Alan Greer (3:02)

Well, thank you for inviting me. I'm glad to be here.

Dr. Miranda Melcher (3:04)

Could you start us off, please, by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book.

Alan Greer (3:11)

Well, I've been working in the area of early colonial Canadian history for many, many decades now. And rum was one of those things that sort of appears in the corner of the eye of the researcher. It kept coming up here and there. It's never at the center. But at a certain point when I encountered it in so many different settings, I decided it was time to look at it a little more systematically. One of the things I discovered using import records is that the amount consumed in the colonies that would later become Canada was really quite astronomical compared to census figures from 2019. It looked to me as if something like 15 times as much alcohol was consumed in the 18th century in the form of rum alone as in the 21st century in the form of whiskey, tequila, vodka, and everything else. So an awful lot by today's standards.

Dr. Miranda Melcher (4:29)

Yeah, definitely worth looking into then. Can you give us a sense of when we're investigating? Right. When was the age of rum? And maybe some numbers to go with that comment about prevalence would help, too.

Alan Greer (4:40)

So it's essentially an elongated version of the 18th century. So you have New England rum coming into Newfoundland in the 1670s and later in other places, and then things fade out around 1830, approximately. So it's very much centered on the 18th century.

Dr. Miranda Melcher (5:01)

Got it. Okay. And how prevalent was rum at this point?

Alan Greer (5:05)

Well, it. It's prevalent. Really, Sorry. Across North America and the Caribbean, obviously. The Caribbean, that's where it originates. It was invented in Barbados in the mid 17th century. A lot of distilling takes place in the colonial towns of New England. That's the original source for rum coming into the Canadian area. Exactly how much was produced is very hard to say. Don't have any equivalent statistics for the British colonies that become the United States. But in Canada, as I say, if we want to talk about per capita consumption, it's approximately 15 times the present day.

Dr. Miranda Melcher (6:03)

Okay, that's a lot. And that alone would tell us that it's important. Right. People don't consume that much of anything if it's not important. So why was rum so important in this time in Canada?

Alan Greer (6:15)

Well, this is where it gets intriguing because I found that it would. Although, you know, it's drunk by all classes in all areas, it's particularly associated with, with the extractive industry that dominate industries that dominated the early Canadian economy. First of all, the cod fishery centered on Newfoundland and what's now the Maritime Provinces. It also plays a central role in the fur trade that spreads out across the northern half of North America from coast to coast. It's important in the lumber industry, the forestry industry that supplies timber to Britain in the early 19th century when the Napoleonic wars cut Britain off from supplies in the Baltic. And what I found in general, we can maybe get into the specifics a little later, is that it functions as a device to claw back wages in a high wage North American economy. So the enterprises I'm talking about are usually short on capital and have difficulty recruiting workers. They all need skilled workers. There aren't very many of those in the so called New World, and they tend to be very expensive. And by supplying rum to workers and then docking their pay, employers found ways of essentially reducing their labor costs quite considerably. And I think that's the crucial kind of the key to understanding why it's so prevalent in this particular northern North American context.

Dr. Miranda Melcher (8:22)

Okay, yeah, that's very helpful to have as an overview, but of course, as you said, we're going to talk about it in more detail. So I admit when I think about this period, Canada, as you said, quite far north. I do sort of assume that kind of most things, if not everything, is sort of revolving around the North Atlantic cod fishery. That's kind of where my brain at least always goes. So what, what role did rum play in this very key industry?

