Read the passage from Sugar Changed the World.Seeing the fortunes being made in sugar, the French started their own scramble to turn the half of the island of Hispaniola that they controlled (which is now Haiti), as well as Martinique, Guadeloupe, and French Guiana (along the South American coast near Dutch Guiana), into their own sugar colonies, which were filled with hundreds of thousands more African slaves. By 1753, British ships were taking an average of 34,250 slaves from Africa every year, and by 1768, that number had reached 53,100.The sugar that piled up on the docks near the plantations was something new in the world: pure sweetness, pure pleasure, so cheap that common people could afford it. Scientists have shown that people all over the world must learn to like salty tastes, sour tastes, mixed tastes. But from the moment we are born, we crave sweetness. Cane sugar was the first product in human history that perfectly satisfied that desire. And the bitter lives of the enslaved Africans produced so much sugar that pure sweetness began to spread around the world.