Caribbean Impact” Rum as a Development Tool
Ian Williams on how the Caribbean inspired him to write “Rum: A Social and Sociable History of the Real Spirit of 1776.”
Rum is “the global spirit with its warm beating heart in the Caribbean.” Drunk all over the world, despite the best efforts of some major multinational corporations, it is still firmly associated with the region. As Johnny Depp exulted, staggering round his desert island in Pirates of the Caribbean, “Rum, sand and run! It’s the Caribbean!”
Indeed, the one common factor around the continent of isles is the better part of the sugar cane. Whether once Danish or Dutch, British or French, Portuguese or Spanish, all the new nations drink rum.
I had often drunk rum – dark Jamaica for preference – but it was in Martinique that I was introduced to fine aged rums. And there, I discovered that the French, given a choice in 1763 between Martinique and Canada had let Canada go. It was not just the climate.
Seeing the old forts and graveyards of British and French soldiers brought home that the Caribbean was the Persian Gulf of in 18th century. Hundreds of thousands of men came and died to maintain a hold on the production of rum, sugar and molasses – the liquid wealth of the period. And millions of Africans were shipped with an even more gruesome casualty rate to keep the wealth flowing. As I researched more, I learnt that rum, the balm for the souls of those suffering in servitude, in the islands was often the currency used in West Africa to buy them.
And so I expanded my researches outwards from there. Back to the beginning, when sometime in the early seventeenth century, settlers from the British isles in Barbados made the technological breakthrough.
The Caribbean was a great melting pot for cultures and peoples and for a brief period Barbados was at their focus. The Portuguese in Brazil had brought sugar growing from the Arabs in the Mediter-ranean. The Dutch and the Portuguese Jew-ish refugees had brought milling and trading skills. And one can only suspect that among the prisoners and indentured servants sent from Britain were some Irish or Scottish exiles who were familiar with the new technology of the still.
People knew that molasses fermented easily, but only the bold risked drinking it. However, put it through a still and you had a potent and palatable drink. They called it Kill-Devil, or rumbullion, a “hot hellish liquor,” – and they loved it. Rum was born.
Within decades, they discovered that storing it in wooden barrels did wonders for it. “Barbados Water” was in demand across the Atlantic World, until in Jamaica, they discovered that if you redistilled the liquor, it was still hot, but a little less hellish.
Molasses was so potent, that a gallon of it made a gallon of rum, while it took cartloads of grain to make whiskey or gin. In the cold and relatively infertile North East of what is now the United States, the colonists had difficulty growing enough grain to eat and certainly no regular surplus for whiskey. So they drank rum, millions of gallons of it.
They traded their salt cod and timber to the Caribbean for molasses to feed the hundreds of distilleries that sprang up.
The production of rum in Barbados transformed the economics of the island, which switched rapidly to a sugar-growing monoculture and equally rapidly from a majority white indentured work force to a chattel slave based economy. Incidentally, the white workers also rose, and were suppressed with mass executions in the early stages before racism was added to the Planters’ sins of cupidity and cruelty.
It would repay study to see how much the mainland North American colonies benefited from the experience of the Barbadian plantation owners. Not only did the early Bajans invent the principle of no taxation without representation in an agreement with the Cromwellian government during the Civil Wars in Britain, they were the first to introduce legislation that codified African slavery as different from the traditional indentures for white workers and to justify this breach of Common Law by inveighing against the supposed inferiority of Africans.
Many of the English settlers in North America came via Barbados and they brought their social innovations with them, as well as a thirst for rum, which became a major item of trade.
The British islands used all their molasses to make their own rum, which the colonial elite drank for preference. The colonists largely benefited from the imperial connection, but rum was a crucial commodity. Because the French would not allow their colonies to export rum in competition with the domestic brandy makers, the resulting lakes of molasses in the French islands proved an irresistible temptation, so much so that the Yankee traders were easily able to overcome any scruples that may have resulted from the wars being fought between France and Britain, even though a major purpose of those wars was to safeguard the American colonies from the French threat in Canada.
The colonists drank prodigious quantities of their own rum, but they also used it to trade for furs with the Indian tribes, while many of them quietly rejoiced at the damage rum did to Indian societies which amounted to alcoholic ethnic cleansing. Even more sinisterly, New England rum was the major trade item for slaves on the African coast.
When the French and Indian war was over, the British were paying over a quarter of their GDP in taxation, mostly to pay off the National Debt. The colonies offered but never delivered contributions. It was clear that “no taxation” was the primary thought, not representation. The British sent in the Navy to enforce customs collection, and played into the hands of the secessionists by providing an excuse for insurrection.
Even when the war came, rum was an essential war supply, with both sides fighting to deprive the other side. George Washington, that unlikely socialist, even advocated government owned distilleries to meet the need and was as scornful as any modern Virginian about French fries in the Congressional canteen at any attempts to substitute a French wine ration for rum for the continental armies.
Aided by temperance and prohibition, this inconvenient history, both rum and the essential Yankee role in the slave trade has been edited out of popular historical consciousness.
But then, more recently, who re-members that the Bacardi family bank-rolled Fidel Castro up in the hills, and greeted him when he arrived in Havana with a banner “Gracias a Fidel” draped across their headquarters? Of course, they took it personally when he nationalized their distilleries, but they had already gone multinational, incorporating in the Bahamas and distilling in Puerto Rico, so they still conduct their grudges against Castro in the American courtrooms for ownership of the Havana Club brand, which, although banned by the Embargo from the US, is selling far more successfully than Cuban sugar across the rest of the world. And touchingly, Fidel was telling Cubans that drink was bad for them, so that there would be more for export.
Perhaps more damaging than this family feud is the way that Bacardi has used its economic and political clout to flood out better rums from the rest of the Caribbean with its own undistinguished spirit. For many islands, faced with competition from European sugar beet, Archer Daniel Midland’s high fructose corn syrup and their accompanying tariff barriers, making high value added branded rum from their sugar crop is one of their ways forward in a world where the empires have moved on and forgotten how much of their own and African blood they shed to conquer these volcanic rocks, and how much money they made from it.
But Caribbean unity has to go beyond everyone drinking rum. Currently each island jealously promotes its own brand, while Bacardi swamps them all. They need to promote the idea of rum, and get the consumers tasting the stuff, and let them sort out whether they prefer El Dorado, Mount Gay, Appleton, Angosturas or whatever. The tourist industry offers an unrivalled opportunity for the islands to make that connection: the Caribbean and rum, and to take their newly acquired tastes home with them.