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The only form of sugar used for many centuries was that sugar cane. It is believed to have been led by the inhabitants of the Polynesian islands in China and India. In Indian, the Persian Dario found in 510 BC, the cultivation of a plant from which returns a thick and sweet syrup. Dried leaves produced in large crystals that lasted a long time, the strong energy properties. The Persians brought with them the plants and cultivation spread to the Middle East.

In 325 BC Alexander the Great brought the news that in the eastern territories was a "honey that did not need bees." But the Arabs were, at which he was already in use in the sixth century BC, which extended the cultivation in their areas.

Genoa and Venice, in the tenth century, took to import small quantities of what was called "salt Arab" that the Crusades made even more widespread. Frederick II of Swabia provided to cultivate sugar cane in Sicily, but the sugar for a long time remained a rare and precious spice, sold by special and pharmacists a dear price as a medicine used for syrups and compresses.

With the discovery of the Spanish introduced the cultivation of sugar cane in Cuba and in Mexico, Brazil Portuguese, English and French Antilles, namely in those territories of Central and South America that today are among the largest producers. Since the sugar in the Americas was better and less expensive, the Spanish and Italian crops disappear, along with trade with Arab territories.

In 1575 the French agronomist Olivier de Serres said that a vegetable and widely cultivated, mainly for use fodder beet (Beta vulgaris), when cooked produce a syrup similar to that of sugar cane, a very sweet syrup. The observation, however, remained a dead letter and sugar cane was the only available for a long time. Within a century, between 1640 and 1750, consumption of the substance tripled, encouraging the tragic phenomenon of trafficking in slaves from Africa who were captured and deported to work in the plantations.

In 1747 the German chemist Andreas Sigismund Marggraf had succeeded in demonstrating the presence of sucrose from beet and some decades after his pupil Franz Karl Achard conceived a suitable industrial process is to him that it must be the first factory built in the industrial Silesia in 1802.