Sugar was a rarity in eighteenth-century America. Even after cane plantations were established in the Caribbean, it remained a luxury good beyond the reach of most Americans. (Later on, cane sugar became so closely identified with the slave trade that many Americans avoided buying it on principle.) Before the English arrived, and for some time after, there were no honeybees in North America, therefore no honey to speak of; for a sweetener, Indians in the north had relied on maple sugar instead. It wasn’t until late in the nineteenth century that sugar became plentiful and cheap enough to enter
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