Product Description

Rum arguably shaped the modern world. It was to the eighteenth century what oil is to the present, but its significance has been diminished by a misguided sense of old-fashioned morality dating back to Prohibition. In fact, Rum shows that even the Puritans took a shot now and then. Rum, too, was one of the major engines of the American Revolution, a fact often missing from histories of the era.

Ian Williams’s book—as biting and multilayered as the drink itself—triumphantly restores rum’s rightful place in history, taking us across space and time, from the slave plantations of seventeenth-century Barbados (the undisputed birthplace of rum) through Puritan and revolutionary New England, to voodoo rites in modern Haiti, where to mix rum with Coke risks invoking the wrath of the gods. He also depicts the showdown between the Bacardi family and Fidel Castro over the control of the lucrative rights to the Havana Club label. Telling photographs are also featured in this barnstorming history of the real "Spirit of 1776."

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #873725 in Books
• Published on: 2005-07-10
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 328 pages

From Publishers Weekly
The Nation's Williams (Deserter: Bush's War on Military Families) offers a spirited—if rambling—discussion of the history and spread of rum, from the field-side stills of 17th-century Barbados to the scientifically calibrated factories of modern multinationals like Bacardi. His main point? That the "role of rum and drink in both causing and effecting the American Revolution has been filtered out" of our history books. Williams details the mechanics of the pre-Revolutionary triangles of trade: African slaves for the Caribbean sugarcane plantations were purchased with rum distilled in New England from Caribbean molasses. He deftly describes how the American colonists evaded British taxation of rum-making supplies, and relishes the notion of our patriotic forefathers as a bunch of rum-sozzled smugglers. His other discussions—on the use of rum rations by various countries' navies, the production of rum in other parts of the world, the efficacy of Prohibition and his own rum-tasting forays—are less focused. Readers also may tire of Williams's tendency to overwork the liquor metaphor: "cultural alembic," "heady cocktail," "good spirits," "the equation in a small tot," etc. 10 pages of b&w illus. not seen by PW.
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From Booklist
A connoisseur of rum, a distillate of sugar cane, Williams (who writes for the Nation) cheerily discusses 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 the American Revolution to New England molasses smugglers, but his product-based interpretation 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
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