Alan Greer (8:50)

Well, first of all, alcohol is always doled out to people working at sea. As you know, the British Navy adopts the custom of daily dose of grog. It was at this time thought to be health giving and when used in moderation, particularly warming to bodies that are exposed to the elements, which of course high seas sailors and fishermen are. So that's one of the reasons it's used in the Atlantic fishery. But I don't think it's the crucial one. Before brandy, there had been wine. Before, sorry, rum, there had been wine and brandy, but rum comes along as a low cost alternative to these other drinks. So rum is, is very much a New World commodity. It's a byproduct of the sugar slave Plantation of the Caribbean. It's made with byproducts of sugar refining. And the American traders of New England see an opportunity to insert themselves into the Newfoundland fishery in the late 17th, early 18th century. This is an industry that's in the process of being transformed from an entirely European based enterprise. That is to say, before the late 17th century. Fishing is done by ships and crews and supplies that come, in English case, from ports in the southwest, such as Exeter and Pool. They, they come in the spring, they cross the Atlantic in these little, little vessels, bobbing along, dodging icebergs. They set up shop in a cove somewhere in Newfoundland. They work very, very hard through the summer, make a dry salt cod and take them back with them. So it's self contained European. And the European labor market, or the English labor market, is what determines wages to. Around the early 1700s, some fishermen decide to colonize Newfoundland and live there year round to spare themselves this perilous and time consuming transatlantic crossing. But their problem is they have very little capital and they have to recruit laborers. Each fishing skipper would need four or five men and two boats. And where does he get the men? Mostly he poaches them from the England based ships. And he has to, to do that, he has to offer very high wages. So the, the going rate is something like 20 pounds per season, which would be unheard of in the English context. These American suppliers come in on ships from New England and provide supplies in advance to the fishing entrepreneurs on the understanding that they would come at the end of the season and take away the salt cod in payment. And one of the things they supply is a product of their most important domestic industry, which is rum distilling. So the fishing entrepreneurs hire men with the promise of high wages, but with payment to be deferred until the end of the season. Meanwhile, they ply them with rum, and the more rum the fishermen drink, the less the captain has to pay them at the end of the season. And you have British officials complaining that the majority of fishermen find themselves at the end of the season with essentially no pay coming to them and sometimes indebted to their captain. So this solves two problems for the fishing entrepreneurs. It claws back wages and it retains skilled personnel because the fishermen are often forced to stay on for another season as a result. So it works for the fishing entrepreneurs, it works for the American suppliers. In fact, the Newfoundland market is probably the most important stimulus to the growth of the distilling industry in Boston, Rhode island and various other places. But the victims, of course, are the fishermen who End up penniless.

Dr. Miranda Melcher (13:46)

Okay. That's a pretty big change indeed, with, as you said, some significant costs there. So thank you for helping us understand sort of the cycle and its transformation. Of course, the other thing that kind of immediately comes to mind, thinking about this period in Canada, is of course, the fact that there's the French aspect of Canada too. So all these things about the availability and the importance of rum, was that true when the French ruled Canada as well?

Alan Greer (14:13)

Yeah, and of course, the French did not rule Newfoundland or the maritime parts. What they called Canada was the St. Lawrence Valley, now the province of Queen Quebec. And that was the central colony that the French maintained for 150 years. And there was very little rum there. And that's because France wanted it that way. France is the center of the most important distilling industry in Europe, and it's brandy made from the juice of grapes, of course. And it happens that the two of the most important centers of brandy distillation are La Rochelle and Bordeaux, which also happen to be the main ports for supplying the colony of New France or Canada. So the French want to protect their brandy industry. And of course, they have sugar colonies in the West Indies, just as the British dollar. And so there's lots of the raw materials for making rum, which is essentially molasses from the refining and also some of the residue from actually turning cane juice into sugar. But France discourages the distilling industry. And as of 1713, they actually prohibit any importation into France of colonial rum. And so the French sugar producers find themselves with a big surplus of molasses and other residues. They're virtually throwing it away. So again, the enterprising Yankees from New England appear on the scene and find they can get molasses very, very cheaply. So they take it back to New England. And that's the key to the New England rum distilling industry is this very cheap French raw material that they. They benefit from and then sell the rum, of course, to, to the English cod fishery in Newfoundland and elsewhere. So basically, French Canadians are frequently forced to buy brandy, eau de vie, they call it, which is much more expensive than rum, because New England rum is extremely cheap and not very good quality. Some French colonial rum starts coming into Canada in the 18th century, but they slap taxes on that to discourage it and to favor the brandy industry. So there's a little bit of rum in Canada before the English conquest, but not very much. And taxes ensure that it's all fairly expensive. So there's less drinking in the French colonies than in the British ones simply because the alcohol was more expensive. So that's fundamentally the story for New France before the English conquest.

