European beet sugar could replace Caribbean cane without colonial holdings

Evidence

“In 1747, precisely the year when Beckford called sugar the wheat of the Caribbean, a Prussian chemist, Marggraf, in a communication to the Royal Academy of Science and Literature in Berlin, showed that various kinds of beetroot, the sweet taste of which was already known, contained sugar that could be extracted and crystallized in a fairly simple way. Where the Welsers and the Elector of Brandenburg-Prussia had failed in the attempt to gain for Germany a place in the Caribbean sun, beet sugar indicated that that place was after all unnecessary.” — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 2043

Categorization

• XREF: This is the broader economic-end-of-slavery mechanism — the same logic that lets empires abandon plantation colonies once (or sugar/profit) can be sourced elsewhere.
• DEFINE: Concrete anchor for the causal arc: technological substitutes for colonial commodities (beet sugar, maple sugar) undercut the slave economy from outside.