Sugarcane Industry and Technology. The horizontal roller mill

The horizontal roller mill was the first great innovation of the sugarcane industry. The new machine for grinding canes to extract the juice increased the industrial productivity of this industry and reduced sugar prices. Therefore, this innovation facilitated the transition of the productive process, from the small Mediterranean garden to the large American estate, and it was then that the sugar supply could be incorporated into the first global economic era. This article shows that this new industrial technology had its origins in the Canary Islands at the beginning of the sixteenth century, and how the island workers transferred it later from there to the other side of the Atlantic.