Serious European harvesting and refinement of sugar from the sugar beet began during the Napoleonic wars, when sugar from sugar cane became unavailable. But this was far from the first time that war and the fate of sugar were intertwined. More than one hundred years before, in 1764, the British decision to tax the American colonies with a new duty on molasses, the so-called Sugar Act, added fuel to the fire which would become the American Revolution.