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A Copper Still and the Making of Rum in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World

Part of: Intoxicants and Early Modern European Globalization

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 May 2021

Nuala Zahedieh Open the ORCID record for Nuala Zahedieh [Opens in a new window]
Nuala Zahedieh*
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Centre for History and Economics, University of Cambridge, UK
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Abstract

This article focuses on a copper still transported from London to the Mesopotamia estate in Jamaica and used to convert waste sugar products into rum, one of the many New World intoxicants which transformed British consumption patterns in the early modern period. Much has been written about the consumer revolution which allowed these commodities to be absorbed into everyday lives but less interest has been shown in the producer revolution needed to get the goods to market. The labour, skills, and materials embodied in the production and use of the copper still highlight how slave production of rum was integrated into a steadily advancing industrial capitalism linking dispersed sites and workers on both sides of the Atlantic. Rum production was a collaborative effort in which Caribbean plantations were inextricably chained to the local, regional, and international economies, and it involved adaptations in skills, tools, and techniques which were incorporated into Britain's long, slow industrial revolution.

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Article
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 65 , Special Issue 1: Intoxicants and Early Modern European Globalization , February 2022 , pp. 149 - 166
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

1 Joseph Foster Barham to William Forbes, 9 Sept. 1775, Falkirk Archives, Forbes of Callendar papers (hereafter Forbes papers), A727.1471.

2 Smith, Frederick H., Caribbean rum: a social and economic history (Gainesville, FL, 2005)Google Scholar.

3 Smith asserted that ‘the greatest improvement in the productive powers of labour and the greater skill and dexterity and judgement with which it is anywhere directed, or applied, seem to have been the effect of the division of labour’. In discussion, he looked at the ‘variety of labour’ needed to make the shears with which the shepherd clips the wool to produce a coat. He listed the miner, the builder of the furnace for smelting the ore, the feller of the timber, the burner of the charcoal to be used in the smelting house, the brick-maker, the brick-layer, the workmen who attend the furnace, the mill wright, the forger, and the smith, who ‘must all of them join their different arts in order to produce’ the shears. Adam Smith, An inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations (London, 1812; orig. edn 1776), p. 25. For a recent example of a scholarly tradition which pays attention to tools, see Evans, Chris, ‘The plantation hoe: the rise and fall of an Atlantic commodity, 1650–1850’, William and Mary Quarterly, 69 (2012), pp. 71–100CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Beckert, Sven, Empire of cotton: a new history of global capitalism (2014), pp. xvii–xviiiGoogle Scholar.

5 According to Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and power: the place of sugar in modern history (New York, NY, 1985), p. 40, ‘the seventeenth century was pre-industrial and the idea that there might have been “industry” on the colonial plantation before it existed in the homeland may seem heretical’.

6 John Brewer and Roy Porter, eds., Consumption and the world of goods (London, 1993); Carole Shammas, The pre-industrial consumer in England and America (Oxford, 1990); Beverley Lemire, Global trade and the transformation of consumer cultures (Cambridge, 2018); Jan de Vries, The industrious revolution: consumer behaviour and the household economy (Cambridge, 2008); Sydney Pollard, Peaceful conquest: the industrialization of Europe, 1760–1970 (Oxford, 1981).

7 John Chartres, ‘No English calvados? English distillers and the cider industry in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’, in John Chartres and David Hey, eds., English rural society, 1500–1800: essays in honour of Joan Thirsk (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 313–42; John J. McCusker, ‘The business of distilling in the Old World and the New World during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: the rise of a new enterprise and its connection with colonial America’, in John J. McCusker and Kenneth Morgan, eds., The early modern Atlantic economy (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 186–224.

