Islamic conquests introduced sugar to the Mediterranean and eventually the New World

Evidence

Sugar is an interesting additional item, which came from India via Iran, and was either unknown or very little known in Greco-Roman antiquity. We find occa­ sional references to what might be sugar, but they certainly didn’t use it normally for cuisine, and when it first appeared it was used for medicinal purposes. After the Islamic conquests sugar spread very rapidly—first its use, then its cultivation: from Persia to Egypt, to North Africa, to Spain, and from Spain to the Atlantic islands and to the New World. From the New World it came back to the Middle East. European powers were able to grow sugar more cheaply and more efficiently on their plantations than in the home countries. The same happened a little later with coffee. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 248

Categorization

• XREF: A concrete mechanism of Islamic transmission of material culture westward — supplements the reader’s claims about how the region was legible/knowable to Europe via trade goods.