Rum
Paperback Original
Ian Williams
Imprint: Nation Books
Extent: 340 pages
Format: Paperback, 210 x 140mm
ISBN 13: 978-15602-5891-9
Price: £9.99
Publication: 1st April 2008
Subject: History
BIC code: HBB
Market rights:
A spirited history of the drink that shaped the modern world
Rum shaped the modern world. The drink, and the molasses that it was made from, was to the eighteenth century world what oil is to the present. In this sweeping history of the world’s most popular spirit, Ian Williams takes us across space and time, from the origins of rum in the plantations of Barbados to Haiti, where to mix rum with Coke risks provoking the wrath of the gods, through Puritan and Revolutionary New England, to voodoo rites in modern
Williams reminds us that rum is the quintessentially British drink, invented by thirsty British colonists in Barbados. In this book he reveals how the Royal Navy ever managed to leave port, let alone win victory after victory when the daily grog ration gave its crews perennial blood alcohol levels that would disqualify them from driving round the corner under present drink driving laws.
From rum being the moving spirit for the tax-dodging smuggling colonists of America to declare independence, up to the trade wars between the Bacardi family and Fidel Castro, Williams shows that rum, while remaining quintessentially British, has helped shape the modern world in many surprising ways, not least providing the essential liquidity in every sense for the development of Atlantic trade.
About the author: British ex-pat Ian Williams lives in New York where he is The Nation magazine’s UN correspondent. He has written for the Financial Times, Daily Telegraph, Observer, Independent, Sunday Herald and magazines such as Tribune, The New Statesman and Punch, and still contributes regularly to the Guardian’s ‘Comment is Free’.
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