Molasses: Historical Significance

Wits may laugh at our fondness for molasses, and we ought all to join in the laugh with as much good humor as General Lincoln did. General Washington, however, always asserted and proved, that Virginians loved molasses as well as New Englandmen did. I know not why we should blush to confess that molasses was an essential ingredient in American independence. Many great events have proceeded from much smaller causes.
John Adams to William Tudor, 11 August 1818

From The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States: with a Life of the Author, Notes and Illustrations, by his Grandson Charles Francis Adams. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1856. 10 volumes. Vol. 10.

Molasses, of course, was sought by those in New England because it was the principal ingredient in the manufacture of rum. The 1733 tax to which Adams alludes was a protective measure designed to render importation of molasses from French plantations so prohibitively expensive as to eliminate French sources. New England rum distillers would thus be forced to secure molasses from Barbados, Jamaica, and other British islands in the Caribbean.

Matthew Parker, The Sugar Barons: Family, Corruption, and War in the West Indies (New York: Walker Publishing, 2011), 241, 400 attributes "[m]olasses was an essential ingredient in American Independence" to Novanglus (vol. 4 in The Works of John Adams). Parker also spells his source Novangulus.

The Dog and the Shark

A constant pleasure of history are the little stories that pop out while reading primary sources. Often distracting from the purpose that led to the text in the first place, these episodes entertain and add texture. They also offer unexpected connections to other stories.

As I prepare to teach Atlantic history in the fall, I am perusing texts concerned with the development of the sugar industry in the West Indies. Matthew Parker, The Sugar Barons: Family, Corruption, Empire, and War in the West Indies (2011) has filled time-spaces between the social activities of New Year's celebrations the past few days. Parker draws heavily upon Richard Ligon, A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbadoes (1657). Inasmuch as the 1673 edition of Ligon's text is readily available via Internet Archive, I have delved into that text. Ligon offers three compelling paragraphs concerning "a Fish called a Shark" (5).

Several sharks were taken on board the Achilles, the ship on which Ligon made passage from England to the West Indies in 1647. Once the shark had been landed on board, however, the adventure began. Most of the passengers were afraid to approach it. Only the fearless sailors and a very large dog had the courage.

We had aboard divers mastive [mastiff] Dogs, and amongst them, one so large and fierce, as I have seldom seen any like him; this Dog flew to [the shark] with the greatest Courage that might be, but could take no hold of him, by reason of his large roundness and sliminess; but if by chance he got hold of one of his Fins, the Shark would throw him from side to side of the Ship, as if he had been nothing; and doubtless if he had encountered him in his own Element, the Sea, he would have made quick work with him.
Ligon, True and Exact History, 5.

Reading of the flopping shark's ability to fling this large mastiff across the ship's deck, I am reminded of the fate of the Aztecs who faced such animals in battle.

It is often assumed by those with superficial understanding of history that Europeans prevailed in the New World because they had superior armaments (see "Superior European Technology"). On the contrary, the most important weapon the Europeans possessed was infectious disease. The Aztecs were weakened by disease prior to their conquest in 1521. Their repression of neighboring peoples also helped the Spanish, who were able to recruit allies among enemies of the Aztecs. In battle, guns were insignificant except where cannon were useful. But the Spanish had two terribly powerful weapons of use in close combat--their swords--Toledo steel--and their dogs--mastiffs bred for war.

Sugar and Tea

History is what has happened, in act and thought; it is also what historians make of it.
Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concepts and Contours (2005)

I am reading a book that I bought three years ago on a discount table in London: John Griffiths, Tea: The Drink that Changed the World (2007). At the time that I bought it, I thought of it as connected to a spate of recent topical books concerned with basic foods. Tea, of course, is very British, and an appropriate book to buy in London. The appeal of the book was partly in its resonance with Mark Kurlansky, Salt: A World History (2003); Bennett Alan Weinburg and Bonnie K. Bieler, The World of Caffeine: The Science and Culture of the World's Most Popular Drug (2000); Iain Gately, Tobacco: A Cultural History of How an Exotic Plant Seduced Civilization (2001). I quoted from the last of these in "Death in Jamestown".

I started this book in London, or shortly after I returned home, but then set it aside as other priorities displaced it. Last week, after finishing the remodeling of our living room, we moved upstairs a bookcase that had been in our guest bedroom. This bookcase contains the books that I bought in London, including several concerned with Jack the Ripper and Griffiths's Tea. It seemed time to read one or more of those books. Then, I was asked it I could teach a new course at the university where I teach occasional courses. This course, The Atlantic World, is at the margins of my areas of expertise, and so requires quite a bit of preparation (thankfully I have several months).

I started anew on Tea: The Drink that Changed the World in full knowledge that it would do more to trace connections between Great Britain and Asia than the colonial worlds of the Atlantic. On the other hand, I considered also that tea and the taxes placed upon it in the eighteenth century were a central element in the long history of separation of colonies from their European founders. This process began in the Atlantic and later spread to other parts of the world. The Boston Tea Party is the subject of chapter four in Griffiths text.

Aside from a single program at Johns Hopkins University established in the 1960s, the institutionalization of Atlantic history as a distinct subject has been limited to less than the past two decades. Harvard's International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World, spearheaded by Bernard Bailyn, began in the mid-1990s. Among the criticisms of this emerging field are that by highlighting connections across the Atlantic, it risks minimizing connections outside.

I was thinking about the relationship between trans-Atlantic connections and global ones when I fell upon this passage concerning tea and sugar in Griffiths's Tea.

During the eighteenth century the population of Britain nearly doubled from just under seven million to well over 13 million. During that time annual consumption of sugar from the West Indian colonies rose from 4lb a head in the 1690s to 24lb in the 1790s. Slavery provided the free labour that fuelled this growth, most of it on the back of tea drinking. Tea was taken without milk. so usually sugar was added to offset the bitter taste from leaves that had been processed many months before and were often ill-packed for their long sea voyage from China. (18)

Although sugar originated in the Pacific and spread across Asia and the Mediterranean before it became a staple in Europe, the history of sugar consumption in Britain is intimately connected to British colonies in the Atlantic, especially Barbados. Indeed, sugar may well serve as a topic around which I might build part of my course on The Atlantic World. But, where sugar and the English are concerned, there will often be a cup of tea.