Rum

"Rum shaped the modern world. The drink, and the molasses that it was made from, was to the eighteenth century what oil is to the present, and nowhere more so than in North America. Rum was used by the colonists to clear Native American tribes and to buy slaves. To make it, they regularly traded with the enemy French during the Seven Years' War, angering their British masters and setting themselves on the road to Revolution. And the regular flow of rum was essential to keeping both armies in the field. From Valley Forge to the trenches of the First World War, soldiers relied on rum to keep up their fighting spirits." "Even though the Puritans themselves were fond of rum in quantities that would appall modern day doctors, temperance and Prohibition have obscured the historical role of the "Global Spirit with its warm heart in the Caribbean." Ian Williams's book restores rum's rightful place in history, taking us across space and time, from its origins in the plantations of Barbados through Puritan and Revolutionary New England, to voodoo rites in modern Haiti, where to mix rum with Coke risks invoking the wrath of the gods, and across the Florida straits where Fidel and the Bacardi family are still fighting over the rights for the ingredients of a Cuba Libre."--BOOK JACKET.