Dr. Miranda Melcher (17:30)

Okay, that's really interesting because again, it speaks to sort of what are the factors that make something prevalent. It's not just sort of, oh, this tastes nice. Right. There's many other things that go into it. How then does all of this impact drinking culture? Right. As you mentioned right at the beginning of our conversation, we're talking about a lot of rum. So what does that mean sort of socially and behaviorally the situation in New France?

Alan Greer (17:53)

Taste does have something to do with it. And I mean, partly the French colonists prefer brandy because it's, in fact, everybody prefers brandy in Britain and elsewhere. That's kind of the general standard of quality. So there is that preference. So there is a certain amount of drinking, but nothing like to the extent of later. And things change dramatically when the British conquer Canada. So that's 1759-1760. They capture Quebec City in 1759, Montreal and the rest of the colony surrenders in the next year. And I'm sure everyone's familiar with General James Wolfe, who wins the battle of the Plains of Abraham. But less familiar perhaps is the fact that his fleet of naval vessels and transports is accompanied by an equally large fleet of camp followers, sutlers they're called, who are there to sell goods to the British soldiers and sailors. And rum is a big, big part of their cargoes. And they find there's a massive appetite in, in French Canada for, well, actually any kind of products because they've been cut off during the war by the British naval blockade. And people eagerly buy up New England rum in Quebec. This is actually before Canada has fully surrendered to the British already. French Canadians are, maybe it's too strong a term, but addicted to New England rum. So you have observers coming through, British travelers and others saying it's quite amazing the change that has occurred here. The, the French Canadian peasantry used to live on bread and their main beverage was cold water. And ever since the British took over, like almost from the day they're drinking large quantities of rum. And so lots of talk about, you know, French Canadian farmers going into town to sell their goods and coming back drunk and you know, in their, in their horse drawn sleighs, driving one another off the road and getting into fist fights and so on. And, and everyone's aghast because prior to 1759, they claim a bit exaggerating things, that this had been unheard of. When British merchants decide that there is a good overseas market for Canadian wheat. In the 1770s, for example, when Britain needs more grain, the farming population was used to self sufficiency, and merchants find that in order to get them more open to the idea of producing more for export, they make use of gifts of rum to encourage people to sign contracts to supply more grain. So it works in that staple trade as well, the agricultural one. And generally the impression is that drinking becomes much more prevalent in this colonial population.

Dr. Miranda Melcher (21:49)

Cool. Yeah, that definitely makes sense to understand why it's such an uptick. Is there anything else we want to talk about in terms of drinking culture with this increase?

Alan Greer (21:59)

Well, you know, you have the general kind of, I guess, increase in various sorts of social problems. It's a little hard to chart that with any kind of precision, but you have more and more complaints about things like spousal abuse and, you know, people falling on their face in the streets and so on. There was some of that with brandy in earlier periods, but it was it was limited to some degree by by just the the cost of of alcohol before 1759.

Dr. Miranda Melcher (22:35)

Yeah, that makes sense.

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Dr. Miranda Melcher (24:53)

Thinking then about other aspects that were important to Canadian society at that point. What was the role of rum in the fur trade?