8 Smith, Caribbean rum, pp. 10–17.

9 Richard Ligon, A true and exact history of the island of Barbadoes (London, 1656), pp. 85, 112.

10 Smith, Caribbean rum, pp. 82–3; Harvey, Karen, ‘Barbarity in a teacup? Punch, domesticity and gender in the eighteenth century’, Journal of Design History, 21 (2008), pp. 205–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 In 1719, English imports of rum surpassed those of brandy for the first time. After 1741, rum imports regularly exceeded those of brandy for the rest of the century. Smith, Caribbean rum, pp. 72–83; R. Campbell, The London tradesman, being a compendious view of all the trades, professions, arts, both liberal and mechanic, now practised in the Cities of London and Westminster (London, 1747), p. 265.

12 Elizabeth B. Schumpeter, English overseas trade statistics, 1697–1808 (Oxford, 1960), pp. 52–5.

13 Whereas Ligon reckoned that rum accounted for around 16 per cent of plantation revenues in the 1650s, Long claimed it had doubled that proportion by the 1770s, and his figures are supported by Mesopotamia's records. Ligon, History of Barbadoes, p. 112; Edward Long, The history of Jamaica; or, general survey of the ancient and modern state of that island (3 vols., London, 1774), I, pp. 496–7; ‘Mesopotamia crop and balance account, 1751–1777’, Bodleian Library, Oxford, Clarendon deposit (hereafter Clarendon deposit), b. 37.

14 ‘Mesopotamia returns 1751–1777’, Clarendon deposit, b. 37. Richard S. Dunn, A tale of two plantations: slave life and labour in Jamaica and Virginia (Camb, MA, 2014).

15 Smith, Caribbean rum, pp. 43–50; George Smith, A compleat body of distilling, explaining the mysteries of that science (London, 1725).

16 J. Wedderburn, account current with estate for 1778, Clarendon deposit, b. 37. Peter Marsden provided a good description of a similar still house in the 1780s as quoted in Barry Higman, Jamaica surveyed: plantation maps and plans of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Kingston, Jamaica, 1988), p. 156.

17 Ambrose Cooper, The complete distiller (London, 1760).

18 Ibid., pp. 33–6.

19 Samuel Martin, Essay upon plantership (London, 1765), p. 53; Clarendon deposit, b. 37/2.

20 Beinecke Library, Thistlewood papers (hereafter Thistlewood papers), box 3, folder 14.

21 Campbell, London tradesman, p. 267.

22 Thistlewood papers, box 11, folder 81.

23 Clarendon deposit, b. 37. Both were employed in the distillery throughout the annual cycle of six or seven months of rum production and then redeployed on miscellaneous tasks elsewhere in the estate. Dunn, Two plantations, p. 329.

24 Clarendon deposit, b. 37/2.

25 In the 1770s, Mesopotamia employed two book-keepers, with the senior, who was also inspector of the still house, paid £45 per annum and the other £30. Clarendon deposit, b. 37.

26 Martin, Essay upon plantership, p. 53.

27 In 1754, Thistlewood tried adding pimento broth to the wash. Diary, 4 Apr. 1754, Thistlewood papers, box 1, folder 3, p. 87.

28 Mr Richard Beckford's instructions, Thistlewood papers, box 11, folder 81, p. 26.

29 Diary, 14 Jan. 1754, Thistlewood papers, box 3, folder 4.

30 Philip Wright, ed., Lady Nugent's journal of her residence in Jamaica from 1801 to 1805 (Kingston, Jamaica, 1966), p. 62.

31 According to Dunn's research on Mesopotamia, distilling differed from other crafts in being heavily performed by Africans – eight of the thirteen distillers he identified on Mesopotamia between 1762 and 1804 were Africans, compared with only eleven out of seventy-one craftsmen. Dunn, Two plantations, pp. 178, 328–9.

32 William Belgrove, A treatise upon husbandry, by William Belgrove, a regular and long experienced planter of the island of Barbados (Boston, MA, 1755).

33 Mesopotamia estate copper and pewter account, 1751–75, and Mesopotamia crop and balance account showing the annual net profit of the estate, 1771–75, Clarendon deposit, b. 37.

