A History of the World in Six Glasses

In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, England began exploring colonies in North America. It did so in part because it was believed that the areas of North America would have a similar climate to the Mediterranean, since the area had a similar latitude. In actuality, England’s colonies in North America yielded no rich soil, gold, or minerals. During the early 1700s, colonists in North America had to make due without beer or wine, since these products were highly expensive to ship across the ocean. This changed in the 1750s, when rum reached North America from the West Indies. By the end of the 18th century, rum was a staple of colonial life in North America—everyone drank it, and it became an accepted form of payment. Distilleries were established in North America, converting West Indian sugar into rum. At one point, the average colonist (including women and children) consumed four gallons of rum per year.

The rum business in North America became so influential that Britain began to tax it heavily. In 1733, the infamous Molasses Act taxed North American distilleries’ sugar sources, making rum prohibitively expensive. As a result, a huge black market of rum and molasses arose in the New World. Smugglers bribed officials to sneak sugar into North America. In general, the Molasses Act was despised in North American colonies, and provided an early symbol of British tyranny.

In 1764, Britain passed the Sugar Act, which strengthened the Molasses Act by raising the tax on sugar. Smugglers were punished more harshly, further raising the price of rum. The Sugar Act was the first of a series of highly unpopular acts in the 1760s and 70s: the Stamp Act, the Townshend Acts, and the Tea Act. These political decisions on Britain’s part would eventually lead to the Revolutionary War of 1775.

During the Revolutionary War, alcohol was a crucial part of the American war effort. George Washington (knowing full well that Americans were rebelling in part because they’d been deprived of rum) made sure to provide all of his soldiers with adequate rations of rum, along with beef, bread, and pork. John Adams once wrote that the tax on molasses was “an essential ingredient” of the American Revolution.

Following the Revolutionary War, whiskey replaced rum as the dominant drink in America, in part because the sugar supply flowing from the West Indies had been disrupted by the war. Whiskey could be produced in North America without any trade whatsoever—all it required was cereal grains. Whiskey was also used as a currency, and even clergymen were paid in whiskey. In 1791, Alexander Hamilton, the Secretary of the Treasury under President George Washington, proposed that the government tax the consumption and sale of whiskey, causing a minor uproar in the colonies. The uproar culminated in the so-called Whiskey Rebellion of 1794. Thousands of farmers and distillery-owners refused to pay their whiskey taxes. In response, Washington sent an army of 13,000 men to the South to collect the whiskey taxes, and was able to obtain the money without a fight.

The stigma of whiskey following the Whiskey Rebellion led to the invention of new whiskey derivatives, such as bourbon, which incorporated corn into its recipe. Wine remained fairly popular in America, but despite the fact that President Thomas Jefferson loved it, it never replaced whiskey or rum as a national drink. In part this was because wine was expensive to ship from Europe, but this was also because wine symbolized the decadence and pretentiousness of the Old World—whiskey, by contrast, was a democratic, down-to-earth drink.

As America shifted from a rebellious colony to a major imperial power in the Western hemisphere, it used alcohol to control and manipulate its enemies. In the American West, Native Americans were known to love alcohol—which they’d never experienced before their contact with Europeans. Because Americans knew about Native Americans’ love for beer, whiskey, and other forms of alcohol, they used alcohol to “sweeten the deal” when trading with Native Americans. One French missionary criticized European traders for shamelessly using brandy to manipulate Native Americans into accepting unfair deals.

One consequence of the importance of alcohol in commerce between Native Americans and representatives of the U.S. was the rise of new forms of alcohol, such as mescal, the drink that incorporated the fermented juice of the agave plant. For many hundreds of years, spirits were a fixture of colonial life: spirits inspired colonies to rise up against Britain, and were later used to subjugate slaves and Native Americans.