User:Grieg2

Sugar refinery, sugar factory and sugar mill

While writing about Dutch sugar refineries, I stumbled on the incredible confusion about the difference between sugar refineries, sugar factories and sugar mills. I.e. the confusion on Wikipedia and Wikimedia. I am not only one who noticed. The subject is indeed rather complex, and I am still discovering new aspects of it.

The difference between sugar factories and sugar refineries seems quite clear. A sugar factory has sugar cane or sugar beet as input and raw sugar or white sugar as output. A sugar refinery processes the output of a sugar mill or sugar factory. Its output is white sugar, sugar candy, or bastard sugar.

The difference is complex for many reasons: Most sugar factories also have the ability to refine raw cane (and beet) sugar and they often do this, but this does not make that they are considered to be refineries. The second reason for confusion is that the meaning of the words changed over time. In the late 19th and early 20th century, some sugar factories were also able to refine their product, while other factories could not do this. In order to mark the difference, these advanced factories were called factory-refineries, or simply refineries. Later, when about all beet sugar factories in the western world were able to do this, this practice ceased. However, some organizations had meanwhile put this ability in their company name, and they did not change this. A third problem came about by geography. In places like Java and Cuba, it seemed a good idea to distinguish between plantations with a sugar mill driven by wind or oxen and the more advanced steam powered facilities. For this distinction, the terms sugar mill and sugar factory were used. As the locals consumed the turbinado sugar or plantation white sugar sugar, this seemed fine. However, in rich countries, these kinds of sugar were not considered to have been refined. Therefore, in places like the USA or Australia, the same installation that in Java or Cuba would be called a sugar factory, would still be called a sugar mill, because it produced only the intermediate product. On Wikimedia I worked hard to get a correct distinction between sugar refineries and sugar factories.

Naval affairs

I wrote a lot about naval affairs, especially those of the Netherlands and the Dutch East Indies in the 19th century.