The industrial revolution is not just the steam engine, but is a set of discoveries and innovations in the production sector that have produced an epochal rift in the world economic equilibrium. Suddenly, having "the land" no longer meant being rich and powerful and indeed, in most cases, having the land meant absolutely nothing.
One of the most important introductions of this era, which in its early stages travels parallel to the French Revolution and the Napoleonic age, concerns sugar, specifically sugar processing.
Up to that time sugar was produced by hand, by legions of slaves, in the colonies, but the industrial revolution changed everything, and introduced a method for the industrial production of sugar, starting with the sugar beet.
Producing sugar from sugar beet was not difficult, even the ancients knew how to do it, but, the innovation of the late eighteenth century, made it possible to produce much more sugar from a single beet, in much less time, and required the use of much less people.
Faced with this new technology, the sugar cane plantations in the colonies, which based their production on slave labor, seemed something primitive and above all, economically inexpensive.
Because producing sugar in the colonies, albeit with almost zero-cost labor, and importing it into Europe, was still expensive, producing it in Europe, with a slightly higher production cost, but completely reducing the costs for transport at sea, in general economy made sugar cheaper, so cheap that, within a few decades, traditional sugar buyers (aristocrats and bourgeois) , they were no longer able, on their own, to absorb the entire supply, so the price of sugar gradually began to decline.
We are at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Europe is undergoing revolutionary ferment and the specter of a totally new and unexpected economic crisis appears on its doorstep, a crisis of overproduction ( typical of the post industrial revolution ), but cheap sugar, Marc Bloch reveals, does not produce this crisis and, on the contrary, produces an unexpected push.
The large availability of sugar in European markets makes it accessible to the popular masses, which began to take shape as popular masses and suddenly sugar, once used only to sweeten bitter drinks such as coffee or chocolate, was now a mass commodity, a commodity of consumption that quickly found application in many fields, marking a revolution in pastry, but also in food preservation procedures, in particular fruit, for example jams, but also Ketchup and caramel, which we can define ( in the early 19th century) such as tomato and sugar jams.
But it does not end there, because the economic boom of the early nineteenth century would also have other effects, political and social, and would have changed the world forever.
But I will not talk about it here, instead I refer you to the video, released right now on my Youtube channel