The Thirst of a Mercantile Empire

Paper Summary:

The paper discusses how when Spain, Portugal, France, Great Britain, and other European nations established colonies in the Americas, each was faced with a similar dilemma - how to turn a profit from these new ventures. The paper shows how the mercantile colonial world of the British New World Empire of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was based upon the sugar plantations of the West Indies. The paper describes how rum, grog and other sugar-cane based alcoholic beverages fed the appetites of British men and women in the mother country and fueled the European trade in slaves along the West Coast of Africa.

From the Paper:

"Rum, for example, was distilled from the molasses - the molasses itself a product of one the stages of sugar refining. Still other strong drinks were made directly from the fermented, or distilled, juice of the sugar cane plant. These liquors were shipped back home to Britain, where the profits from their sale were invested either in alcoholic beverages of European manufacture, or put back into the sugar plantations themselves. These plantations demanded enormous amounts of backbreaking labor, but laborers were in short supply. It was only when the British, and other European colonizers, discovered the cure-all of African slavery that their problem appeared solved, and the classic Eighteenth Century mercantile relationship between colonizer and colony was fixed firmly in place."

Sample of Sources Used:

• Egnal, Marc. New World Economies: The Growth of the Thirteen Colonies and Early Canada. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
• Fogel, Robert William. Without Consent or Contract : The Rise and Fall of American Slavery /. New York: W. W. Norton, 1989.
• Morris, R. J. "Chapter 12Voluntary Societies And British Urban Elites1780-1850: an Analysis." The Eighteenth-Century Town: A Reader in English Urban History, 1688-1820. Ed. Peter Borsay. London: Longman, 1990. 338-366.
• "New England and the African Slave Trade." Social Education 69.6 (2005): 338+.
• Pritchard, Jonathan. "Pope, John Rackett and the Slave Trade." Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 45.3 (2005): 579+.

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