Industrialization

As in England and Germany, the nineteenth century brought industrialization and urbanization to the Hapsburg realms. It also brought the sugar beet, which first transformed the diets of city dwellers and eventually the foodways of everyone See sugar beet. Starting in the 1830s, the vast majority of the empire’s sugar beets were produced in Bohemia, which by 1863 was producing 12 percent of the world’s beet sugar, much of it destined for export. Enough was left over, though, to add increasing amounts of sugar to flour-based foods that had once been barely sweet or sweetened only with fruit.