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Connecting the Four Corners: The History of Rum

Matthew Burnett

 

The story of rum begins with sugar. Sugar was arguably the most important of the commodities produced in the Americas. Sugar production began with the Portuguese and Spanish in the 1550s, but it reached its highest levels once the English took control of Barbados.  Barbados became the largest and most successful of the “sugar colonies”, and this success led to unintended consequences, one being the discovery of rum.


The increased production of sugar led to a corresponding increase in the amount of byproducts produced. One of the most important byproducts was molasses. To create sugar crystals, the sugar cane juice had to be boiled down. The leftover residue from this process was molasses. Originally, molasses were thrown away or given to slaves on the plantations to eat. Around 1650, someone, although no one knows whom, discovered that if molasses were mixed with water and yeast, the mixture will ferment to create a wine. If this wine is distilled, it creates the​

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Molasses, the main ingredient in rum production.

drink we now know as rum. The first reports of rum in Barbados called it “kill – devil” because of its strong effects.

 

Through the late seventeenth century production of rum was still localized to Barbados and a few of the other Caribbean Islands. This changed as the population in the British Colony of New England increased. While colonists moved to New England expecting to exploit the riches of this “new world,” they did not expect the harsh climate of New England. As the colonists did not have much to trade, they were often unable to get shipments of beer from England. The colonists were introduced to rum by traders who picked it up in the Caribbean, and the colonists were hooked as it was cheaper to import due to the abundance of molasses and shorter trade routes.

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Mount Gay is the world’s oldest rum distillery. It is in Barbados and was built in 1703.

The New Englander’s reliance on rum led to them setting up a multitude of distilleries, and by the middle of the eighteenth century, there were well over one hundred distilleries in New England. As the amount of distilleries steadily increase, the amount of rum imported to New England decreased. They instead started importing copious amounts of molasses with which to make rum. This made rum one of the central components of the triangular trade.

 

“Triangular trade” is a colloquial term used to describe the Atlantic trade routes between Europe, Africa, and the Americas in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As rum production increased, it became a key commodity traded from New England. The colonists used rum to trade for manufactured and luxury goods from Europe. The merchants would take the rum to Africa, and what they did not drink on the journey, they would use to buy slaves. These slaves were then shipped to the Americas, where many of them would be put to work on sugar plantations, producing the molasses that would be used to make rum. In this sense, triangular trade made rum a cyclic commodity, as it was in effect sold in order to make itself.


Although rum played a key role in triangular trade, its significance on the world was far ​

larger. The New England dependence on rum production for its economy, helped expedite the onset of the American Revolution. In 1733, the British imposed a tax on molasses from foreign traders through the Molasses Act. This forced the New England distillers to buy only from British colonies, which often cost more than foreign colonies. The New Englanders worried this would hurt their economy, as they would have to raise the price of their rum, which would lead to a drop in exports as merchants would look to buy it cheaper elsewhere. To circumvent this, many distillers began to smuggle in molasses. The rise of smuggling led to the institution of the Sugar Act in 1764. This act was designed specifically to reduce the smuggling of molasses from French and Dutch colonies in the West Indies. As a result, sugar plantation owners in the British West Indies had a de facto monopoly over not only the molasses trade, but the rum trade as well. Without the British molasses, the colonists would be unable to produce their key export of rum. Severe protests against the tax, led to it being lowered in 1766, although the dissent set the stage for the American Revolution ten years later.​

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The “triangular” trade routes between the Americas, Europe, and West Africa.

 

Although it is often overlooked, rum was one of the key commodities linking the four corners of the Atlantic Ocean: Europe, Western Africa, the Caribbean, and the British colonies in America. It had large influences in both triangular trade and the American Revolution, and served a unique role as a self-perpetuating commodity, often being sold for slaves, which were needed to extract the molasses necessary for its own creation. The more rum that was made, the more they were able to make.

 

Bibliography

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  • Loades, DM. England's Maritime Empire: Seapower, Commerce, and Policy 1490–1690. New York: Longman, 2000.

  • Metz, L. The American Revolution. Rosen Publishing Group, 2014

  • Smith, FH. Caribbean Rum: A social and economic history. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005

  • Standage, T. A History of the World in 6 Glasses. Atlantic Books, 2007.

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