Canada in the age of rum / Allan Greer.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Greer, Allan, author.

Series:

McGill-Queen's studies in early Canada ; 12.

McGill-Queen's studies in early Canada / Avant le Canada ; 12

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Rum--Canada--History.

Rum.

Rum industry--Canada--History.

Rum industry.

Drinking of alcoholic beverages--Canada--History.

Drinking of alcoholic beverages.

Indigenous peoples--Alcohol use--Canada--History.

Indigenous peoples.

Temperance--Canada--History.

Temperance.

Canada--Social life and customs.

Canada.

Physical Description:

xvi, 196 pages, 12 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (some colour) ; 23 cm.

Place of Publication:

Montréal ; Kingston ; London ; Chicago : McGill-Queen's University Press, [2026]

Summary:

"A new history revealing early Canada as a place where people drank rum and a lot of it. 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 in an effort 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."-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

The age of rum: Capitalism, slavery, and empire

Drinking on the job: The Atlantic cod fishery

New France: The water of life

Rum conquers Quebec

The North West Company

Indigenous rum

The end of the age of rum.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 171-192) and index.

Other Format:

Online version: Greer, Allan. Canada in the age of rum.

ISBN:

022802689X

9780228026891

OCLC:

1526691723

Publisher Number:

90105275415