The manufacture of beet sugar was revived by Austria in 1831 and by 1840 there were many factories in operation. In 1854 the output of domestic sugar equaled the tonnage brought in from foreign countries and beet sugar had established itself throughout Europe as a strong competitor of the cane sugar of the colonies.
The European consumption, however, had grown at such a rate that the domestic beet-sugar production did not keep pace with it, hence the cane manufacturer was scarcely sensible of the competition for some years; in fact Europe took rather more than less cane from the tropics for a time.
During the nineteenth century Europe became less and less dependent upon the cane countries of the New world for its supplies. The abolition of slavery in most of the European possessions (1825-50), the development of the cultivation of cane in India and Java, and the expansion of the bounty-fed beet-sugar industry in Europe all contributed to bring this about and many colonial cane growers found themselves on the brink of ruin.
Slavery, upon which cane sugar raising so greatly depended, was entirely abolished in British possessions in 1834, in France in 1848 during the Second Republic, in the Dutch West Indies in 1863, in Porto Rico in 1873, in St. Thomas in 1876, and in Cuba in 1880. Great Britain appropriated the sum of £20,000,000 sterling as an indemnity, and of this £16,500,000 went to West Indian planters, the remainder going to Mauritius and the Cape, but indemnification, while most welcome, did not restore the supply of labor. Many of the freed slaves refused to work and great numbers of them left the plantations. British colonists were at a serious disadvantage, too, as after their slaves were liberated slavery still existed in other West Indian islands, and to offset this a special import tax was imposed on sugar produced by slave labor.
Strenuous efforts were made to secure an adequate labor supply. Chinese coolies, free negroes and Hindus were tried, but the cost was great and the number available was insufficient for the proper cultivation and upkeep of the plantations. This condition obtained in the British West Indies, Cuba, Louisiana, Peru, Brazil, the Guianas, Mauritius, Réunion and other places, and the cane growers had hard work to keep from going under during the adjustment period, when they were learning how to operate their plantations with a limited number of hands. Importation of labor, subdivision of cane lands into small tracts, to be rented or sold to farmers—many plans were tried—but naturally under such circumstances development was impossible, and beet sugar, which had been steadily increasing, finally outstripped cane in 1883-84, while in 1899-1900 cane only furnished 34.7 per cent of the world’s crop. In 1912-13 the cane tonnage exceeded that of beet by 211,082 tons of 2240 pounds. The great war in Europe has curtailed the production of beet sugar in that country to such an extent that of the world’s output for 1915-16 the proportion of cane to beet was roughly as two-thirds to one-third in favor of the former. The actual figures are:
| Cane | 10,533,039 | tons |
| Beet | 5,986,404 | ” |
| Excess of cane over beet | 4,546,635 | tons |
The following table giving the world’s production of cane and beet from 1852 to 1916 will be of interest, but it should be borne in mind that this comparison between beet and cane is not a fair one, because the figures are incomplete as far as cane is concerned.
In some instances in former years, only the quantity exported from a country was included in the world’s statistics and the amount consumed at home was left out of the calculations. This is particularly noticeable in the case of India, whose production of over two million tons of sugar annually was omitted from the older estimates as it all went into domestic consumption—while the beet figures were invariably given in full.
The world’s crop figures as furnished by Willett & Gray for the period from 1852 to 1916 include British India’s production for the last eleven years only: