RUM: A Social and Sociable History of the Real Spirit of 1776
The New Statesman, for which I wrote over 20 years ago, is known in Britain as the Staggers.. appropriate for a rum review!
Rumpundit
Books
After the sugar rush
Published 08 May 2008
Rum: a Social and Sociable History
Ian Williams Nation Books, 340pp, £9.99
Rum is the “demon” beverage favoured by pirates, slavers, buccaneers and, as the French historian Alain Huetz de Lemp once declared, “all the vagabonds who scoured the New World”. The Nation correspondent Ian Williams’s micro-historical journey looks beyond this reputation to uncover a heady past at the very heart of world trade.
From its Caribbean-Creole origins to its significance in Castro’s Cuba, Williams traces the drink’s biography with a connoisseur’s nose for a striking anecdote. The Kennedy dynasty made its fortunes “supplying Yankee thirsts during Prohibition”, while America’s Pilgrim Fathers were “a bunch of weird cultists” who thought nothing of waylaying a Quaker ship for its cargo’s value “in rum and sugar”.
But its darkest secret is its importance to the transatlantic slave trade. Rum was a “double enslaver”: it both depended “on the toil of slaves to make” and was “the main trade item to buy slaves in West Africa”. The Sugar Rush, as malicious and as maddening as the Gold Rush, pioneered the Middle Passage to the Americas. There, rum’s high market value helped to justify the use of an “industrial-scale” slave force. Williams’s headlong dive into “rumbalia” is an overproof treat.
(Glad to have expanded his vocabulary! Rumpundit. )
Rum - A Social and Sociable History by Ian Williams
Alan G. Scott
Level: Basic PLUS
I have a Ph.D. in Analytical Chemistry and have worked as an environmental laboratory technician, a laboratory manager in an industrial lab, and a quality …
Rum, NOT money, makes the world go ’round. That is the clear, simple, double-distilled message of Ian Williams’s very tongue-in-cheek work on the delicious spirit. It’s interesting how one can skew history by focusing on one aspect, viewing it through rum-soaked goggles and thereby turning history on its keg…er, head.
All the American text books will have to be re-written. For example, the American Revolution, dubbed the War of Independence by the British Williams, was not fought for freedom from English rule. It was to protest the high tariffs that the sugar lobby in London forced the crown into imposing on the colonies for rum, sugar and molasses imports and exports.
The Boston Tea Party wasn’t to protest taxation on tea, or any other form of rebellion. “It was really all about the rum.” (pg 166)
Paul Revere stopped at a tavern and threw back a few snorts of rum before setting off on his famous midnight ride. (pg 172)
Williams could not help but take a few shots (no pun intended) of George Washington, who according to the author loved rum SO much, he named his historic home after the man who introduced grog to the navy, Vice Admiral Vernon. By the way, the anniversary of that momentous occasion of the order for grog, August 21, 1740 is just a few short months away. You had better start planning for the big holiday now!
A few days before that, however, is the big bash for Black Tot Day, the day the Admiralty abolished the grog rationing, July 31, 1970.
Williams has other writing credits to his name, but his style of prose makes this book a difficult read. I had to re-read many complex and compound sentences to understand them. He drops in names, perhaps once, with no introduction or follow-up. The reader who may not have been exposed to as many annals of history as Williams is left wondering who he’s talking about and why they were included. He digresses often, although I’m (so) sure the logic in these tangents made perfect sense to him and his editor.
He loves to throw in terms like “eleemosynary efforts”, “Panglossianly optimistic” and “scofflawlishness”. Wow. Flowery language. Yawn.
Stephen King once wrote the road to hell is paved with adverbs. That’s all I’m saying.
It’s hard to tell if Williams was taking himself seriously with this book, but the reader should not. Rum is worth a look or at least one to keep on the shelf as a reference guide to other references on rum in history.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Alan_G._Scott
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HEADLINE: RUM;
A Social and Sociable History of the Real Spirit of 1776
All about the distilled spirit that fueled the slave trade and sparked the American Revolution.
Nation correspondent Williams documents the etymological origins of rum–”kill-devil” is one especially pungent early name for the stuff. In the Caribbean, especially Barbados, massive plantations grew the bulk of the cane that could be transformed into what the English for a time called “Barbados Waters.” The brutal work of sugar production required untold numbers of slaves, a vital component of 18th-century trading among Africa, the Caribbean and the New England colonies. Williams highlights just how lucrative and corrupting the business was, comparing the colonial-era Caribbean to today’s petroleum-enriched Middle East. He ascribes to the rum business the origins of the French-Indian War and the American Revolution. During the 1760s, colonists smuggled one barrel of rum for every two that were legally taxed, and their desire for cheap liquor whipped up plenty of anti-Crown sentiment. The story becomes less colorful as it comes closer to modern times: Life at sea just isn’t as much fun once British and American navies stop issuing grog rations; and the consolidating efforts of substandard producers like Bacardi are hardly as interesting, though arguably less reprehensible, than the activities of those who sold “the rum that was made from the molasses that had been traded for cod . . . then bartered in West Africa for yet more slaves.” Nonetheless, Williams (himself an avid collector of rumabilia) keeps his narrative chatty and informative to the end.
Rambunctious, rollicking history, sodden with tasty lore.
By Bob Ivry
Sunday, October 23, 2005; Page BW09
If only high-school textbooks were written in the style of Ian Williams’s Rum: A Social and Sociable History of the Real Spirit of 1776 (Nation, $26). The lessons of 10th grade would be more fun and memorable with a wily uncle like Williams spinning subversive yarns of pirates, patriots and corrupt governments. He’s a historian who seems to be sampling his subject and exhorting us to remember what we otherwise might drink to forget: that America’s origins depended heavily on slave labor and a distilled spirit early imbibers called “kill-devil.”
Williams asserts that taxes on rum, not tea, were what turned colonists against King George III. It makes sense, if only because who can imagine getting so stirred up over Earl Grey? The Puritans, contrary to reputation, drank like fish, Williams writes, and as a weapon aimed at the New World’s native population, rum was “a potent ethnic cleanser.”
One curious legend Williams relates concerns the body of Admiral Horatio Nelson, Britain’s greatest naval hero, which reportedly was shipped back home preserved in a cask of rum. Williams slyly notes that, according to one version of the legend, the cask arrived more than a few liters shy.
Why has this rum-soaked draft of history largely gone untold? Williams, a correspondent for the Nation, explains: “Prohibition helped erase the importance of alcohol in general and rum in particular to the country’s development. Anything alcoholic became so thoroughly disreputable that to say a founding father took the occasional drink is on par with suggesting that George W. Bush sniffed cocaine; it may be true, but it is not polite to talk about it.”
I urge Williams to embark next upon a history of hemp.
Published by the American Libraries Association.
15 September, 2005
A connoisseur of rum, a distillate of sugar cane, Williams, (who writes for the Nation) cheerily discuses the liquor but keeps the reader in mind of its dark underside, which was slavery. Structuring matters chronologically, Williams selects anecdotes about rum as if to set up his own witty observations: he is out to entertain not to bore. The Caribbean Sea’s signature contribution to the world’s bar, rum originated in Barbados as a by-product of sugar refining- molasses. Williams establishes how molasses became fixed in transatlantic trade in African slaves, and in the mercantile minds of the British as a revenue source. Williams may oversimplify things by attributing the cause of American Revolution to New England molasses smugglers, but his product-based interoperation of history will appeal to readers of similar books on cod, sugar, and salt. Tracing rum’s run on the frontier, its run from the law in Prohibition and its contemporary incarnation in popular brands, Williams concocts a stimulating saga. – Gilbert Taylor
Santé magazine, September 2005
Rum, A Social and Sociable History of the Real Spirit of 1776 by Ian Williams, currently the Nation’s UN correspondent, should be immensely appealing to history buffs and rambunctious rummies. Williams traces the Caribbean spirit from its pre-rum roots in Asia and North Africa and firs iterations in Barbados, through the turbulent Colonial and Revolutionary War periods, to its exquisite expressions today. The author’s thorough research, when combined with a gift for story telling lifts the book high above the ordinary. Williams’s prose is as inviting, biting and spirited as rum itself.
Book Alert / Rum November 7, 2005
Yep, this is a book about rum. You got a problem with that?? There’s something refreshing about coming upon a book dealing with a narrow subject by an author, enthusiastic about his theme, and focused on telling you why his topic is a lot more important than you think it is. A few recent books come to mind — this season’s The Lobster Chronicles or Mark Kurlansky’s volumes on Cod and Salt. As a hardened New Englander, I think there’s even room for a book on Salt Cod.
But I digress. Let’s get back to Ian Williams’s new Rum — A Social and Sociable History ofthe Real Spirit of 1776. Williams, the Nation’s United Nations correspondent, clearly intends to have a good time with his subject, all the while imparting some significant information. He apologizes in acknowledgements for not mentioning some of his sources by name — “…it is in the nature of such research that memories for names become a little hazy.” Yet his narrative itself is thoroughly documented, with full index, bibliography and notes.
It’s a treat to see Williams debunk such stiffnecked colonists as George Washington and John and Abigail Adams, to whom rum had an honored place at the table. But, in fact, rum was a lot more important than that — it was, he says, as important in colonial times as oil is in our century and essentially became a commodity in trade, development and negotiation and so helped shape what America was to become. Kirkus Reviews calls it a “Rambunctious, rollicking history, sodden with tasty lore.”
Bilgemunky.com - Gerard Heidgerken
“The fulcrum of most European imperial ventures during the formative years of the thirteen colonies was not the North American mainland but the Caribbean. From the Spanish Main that hems it to its polyglot islands, the one universal uniting factor for the Caribbean is rum - lots of it, as a living liquid memorial to the time when the lands bedecked around that perfect blue sea were not the tourist playground of North America and Europe but the cockpit of all their rivalries.”
Perhaps no single paragraph throughout Ian Williams’ Rum: A Social and Sociable History of the Real Spirit of 1776 more concisely summarizes this work’s content and tone than this, the opening segment of its tenth chapter. It introduces the idea that pre-revolutionary American history wasn’t centralized in Boston or Philadelphia, but actually the Caribbean - and that the one material that truly greased the wheels of rebellion wasn’t tea, but rum. Rum: A Social and Sociable History focuses largely on rum’s role in the colonies, and how its trade, regulation, and consumption ushered the founding fathers towards revolution. It’s a history that’s largely been lost, due in no small part to the days of prohibition when historians were encouraged to ignore some aspects of our colorful past. This is a shame, as rum played an enormous role in our early history - sugar cane and its byproducts at one time held as much influence on world events as oil does today, and Williams goes to great lengths to excavate this buried truth. From the creation of a nation founded on the principles of tax evasion and smuggling, to its irreparable damage to the American Indian population, and throughout an entire sub-history of wars and battles, rum was an ever-present catalyst in the United States’ birth. Williams recounts numerous aspects of this history, from rum’s invention in Barbados to its spread throughout the world.
Rum’s history is rich and fascinating, and Ian Williams strives to share it all. But this book does have a few qualities that detract from its success. It can be a very challenging read, and the aforementioned quote demonstrates Williams’ tendency to over-extend his train of thought, and indeed, overextend his vocabulary for the taste of many readers (if your eyebrow raised at the word “polyglot,” it will surely become airborne at words like “scofflawlishness,” “eleemosynary,” and “panglossianly.”)
Throughout his writing, Williams illuminates some absolutely fascinating snippets of rum lore, from the virtually comedic measures the colonial courts took to defy British smuggling laws, and to the reasons that today in the Caribbean, heart of rum production, Bacardi is strangely the only thing served in many hotels. But unfortunately Williams also passes judgment with many of his observations, and his writing sometimes comes across a little one-sided as a result. Any book that quotes a letter from Cotton Mather (of Salem Witch Trials fame) in which Mather suggests that bartering heathens for rum is a pious act, and then goes on to sign “yours in the Bowels of Christ” could surely be forgiven for viewing the puritans with a dubious eye, but to paint them all as “weird cultists” and calling them “incompetent” seems a rather broad stroke.
This quality becomes all the more prominent when Williams expands on points with contemporary analogies - analogies that almost invariably cast suspicion on the Bush Administration, the Iraq War, and even America itself. However, it doesn’t appear that Williams’ is seeking to actually editorialize on current events, but merely possesses a very specific worldview, and assumes the reader shares the same. As such, readers with different life experiences than Williams’ own might find some of his analogies more distracting than illustrative.
Williams’ work offers one last unfortunate quality that bears mention - his conclusions are not always well supported by the evidence offered. The most significant example of this would be his claim that the Boston Tea Party was “really all about rum.” He then goes on to explain, rather effectively, that the Tea Party wasn’t about taxes, but about eliminating competition from the East India Company - competition in the tea market, to be specific. That the entire affair was really about rum seems to rest solely on the claim that Samuel Adams was a smuggler of both tea and molasses - an explanation that leaves me wanting for more support. Williams offers a slightly more substantial, but still shaky, explanation of his claim that Lord Nelson was probably shipped home in a cask of brandy, rather than the rum of folklore. In both of these cases Williams offers many rare and interesting facts - it’s merely his conclusions that seem a bit of a leap.
Rum: A Social and Sociably History of the Real Spirit of 1776 covers a fascinating piece of American history, and does so in exceptional detail. Its effectiveness is sadly impacted by the writer’s strong opinions, occasional use of exceedingly rare words (eleemosynary,) and aptitude for winding, tangential sentences that require several re-reads to fully digest - but true rum enthusiasts would do well to check it out just the same. Rum is an integral part of our heritage, and unless you read this book you may never appreciate the full impact distilled molasses had in the formation of the world in which we live.