34 George Furzeon with seven enslaved labourers; John Grant with twenty enslaved labourers; and Thomas Williams, a mulatto. Survey of St James, 1773, British Library, Add. MS 12,435. In 1775, Forbes supplied Florentius Vassal, Barham's neighbour in Jamaica, with four sheets of copper, 14 hundredweight of nails, spelter solder, six small coppersmith's hammers and six large of same, and one pair of bellows, suggesting that Vassal had plans to set up a coppersmith works, but no further details are known. Order for Florentius Vassal, 10 Oct. 1775, Forbes papers, A727.1443.

35 Accounts current, Mesopotamia, Clarendon deposit, b. 37.

36 Between 1751 and 1775, Mesopotamia sold used copper to the value of £600, of which copper to the value of £142 was sold in the island. Mesopotamia estate copper and pewter account, 1751–75, Clarendon deposit, b. 37.

37 According to Long, there were 690 sugar plantations in Jamaica in the early 1770s and, as the large island produced half of Britain's sugar imports, it is here assumed that there were as many in the rest of the British Caribbean. Long, History of Jamaica, I, p. 494.

38 Numbers of distilleries in North America are given in McCusker, ‘Business of distilling’, p. 217.

39 Forbes papers, A727.1507.

40 The National Archives, Cust 3/60–79; Schumpeter, English overseas trade statistics, p. 63. On the expansion in the English copper industry to meet export demand, see John Morton, ‘The rise of the modern copper and brass industry in Britain 1690–1750’ (Ph.D. thesis, Birmingham, 1985); Zahedieh, Nuala, ‘Colonies, copper and the market for inventive activity in England and Wales, 1680–1730’, Economic History Review, 66 (2013), pp. 805–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

41 Zahedieh, Nuala, ‘Eric Williams and William Forbes: copper, colonial markets and commercial capitalism’, Economic History Review (2021)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, https://doi.org/10.1111/ehr.13050.

42 Report from the committee appointed to enquire into the state of the copper mines and trade of this kingdom (London, 1800); J. R. Harris, The copper king: a biography of Thomas Williams of Llanidan (Liverpool, 1964), pp. 18–40; Henry Hamilton, The English brass and copper industries to 1800 (London, 1926); William Pryce, Mineralogia Cornubiensis: a treatise on metals, mines and mining (London, 1778), p. xv.

43 Hamilton, English brass and copper industries, p. 323; D. B. Barton, A history of copper mining in Cornwall and Devon (Truro, 1961), pp. 28, 33–4.

44 Arthur John, The industrial development of south Wales, 1750–1850 (Cardiff, 1950), p. 114; Louise Miskell, The origins of an industrial region: Robert Morris and the first Swansea copperworks, c. 1727–1730 (Newport, 2010); Michael Flinn, The history of the British coal industry, vol. 2 (Oxford, 1984), pp. 9–12.

45 Glover, Elizabeth, Men of metal: history of the Armourers and Brasiers of the City of London (London, 2008), pp. 130–1Google Scholar.

46 Campbell, London tradesman, p. 264.

47 The London directory for the year 1774 containing an alphabetical list of the names and places of abode of merchants and traders of the cities of London and Westminster (London, 1774).

48 ‘The names of the yeomanry of the Worshipful Company of Armourers and Brasiers, London’, 22 Jan. 1771, Guildhall Library, London, MS 12/083.

49 Inventory, 10 Apr. 1775, Forbes papers, A 727.1475.

50 Accounts of wages, June–Dec. 1773, Forbes papers, A727.1438.

51 Order book of William Forbes, Feb. 1773–June 1775, Forbes papers, A 727.1442; Order book of William Forbes, 11 Aug. 1775–6 Mar. 1778, Forbes papers, A727.1443.

52 Barham to Forbes, 9 Sept. 1775, Forbes papers, A 727.1471. The monster was expected to weigh between 28 and 34 hundredweight (1.4–1.7 tons): Forbes to Barham, 15 Sept. 1775, Forbes papers, A727.25.

