The sugar industry is quite old and widespread. It is easy to define briefly (the industry of processing raw materials into sugar and selling that sugar), but to define it in detail would take many pages.

For a history of the sugar industry in the broadest sense, visit this site:
http://www.irish-sugar.ie/noframes/nf-pages/nf-hist/nf-hist.htm
or this one:
http://www.sucrose.com/lhist.html

That same site considers itself a voice for sugar technology:
http://www.sucrose.com/home.html