Rum: Fuel For the Modern World

By Laura Barcella, AlterNet. Posted December 2, 2005.

Ian Williams knows rum, and he knows it far better than you, or I, or anyone we know.

His interest in the libation began as a boy growing up in a Liverpool, England council estate -- the American equivalent of a housing project. Williams' dad couldn't afford much at Christmastime, but he always scrounged up enough to buy a sole, special bottle of rum ("Usually Demerara," Williams recalls) to help stay warm during the snowy season.

A frequent AlterNet contributor and a U.N. correspondent for The Nation, Williams delves into the drink's remarkable history in his latest book, Rum: A Social and Sociable History of the Real Spirit of 1776.

Hopping the globe from Haiti to Cuba to Boston to explore various countries' unique rums and their backgrounds, Williams uncovers historical connections most Americans never knew existed. He studies the liquor's sordid ties to the slave trade, and the ways rum contributed to the decimation of many of New England's native populations. Most importantly, he examines how rum "put a whole new light on the motives of the Founding Fathers of the American Republic."

From his New York home, Williams spoke with AlterNet about his beloved beverage -- he collects bottles of rum from around the world, as well as labels, advertisements and paraphernalia -- and its distinguished role as "the lubricant and fuel for the whole engine of commerce that made the modern world."

Where did you find the inspiration for this book?

I have always associated rum with Christmas, for reasons to do with post-war rationing in Britain and my father's time as a merchant seaman. But I was recently in the Caribbean, and as I was sampling the fine rums of Martinique, I realized that the island was filled with graveyards of British soldiers. It occurred to me that the 18th-century Caribbean was the Persian Gulf of its day. This is where hundred of thousands of foreigners came to fight each other for control over small islands. And the reasons were similar: sugar was money. It was sugar and rum that made the British Navy what it was. It allowed the British treasury to pay the national debt and to effectively win wars with the French.

How did you go about researching the book?

I don't really regret to say that a lot of the research I did was absolutely irrelevant to the book, but it taught me a lot about rum. It was fascinating because it took me into a lot of history -- particularly about the American Revolution. I developed an appreciation for how the modern world developed the way it did around the Atlantic seaboard.

Rum was such an integral part of it. This has been written out because of Prohibitionism and temperance. The founding fathers' connection to booze was omitted from American history books, along with the whole role of rum in the American Revolution, the development of the northeast colonies, and its tie-in with slavery. We all in the north look down on the south as the old slave-holding stronghold, but the north actually transported most of those slaves and paid for it with rum.

Can you explain the north's role in this trading cycle?

The northeast is very barren. Agriculturally, it has very low productivity. The Yankees traded all over the world and often doubled as smugglers. They smuggled molasses from the French colonies that they made into rum. They drank prodigious quantities of it themselves on a per capita basis, because it was a major food item, especially in the winter.

Then they would use some of it to trade with the Native Americans, and a significant portion of it was taken to the west coast of Africa where they traded it for slaves with the local kings. That was where the American triangle trade came in: rum from New England for slaves, and molasses up from the Caribbean. It was a pretty unholy commerce, but it was what developed the northeastern states, both commercially and industrially.

What role did rum play in relation to Native Americans?

Well, to some extent it was a cultural thing. They had never been introduced to hard liquor on this scale before, and they had completely different ideas about it. It was a sort of spiritual experience. They just knocked the stuff back, and from what I can gather, in Native American tribal custom, a person who was drunk was not responsible for his actions. In fact, the British colonial officials also made it a rule that they wouldn't recognize any treaties or land sales that were conducted with Native Americans when they were drunk.

Basically, the Native Americans' economic role was to provide furs from trapping. They paid for that in rum. The traders' excuse was that if they paid the Native Americans in clothes and food that they had enough of, they wouldn't do it. Whereas rum was a desirable commodity that they had access to, and there was no end to what they could drink.

This also devastated the ecology because they trapped out and had to go further and further infield. It was unsustainable for the Indians because they were at the tail end of massive harvesting.

And getting drunk messed up their society as a social structure, making them vulnerable to diseases, attacks, cheating and takeover. Benjamin Franklin actually described it as something that was pretty much designed by providence to clear "the savages" away from these territories.

Laura Barcella is an associate editor at AlterNet.

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