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Awash in a sea of rum describes the years between the 1670s and the 1830s in the colonies that would later become Canada. Millions of litres of the sugar-based liquor were imported every year to supply a comparatively small population of colonists and Indigenous people. Why rum, and why so much?
Rum was cheap and plentiful. Intimately connected to the West Indian slave plantation complex, rum shipped to early Canada and around the Atlantic World was part of the early modern expansion of intercontinental trade known as the first globalization. Canada in the Age of Rum shows what happened to the vast quantities that came to Canadian shores. Rum was especially important to workers in the early Canadian staples industries. Fishermen and fur-trade voyageurs drank rum in massive quantities, supplied on credit and at grossly inflated prices by their employers, an arrangement that served to claw back wages and ensure the profitability of enterprises that would not have been viable otherwise. Traders deliberately sought to get hunting peoples hooked on rum in order to ensure a steady supply of pelts – alcohol was not so much a commodity for sale as it was a gift used to induce hunters to conform to the ways of the capitalist economy. However, Indigenous people drank rum in their own ways and for their own reasons; and when drinking became a serious social problem, they organized to resist it. The story ends in the 1830s when the combined effects of the temperance movement and the rise of whisky led to a sharp decline in rum consumption.
This brilliant history follows the thread of a single commodity from West Indian plantations to Newfoundland, Quebec, and the west, revealing rum as a critical lubricant of the social life of early Canada and its particular version of early capitalism.
“This book demonstrates with unique clarity the importance of rum not only as a commodity but also as a crucial influence on commercial and cultural relationships throughout the territories that were to become Canada. It will quickly and deservedly gain recognition as an indispensable study.” John Reid, Saint Mary’s University
“With his lively but intellectual tone... Greer explores rum’s role in capitalism and empire, its creep across the Atlantic provinces, its displacement of brandy in New France, its role in Quebec’s collapse at the hands of the English, its largely destructive impacts on Indigenous communities, its utility in the operations of the North West Company, and its ultimate decline due to temperance movements and the rise of whisky.” The Seaboard Review of Books
“Where Greer is at his best is in his storytelling... this is a perfect summer beach read for those interested in historical non-fiction.” Winnipeg Free Press
“If history books had tasting notes, Canada in the Age of Rum by Allan Greer would open with a heady aroma of molasses, oak barrels, and something darker—exploitation, empire, and survival. This is not a conventional “foodie” read, yet Greer serves up a richly layered narrative where rum becomes both ingredient and catalyst in the making of early Canada.” Canadian Cookbooks
“Greer’s attention to the relationship of the rum trade to the wider transatlantic slavery system of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries puts his story onto the world stage in a way that effectively merges the local with the global. We learn about more than just the beverage: as the book’s title suggests, rum is not merely the subject but also the unifying theme in a panorama of the transcontinental economic and social system two to three centuries ago.” Literary Review of Canada