A trade item derived from sugar production that developed out of the expansion of the plantation complex into the Americas with widespread social and economic consequences.
As the plantation complex moved across the Atlantic into the West Indies, sugar became a labor-intensive way to make the West Indies a profitable region of the developing European colonial system. At the early stages of production, sugar was a luxury commodity, also known as a cash crop, because of its high value and limited supply. Over time, as sugar production increased in the Americas, driving down the value of sugar, rum became an important by-product.
Rum, which is distilled from molasses, not only became important to the development of the West Indies, but also affected the development of North America, Europe, and West Africa in the same period. Rum, especially as increasing sugar production drove down its price, became a popular drink in the Americas. The other appealing aspect of rum was that its American production, consumption, and trade allowed its manufacturers and merchants to avoid transatlantic transportation costs. Rum quickly became an important smuggled commodity as its producers and consumers worked to avoid the taxes and duties of the various imperial regimes.
Rum is best known for its role in the triangle trade that developed between Europe, the Americas, and Africa from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. This simplified trade system involved exporting and reexporting from Europe to Africa a wide variety of textiles, rum, firearms, and other items to be exchanged along the West African coastline for slaves. The slaves were then forcibly carried across the Middle Passage and sold in the Americas to begin a life of endless toil. Many slaves produced the same products that were initially used to purchase them. Finally, ships carried the cash crops produced by slave labor back to Europe to reinitiate the cycle.
Pictured here are slaves loading rum barrels in Antigua in 1823. Many Caribbean islands exported both rum and the sugar cane and molasses from which rum was manufactured. Today, rum remains one of the most valuable manufactured exports of the Caribbean basin. (© The British Library/Topham-HIP/The Image Works)
The reason rum became such an important part of the triangle trade stemmed from the initial introduction of sugarcane into the West Indies. The problem that quickly plagued the Europeans who hoped to profit from American land was that they lacked laborers. They attempted to use a variety of labor systems, but the one they found best suited for the American plantation system was African slavery. The ability of Europeans to purchase African slaves and then force them to work on plantations allowed for the development of rum as an important economic and social trade good. An example of rum’s importance in American development involved the New England colonies of British North America. As New England lacked a suitable environment for the production of cash crops, one area of economic activity that its inhabitants excelled in was trade. As New England merchants developed economic ties to the West Indies, they started to trade for not only rum but also molasses. The merchants then carried the molasses, which was cheaper than West Indian rum, to New England where they established distilleries and started to produce their own rum that they could then send to England in exchange for manufactured goods.
Ty M. Reese
See also: Illegal Trade; Labor; Molasses; Slavery; Sugar; Textiles; Triangle Trade.
McCusker, John J. Rum and the American Revolution: The Rum Trade and the Balance of Payments of the Thirteen Continental Colonies. New York: Garland, 1989.
Thompson, Peter. Rum, Punch and Revolution: Taverngoing and Public Life in Eighteenth Century Philadelphia. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999.