Rum

Ian Williams
July 2005     ISBN: 1560256516

This history of rum takes us across space and time, from the origins of rum in the plantations of Barbados through Puritan and Revolutionary New England, to voodoo rites in modern Haiti, where to mix rum with Coke risks provoking the wrath of the gods, and across the Florida straits where Fidel and the Bacardi family are still battling over the rights for the ingredients of a Cuba Libre.

Rum's historical role in North America has been largely obscured. Williams explains the "role of rum and drink in both causing and effecting the American Revolution." Colonists used rum to clear Native American tribes and to buy slaves. To make it, they regularly traded with the enemy French during the Seven Years' War, angering their British masters and setting themselves on the road to Revolution. The flow of rum was also essential to keeping both armies in the field. From Valley Forge to the trenches of the First World War, soldiers relied on rum to maintain their fighting spirits.

Ian Williams is The Nation magazine's UN correspondent. He has also been a columnist for the New York Observer and New York magazine. He has been a regular contributor in Britain to the Guardian, the Financial Times, the Daily Telegraph, the European, the Observer, the Independent, the Sunday Herald and to magazines such as Tribune, The New Statesman and Punch. Williams lives in New York City and has a massive collection of rumabilia.