New Books in Economic and Business History

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

Mar 31, 2026

Allan Greer, historian of early colonial Canada, explores why massive quantities of rum flowed into North America from the 1670s to the 1830s. He traces rum’s role in fisheries, the fur trade, and employer tactics to extract labor. He also discusses how traders used rum in Indigenous trade, Indigenous responses to alcohol, and why rum’s dominance later collapsed.

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INSIGHT

Rum As A Wage Clawback Mechanism

Rum functioned as a deliberate labor-cost tool in early Canadian staples industries, letting employers defer wages and recoup pay through inflated drink prices.
In fisheries, fur trade, and lumber, captains and companies supplied cheap rum on credit to retain workers and turn promised high wages into effective low pay.

INSIGHT

New England Rum Reshaped The Newfoundland Fishery

New England rum transformed the Newfoundland fishery by replacing expensive European brandy with very cheap molasses-based rum.
Suppliers advanced provisions and rum, then took salt cod at season's end, leaving many fishermen penniless or indebted.

INSIGHT

French Policy Kept Rum Scarce In New France

Under French rule in the St. Lawrence Valley, brandy dominated because France protected its distilling industry and taxed colonial rum.
French policies, port ties to Bordeaux/La Rochelle, and bans made rum scarce and more expensive in New France than in British colonies.

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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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