Sugar is fascinating stuff, thanks for posting. I am a big sugar fan. It has its sinister sides too though. I didn't know sugar beet was used to make it. In my hometown in Scotland, sugar was one of the biggest businesses in town, even in the sixties and seventies. The company based there was Tate & Lyle. As far as I know their produce, in the time I knew them, was entirely from cane, pretty much all sourced from Africa. I don't know how much of the manufacturing was done in UK, I think they imported sugar more or less as a finished product, from factories I guess they had in Africa.
We can guess who would have been working in those factories historically, as well as gathering the cane. We can guess also the cane would have come from fields "Owned" by Tate and Lyle.
This was what folk said at the time.
So it looks like a business deeply immersed in the colonial history of UK. Further, sugar is blamed for being at the root of processed food addiction, causing both tooth rot, and diabetes.
But I still love it, where would we be without sugar?