Alan Greer (25:00)

So the fur trade, like the fishery, is another big extractive industry. And it, it's of interest because it's so spatially extensive and because it's a cross cultural enterprise. It involves Euro Canadians acquiring beaver and other furs from indigenous people who are the hunters. And fairly rapidly, this trade is extending from Montreal westward. By the late 18th century, supply lines are running and this is across very rough terrain where, where the mode of transport is birch bark canoes. It's running as far as the Arctic Ocean and as of the late 1790s, the Pacific. So we're talking about thousands of miles traversed in these canoes that are propelled by French Canadian voyageurs. And the trade out of Montreal comes to be dominated by an enterprise called the Northwest Company, which is mostly owned by Scottish and other British capitalists. The labor supply is French Canadian voyageurs and the suppliers are indigenous hunters. So it's a big deal spatially and interculturally. And where does rum fit in? Well, in two crucial areas. One very much like the fishery, it's a matter of labor cost cutting. So voyageurs, like fishermen, are skilled laborers. A lot is demanded of them. They have to work hard during a brief summer season and they are paid top dollar, at least in Terms of the contracts they sign. But once again, payment is deferred until the end of the season. And in the meantime, as with the fishery, the northwest company is happy to supply as much rum as their employees are willing to consume. And there's a lot of dead time in the winter at trading posts and that sort of thing. And stories of, you know, all kinds of carousing and brawling that takes place in these sites. So again, the markup is huge. The price for rum is extortionate, and it has the desired effect of clawing back wages a. And of retaining employees. Be in that one ledger I looked at from the north, the northern part of the northwest company, it was an account employees account. 85% of the employees ended up indebted to their employer rather than the other way around when it came time to settle wages. And a large proportion of those signed on for an additional three year term. So my impression is that in both the fishery and the fur trade, these enterprises could not have survived had they actually paid the amount in wages that they had promised their employees. But thanks to rum, it gets clawed back anyway. It's also important in dealings with indigenous people.

Dr. Miranda Melcher (28:59)

Yeah, no, let's talk about that. You mentioned them briefly, but can we talk more about indigenous people and the extent to which they were involved in these cycles of rum?

Alan Greer (29:08)

Yeah, so in the case of the northwest company, they have a policy of deliberately getting indigenous people hooked on alcoholic beverages. And they find that, you know, initially, a lot of people, like the Chippewayans of what's now northern Alberta, didn't, just didn't like alcohol. And they were under so much pressure to try it that eventually they. They succumbed, or many of them did. At any rate, the. The role of rum is a little different where indigenous people are concerned because they're not salaried employees, they are trading partners. And the challenge for the northwest company is to make the bridge between their capitalist, market oriented, contractual conception of economic behavior and a very different indigenous conception of economic. The indigenous people give their furs to the traders as gifts on the assumption that they are friends and almost pseudo relatives in a sense. And it's part of a ceremonial of mutual support. So the understanding is I, as an indigenous hunter, in the fall, can't go out and hunt unless I have some ammunition, gunpowder, some blankets to keep me warm, and pots to cook, with which the trader, as my friend, gives me, and I, as his friend, feel an obligation to give him the furs that he wants at the end of the season. But from the indigenous point of view, it's not a matter of credit or debt or money. It's not quantitative. It is a relationship of mutual support. And if this season the weather is such that I'm not able to trap as many beavers, or if a relative dies and I have to bury some of those pelts with that relative, or a variety of contingencies come up, I'm not going to be able to give the trader maybe as many pelts as he expected. But, you know, that's life. And it's more, you know, it's more understood as this is a very crude way of putting it, the way we would think of an exchange of birthday presents with a friend. You know, you're not, you're not necessarily counting the price tag. It's not a contractual obligation. So this was very frustrating to the fur traders who, who had to operate within an Atlantic capitalist market economy for them to survive. So they have to find a way of inducing these indigenous people to behave like economic actors in a capitalist context, even though that's not the way they live. So. When they present some trade goods to the indigenous people in the fall, they accompany that with a keg of rum. It makes sense to the traders, not to the indigenous people. This is a gift, not merchandise, that you'll be having to pay back. Then when the indigenous people return in the spring with furs as a reward, they give them a keg of rum again. So a lot of rum changes hands. It's not merchandise. It's. To some extent, it works that way in a European business setting as well. You know, have a drink together with a business associate, but much more so it's a matter of bridging the gap between lubricating the business and bridging the gap between what are otherwise somewhat semi incompatible economic universes and approaches to exchange. And anyway, by that means, indigenous people end up with large quantities of rum on occasion. On occasion. And I hasten to add, because there's a lot of, you know, sort of hoary racist stereotypes around indigenous people and alcohol, I hasten to add that it looks as if in the aggregate they drank less than the non indigenous people by a long shot, but they drank differently. And so they. The appeal for them. And again, simplifying and overlooking a lot of differences between different indigenous cultures. The, the appeal to them initially, because they've never had intoxicating beverages before in their many thousands of years of history, is the achieving of an altered mental state. So getting drunk is actually not a byproduct of drinking. It's the object. And getting very drunk in order to experience the world in a non mundane way, I suppose, is one way of putting at it, putting it in the process. Inhibitions are lowered in ways that no one's ever experienced before. And in many cases, according to the fur traders reports, what results is some terrible scenes of violence, of abusive spouses, of murder, murders of stabbings, of arson, terrible kinds of situations like that. And again, in order not to be misunderstood, I want to add that first nations in a great number of cases, when it became clear to them that pathological behavior was resulting from alcohol, they took steps. They organized beginning in the 17th century with Haudenosaunee people of the Five nations, and onto others, Shawnee and others who took steps to prohibit alcohol, to combat the trade in liquor, and to encourage people to adopt a life of sobriety. So they were well ahead of the settlers in combating the pathologies that can be associated with alcohol. I wanted to make sure that was clear.

