Caribbean Rum: A Social and Economic History (review)

Frederick Smith's early evocation (p. 2) of Sidney Mintz's 1985 master-work Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History is most unfortunate because Smith is no Mintz—except that they are both anthropologists. This sad little book suffers by comparison on most every page. In contrast to Mintz, it is not good social history, it is not good economic history, and it is not good anthropology. More particularly for readers of Enterprise Society, Caribbean Rum is not good business history.

What Smith wants the book to be is an exploration "of the economic trends in Europe and North America that shaped the development of Caribbean rum industries;" a study that "sheds new light on the economic impact of rum on the Caribbean estates [i.e. slave plantations] that produced it;" and "the first comprehensive study of alcohol in the Caribbean" that brings the story down into the twentieth century" (p. 2).

It fails to attain all three objectives. It does not adequately explore the changing economy of the Atlantic World and its impact on rum; it sheds no new light on the ways in which sugar growing in the West Indies responded to the changing Atlantic economy; and its treatment of rum in the twentieth century seems blind to much that has happened in post-colonial West Indies.

Instead, the book is derivative, poorly focused, and lacking insight. It is derivative in that it is based on little or no original research being a pastiche of the work of others. It is poorly focused in that what the author does recount bears little relationship to the author's stated themes. It lacks insight because it misses powerful connections between distilled spirits and society that social anthropologists, among others, have pointed out over the past several decades.

The driving development in the Atlantic World economy during the period covered by Smith's book—apparently unbeknownst to him—was the rise in real wages among workers in the Atlantic World. Rising real wages propelled a "consumer revolution" that introduced choices perplexing to the newly prosperous. (None of this, of course, had much impact on the enslaved peoples of the Western Hemisphere—except to intensify the demand for slaves.) One of the areas of choice challenging many was food. The decisions made were not always for the best, which is why we need be cautious relating a rise in real wages to a better standard of living. All too frequently people ended up replacing nutritious foods with trendy food substitutes, tea and sugar, for instance.

Another of the poor choices people made was to replace traditional drinks, wine and beer, with distilled beverages. Smith makes a critical mistake in forcing a distinction between rum and other distilled spirits such as brandy, gin, whiskey, and vodka. While modern marketing has tried to characterize each as unique, product differentiation had much less play in earlier years. Distillers in the early modern world were quite content fermenting anything available, distilling it into alcohol, coloring and flavoring it to the taste of local consumers, and calling it by whatever name would appeal to their customers. I am especially taken by the sales pitch of Scottish distillers in the 1660s who promoted something called "Scottish rum" as "scarce to be discerned from the fynnest of the forraigne Brandie" thereby conflating what most of us have been taught to think of as at least three fundamentally different types of distilled spirits (whisky, rum, and cognac). (Hence the twenty-first century European Commission and its "protected designation of origin [PDO]" regulations.) Early on consumers were not anywhere near so discriminating. People drank spirits to get high. Steadily from the 1650s on, especially so beginning in the middle third of the eighteenth-century, they spent some of their higher wages on spirits—any spirits—rather than beer, with deleterious personal and social consequences.

The sugar...