Sugar connections

Nowadays it’s strange to think that something as simple as sugar was once considered a rare commodity only available to elite upper class citizens. Not just sugar but other things that we take for granted everyday like pepper or sweetened coffee, something we could easily obtain, was once extremely difficult for people to obtain. In the world we live in now, getting these things are as simple as a trip to the grocery store. It just goes to show how dependent we were, and are, on the rest of the world. All the things that are easy to get for us now would not be so readily available if not for expansion and conquest. It’s a sad thought but the truth is that without the exploitation of other societies, a lot of things that we use every day would not be around. More specifically, something like sugar would not be around if not for Muslim expansion. Honestly, I don’t think that anyone in the present would ever think that sugar would not be in America if not for expansion alone, let alone Muslim expansion. If anything, this shows that everything that happens has an impact on the world. Even major events such as a war in another country don’t just impact one region, there is always a global impact in these kinds of matters whether we notice them or not. This is the beginning of sugar becoming an isolated product to a mass commodity. This in itself was a complex process that didn’t happen overnight. After it became known in Europe it became a luxury for people to have that only was available to the elite in society. To me, thinking of sugar as a luxury is a bit of a difficult concept to grasp because it’s found everywhere now, especially in our society. Finding people who cannot easily find sugar would be a difficult task. From the introduction of sugar in Europe came the desire for it to become available to the masses. And because the process of growing sugar requires large amounts of labor, the need for slaves also started to come up, not to mention a need for more land to grow the sugar on. Again the idea of things that could seem totally unrelated actually are more interwoven than they may seem. I mean personally, thinking that the want for sugar eventually caused more slavery in the world is not some type of connection I would have made. Sugar created a connection between things worlds apart like money from one part of the world bought slaves from another part of the world to grow in an entirely different part of the world. And if this is the connection made just for sugar, imagine what kind of impact things like salt or pepper had on the world when they were becoming more popular; not only those but all spices in general.