What new culture emerged in Europe when black tea, coffee, and chocolate met with sugar? How were the Age of Exploration, colonies, plantations, slavery, the Triangular Trade, and the Industrial Revolution all interconnected through sugar? We explore the birth of the political and economic systems that sustain the world and the interconnected threads of world history through the history of sugar.

One of the earliest examples of a 'world commodity' that has shaped history is sugar.
So, from the 16th to the 19th centuries, politicians and businessmen around the world brainstormed ways to control sugar production and secure its distribution channels.
In Brazil and the islands of the Caribbean, large farms called plantations were created for sugar production.
The plantation was solely focused on growing sugarcane and processing it, with no other activities taking place.
For example, even basic foodstuffs such as grains were dependent on imports, and only sugarcane was grown.
--- p.11

Europeans spent a fortune building plantations in the Caribbean to produce sugar, the 'world commodity.'
To secure labor to cultivate these plantations, African slaves were brought in at a furious pace.
That is why the slave trade and the sugar import trade were connected from the beginning.
For example, slave trading ships that departed from Liverpool, England, carried guns, glass beads, cotton fabrics, and other items that African black kingdoms wanted to exchange for slaves.
They were traded for slaves in West Africa.
And after transporting the slaves they acquired along the tragic 'Middle Passage', they sold them in North and South America and the Caribbean, and returned to Liverpool, their starting point, with sugar (and in rare cases cotton).
This was a voyage that took more than two months, and this series of trade has often been called the "triangular trade" by historians.
--- p.61

There were also many coffee houses where people talked about literature, theater, and music.
The evaluation of literary works was decided through conversations in coffee houses.
Around this time, Daniel Defoe, who wrote Robinson Crusoe, and Jonathan Swift, who wrote Gulliver's Travels, appeared in England, and a new field of literature called the novel was born.
Coffee houses can also be said to have played a major role in the emergence of the novel.
Another important thing that was born in the coffee house is political parties.
The era of the Puritan Revolution, during which Cromwell seized power, came to an end, and Charles II, the son of Charles I, who had been executed by Cromwell, returned to England in 1660 after living in exile in France.
Around that time, groups similar to political parties, called Tories and Whigs, emerged in England.

--- p.108