Dr. Miranda Melcher (36:02)

Yeah, that's definitely an important part and useful to kind of combine with what you were saying earlier in terms of just how much rum the settlers were drinking. Right. Like, it is an incredibly high bar. And the stories you told us earlier about some of the settlers also having all manner of altercations and bad behavior like this is definitely not something that we should think is just happening to indigenous communities, even if that has been in for many decades. The sort of racist stereotype. Obviously, then something, though, changes between all of what you've told us and now. Right. Otherwise we wouldn't have this comparison in terms of, wait, how much rum were they drinking? Right. So when and why did this age of rum end?

Alan Greer (36:45)

Yeah, well, it's. We're talking about the. Maybe the first half of the 19th century. And more specifically, I think I kind of date it to the years somewhere around 1830, earlier in some places, later in others. And rum consumption declines precipitously. And I would attribute that in general to two major factors. One is whiskey, and the other one is temperance. So whiskey becomes a North American drink sort of after the American Revolution, when American settlers are crossing the mountains, getting into the Valley of the Ohio and the tributaries of the Mississippi. And they're a long way from salt water, so it's harder to get rum there. But it's also hard for them to export the agricultural commodities. They produce the grain and the corn. And so they hit upon a solution in the form of distilling the corn and the barley and making whiskey from it. Whiskey being a sort of a folk beverage of the Celtic fringe in. In the British Isles. And then so this whiskey becomes even cheaper than rum. And eventually the New England distilling industry declines to an immense degree. And whiskey is also taken up in the new colony of Upper Canada. So to the west of whiskey, where the French Canadians live now, the province of Ontario is in a similar situation. Many of the first settlers, in fact, came from the United States. And so they take up distilling whiskey. And so that's. That's a very rapidly growing population that has become immune to the charms of rum because they've got their own source of alcohol. So, so part of it is whiskey. The other part is the temperance movement, which is a sort of, you know, spreading around the Atlantic world, Britain, United States, Canada, preaching that, you know, alcohol is evil. And prior to that, the basic attitude of the authorities had been that alcohol is basically good, but overindulgence is bad. So bad to be drunk, but a little bit of alcohol is actually good for you. The temperance movement has a different view. They say alcohol itself is a source of evil. It's associated with the evangelical movement in Protestant Christianity. That's part of the story. A kind of quick and dirty sociological analysis would say we're entering into a different kind of economy where instead of a total reliance on these extractive kinds of industries like fish, fur and lumber, which in which are almost entirely. The labor, almost entirely comes from men, where what's demanded is intense and even heroic kinds of efforts at moments interrupted by long periods of downtime. Now we're getting into the era of industrial capitalism. It's only just starting in Canada. It's well advanced in Britain, but along with it goes a. A new kind of ethos view of. Of how a life should be lived with more of an accent on regularity, steadiness, sobriety in the full sense of the term. So this goes along with. This informs the new religious movement, and temperance is part of that. And so a lot of people swear off alcohol, by no means all of them. So that's really, I suppose, the short answer, the question of how did the Age of Rum end?

