Ages 8 to 14 years. What was the world like before sugar? Find out how the human desire for sweets made a tropical grass into a valuable commodity around the world. With the use of colourful images and maps, The Biography of sugar details how sugar grows, which countries produce it, and the sour history of slavery and exploitation that surrounded its early production. Other topics include: What is a commodity?; sources of sugar and where they are grown; the history of sugar and the sugar trade, from the ancient world, to medieval Europe, to the Caribbean; slavery and sugar plantations; the production and manufacture of sugar; environmental concerns of modern sugar cultivation; uses of sugar, from sweetening, to food preservation, to medicine; the development of sugar substitutes.