Allan Greer, "Canada in the Age of Rum" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2026)

Mar 31, 2026

Allan Greer, a Canadian historian of early colonial life and author of Canada in the Age of Rum, traces how massive rum imports reshaped work and trade from the 1670s to the 1830s. He explores rum’s role in fisheries and the fur trade, its use to control labour and trade with Indigenous peoples, Indigenous responses and resistance, and why rum’s dominance faded by the 1830s.

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INSIGHT

Rum Was Astonishingly Prevalent In Early Canada

Rum repeatedly appeared across early Canadian sources and amounted to roughly 15 times modern per-capita alcohol consumption when measured in the 18th century context.
Allan Greer traced that prevalence to rum's cheapness and ubiquity as a New World commodity tied to Caribbean sugar plantations.

INSIGHT

Rum Used To Claw Back Wages In Extractive Industries

Rum functioned as a wage-clawing device in extractive industries where employers deferred pay and supplied rum at marked-up prices.
Employers used rum to reduce labor costs and retain scarce skilled workers in fisheries, fur trade, and timber operations.

ANECDOTE

Fishing Captains Pliied Men With Rum To Recoup Wages

Newfoundland skippers recruited high-wage fishermen by supplying credit and rum, then docked pay at season's end, leaving many men penniless or indebted.
New England merchants provided supplies including rum so captains could promise 20 pounds per season yet recoup wages via alcohol sales.

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Awash in a sea of rum describes the years between the 1670s and the 1830s in the colonies that would later become Canada. Millions of litres of the sugar-based liquor were imported every year to supply a comparatively small population of colonists and Indigenous people. Why rum, and why so much?
Rum was cheap and plentiful. Intimately connected to the West Indian slave plantation complex, rum shipped to early Canada and around the Atlantic World was part of the early modern expansion of intercontinental trade known as the first globalization. Canada in the Age of Rum (McGill-Queen's UP, 2026) by Professor Allan Greer shows what happened to the vast quantities that came to Canadian shores. Rum was especially important to workers in the early Canadian staples industries. Fishermen and fur-trade voyageurs drank rum in massive quantities, supplied on credit and at grossly inflated prices by their employers, an arrangement that served to claw back wages and ensure the profitability of enterprises that would not have been viable otherwise. Traders deliberately sought to get hunting peoples hooked on rum in order to ensure a steady supply of pelts – alcohol was not so much a commodity for sale as it was a gift used to induce hunters to conform to the ways of the capitalist economy. However, Indigenous people drank rum in their own ways and for their own reasons; and when drinking became a serious social problem, they organized to resist it. The story ends in the 1830s when the combined effects of the temperance movement and the rise of whisky led to a sharp decline in rum consumption.
This brilliant history follows the thread of a single commodity from West Indian plantations to Newfoundland, Quebec, and the west, revealing rum as a critical lubricant of the social life of early Canada and its particular version of early capitalism.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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