Dr. Miranda Melcher (41:19)

No, that definitely gives us a sense. And of course, there's never any one reason why something begins or ends. So thank you for helping us be aware of the kind of multiple factors that are coming together in this then rise and fall that you've taken us through. There were so many different aspects that you investigated. Obviously loads of detail that's in the book that we're not able to kind of force you to sit here for Eight hours and repeat for us. But is there maybe one or two things that you were surprised by in figuring all this out and putting it together?

Alan Greer (41:50)

Well, one little thing that shocked me. At one point, I was reading the sort of journal of a Northwest Company fur trader from the early 19th century. And he, like a lot of fur traders, they're always compl. They supply indigenous people with alcohol. They foist it upon them, and then they complain that the indigenous people get drunk and rowdy and are asking for more. So he says, well, I took care of it with this one old lady who was bothering me. I put laudanum in her glass of rum, and she fell to the floor and was unconscious for 12 hours, which worked out perfectly from my point of view. And I thought, my goodness, here's another drug that's being administered now, this one coming from Asia. This is an opium derivative.

Dr. Miranda Melcher (42:41)

Him.

Alan Greer (42:42)

And then I found other instances of traders routinely giving out rum and lacing it with Adanum. In one case, a man got an overdose and died. And this led to a small war in which several traders were killed by the Cree who. Who had been the victim of this. So, you know, I think it's another illustration of the role that drugs and defined very, very broadly. Drugs, that is, products that have an effect on people's minds as well as their bodies, played a significant part in early modern global capitalism. You know, I mean, you can extend it to tea and coffee, which are also psychoactive in their own small way. But certainly alcohol, opium and other products are. You know, they're having effects around the world and including, you know, the depths of northwestern Canada.

Dr. Miranda Melcher (43:58)

Yeah, no, that's definitely a good message to keep in mind, thinking historically about all manner of things, as you think mentioned. So a good place, I think, to end our discussion on the book, leaving me just to ask whether there's anything you're working on now that it's done, anything you're writing. I don't know if you've got a garden going, anything you're currently spending time on, you want to give us a brief sneak preview of?

Alan Greer (44:21)

Well, I'm retired from teaching, so I have lots of time to undertake ridiculously over ambitious projects. And the main one I'm working on the moment is the title is from the Pleistocene to Canada, and it's a deep history of northern North America, the territory that will become Canada, largely over the course of 15,000 years. So this is an attempt to erase the boundary between history and prehistory so that we don't have these, which is always the case in North America that history seems to start when the white people show up. In my case, the Europeans don't make their appearance until the second half of the book, actually. And the rest of it is mostly based on archaeological evidence, which I'm trying to translate from the highly technical language of archaeological publications into to a more familiar language that could give a sense of the a lot happened before 1492, and I'm trying to turn that into a more conventional historical narrative.

Dr. Miranda Melcher (45:42)

Yeah, okay, that's pretty ambitious, but sounds very interesting. So I'm sure you'll have lots to keep you occupied. And of course, while you're doing that, listeners can read the book we've been talking about titled Canada in the Age of rum, published by McGill Queen's Universe April Press in 2026. Alan, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.

Alan Greer (46:03)

Well, thank you very much for inviting.