Rum was once so valuable that Rhode Island's version circulated like gold
A 1651 Barbados account called it hot, hellish and terrible. Within decades rum had displaced French brandy as the currency of the Atlantic slave trade, become New England's biggest industry, and may even have nudged the colonies toward revolution through a quarrel over taxes on molasses.
Rum is distilled from fermented sugarcane molasses or juice. The traditional story credits enslaved workers on 17th-century Caribbean plantations with discovering that molasses, a waste product of sugar refining, could be fermented and distilled, though many historians think the know-how arrived with sugarcane from Brazil, where production is recorded in the 1520s. Sugarcane wines are far older, made for thousands of years in Island Southeast Asia, where the plant originated.
Nobody is sure where the name comes from. The favoured theory links it to rumbullion, a drink of boiled cane stalks, or rumbustion, slang for uproar; both appear in English around the same time as rum, in the early 1650s. Rival suggestions point to Dutch rummer glasses or the French arôme. By 1654 Connecticut was confiscating Barbados liquors commonly called rum or kill-devil, and Massachusetts banned sales in 1657.
The first distillery in the Thirteen Colonies opened on Staten Island in 1664, and Boston had one three years later. New England's timber, metalworking and barrel-making skills turned distilling into its most profitable trade, producing a lighter, whiskey-like spirit. Newport distillers brewed an extra-strong rum specifically as payment for enslaved people, and for a time Rhode Island rum was accepted as currency in Europe alongside gold.
When France barred rum production in its colonies to protect brandy, New Englanders bought cheap French molasses and undercut British West Indies producers. Britain answered with the Molasses Act of 1733, a punitive duty that was widely ignored because rum made up about 80 percent of New England's exports. Stricter enforcement of its successor, the Sugar Act of 1764, may have been one more push toward the American Revolution. Today light rums go into Mojitos and Daiquiris, while darker aged ones are sipped neat.
Source: Rum
