Cane and Molasses

Only America’s hottest, wettest states—Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, and Georgia—attempted to compete with the West Indies in growing “these honeyed reeds called sugar.” Columbus had brought cane shoots with him in 1494 to plant in the Caribbean and reported that they germinated within a week and “succeeded very well.” As the world well knows, this Asian cane succeeded so very well in the New World that it revolutionized the tables and politics of the Old, enslaving palates to sugar and men to sugar mills. Sugar took Europe by storm and Europe squabbled for the next two centuries over the Sugar Islands of the New World while planters killed off the native Indians through slave labor and imported some 10 million replacements from Africa.