From wax to sugar to New York

Over my breakfast I was reading a leaflet from Eastern Approaches, a British travel group that offers guided tours to the Middle East and beyond. Its originator is the archeologist, Warwick Ball; this gentleman leads some of the tours and writes an editorial column for the company's newsletter. We'd love to meet him.

For its latest edition his subject is Delectable Comestibles and he describes how, through our appreciation of food, we can detect the spread of different cultures from the ancient to the modern world ...

Can we perhaps trace the impact of the Mongol invasions by the spread of stuffed dumplings out of China to [their] distant cousins, the pirogi of Russia, the manti of Turkey and the khinqali of Georgia and Armenia? 

That's an interesting enough chain of thought, but what really caught my attention was this one:

Where would New York be without the importance of honey? The Reformation in Europe led to the collapse of bee-keeping, hitherto the preserve of monasteries because of their demand for wax; the resulting loss of honey led to a huge demand for sugar from the New World, which is why the Dutch gave their loss-making colony of New Amsterdam to the British in exchange for the cane producing colony of Surinam in 1667.

Why wasn't history this intriguing when I went to school?