over. (as per Hendryk's link ;))
The Napoleonic blockade was an incentive to make beet sugar which disappeared at the end of the War 1814-5.
So get rid of cane sugar early and you'd get an incentive for working out beet sugar. :D
 
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.

To an extent, this is true, but it is also putting the concept before the stimulus for its development. The European-style plantation slave economy was developed in order to grow sugar. Without this model to export, the economic future of the New World could be completely different. The Caribbean would still be valuable real estate (Cuba for a long time exported leather, frex), but the bigger prizes might be sought elsewhere earlier.

That said, sugar beet processing is demanding and unrewarding. 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.
 

Hendryk

Banned
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.
 
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.

I think that's what we call 'muscovado' if it's made from cane, so it's not a unique feature of beet processing. But I'll definitely try to get my hands on some beet cassonade and compare.

One big problem is likely to be that sugar beets, like most crops of the beta type, are the result of long effort by farmers to produce something best suited to their needs. In the 1780s, after long breeding for sweet taste, the sugar content of beets in Germanyx was around 8%. By the mid-19th century, 16% had been achieved, today we manage 18-20%. We do not know how long reaching 8% took, but it is not a natural phebnomenon as all other beta variants, even the modern ones bred for sweetness, have much less than that.
 
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