53 On the advantages of large stills, see Edwards, Bryan, The history, civil and commercial, of the British West Indies (5 vols., 5th edn, London, 1815), II, pp. 276–7Google Scholar. See also Ligon, History, pp. 85–7; William Belgrove, Treatise upon husbandry.

54 Planters repeatedly emphasized the importance of thin copper. In 1774, Florentius Vassal ordered a 400-gallon copper which was to be as ‘thin as possible and well and smoothly polished’: Orders received by George and William Forbes, 5 Jan.–27 Dec. 1774, Forbes papers, A727.1455. Barham reported that the London coppersmiths were falling short of former standards when vessels were ‘not more than two thirds of the thickness of the present sort and consequently of better metal workmanship’. Barham to Forbes, 9 Sept. 1775, Forbes papers, A727.1471.

55 Forbes to Barham, 11 and 15 Sept. 1775, Forbes papers, A727.25.

56 James Somerville to Neil Malcolm, 16 Dec. 1775, Forbes papers, A727.26; ‘An essay on the management of rum distilling’, Thistlewood papers, box 12, folder 88, p. 33.

57 Forbes to Barham, 15 Sept. 1775, Forbes papers, A727.25.

58 According to Campbell, London tradesman, pp. 180–1, ‘smiths of all kinds would be better workmen if they understood drawing so much as to plan their works. The use of it is easily observed from this circumstance; speak but of any piece of work that is to be done in a particular manner to the meanest journeyman of any trade he immediately pulls out a bit of chalk and scrawls out what he fancies to be your meaning. This shows that all of them would find use for it if they were taught the principles of this art.’

59 The company was set up by the Coster family in the early eighteenth century and managed from 1739 by John Percival, who gave his name to it. On his death in 1764, the senior partner assumed management and it became John Freeman and Company. On his travels in 1755, Angerstein visited Percival's copper forge at Publowe and noted that ‘copper plates for large distillation vessels are forged here and sold for 15d per pound and some for 18d’: Torsten and Peter Berg, eds., R. R. Angerstein's illustrated travel diary (London, 2001), pp. 136–7.

60 George Dodds, British manufactures (London, 1845), p. 125; Campbell, London tradesman, p. 264; Forbes papers, A727.30, 1438, 1501, 1511, 1531, 1588.

61 Cooper, Complete distiller.

62 Forbes to Thomas Allen, 3 June 1776, Forbes papers, A727.31.

63 Forbes, 26 Apr. 1776, Forbes papers, A727.31.

64 Accounts of wages, June–Dec. 1773, Forbes papers, A727.1438. Forbes directed his brother on how to divide the work in Jan. 1776. J. Stanley was working on Mr Cruickshank's 5-foot still; P. Hanley was employed on the body of another 5-foot still, and Peter Dean on the head. John Gilbert was working on two sets of apparatus for rendering salt water fresh; John Jones was to collect bar copper from George Pengree at Snow Hill, from which he was to make nails. William Forbes to Robert Forbes, 5 Jan. 1776, Forbes papers, A727.30. According to Campbell, London tradesman, p. 180, ‘A journeyman earns … in most … branches of the smith trade, in proportion to his reputation in the trade, the prices being from fourteen shillings to a guinea a week.’

65 Indenture, 16 May 1771, Guildhall Library, MS 12/080, fo. 64.

66 Barham to Forbes, 9 July and 6 Aug. 1776, Forbes papers, A727.43.1, 2.

67 Accounts of wages, June–Dec. 1773, Forbes papers, A727.1438.

68 Forbes to Barham, 27 Oct., 7 Nov., and 17 Nov. 1775, Forbes papers, A727.25.

69 On problems caused by poor packing, see Peter Nouaille to Forbes, 12 Apr. 1776, Forbes papers, A727.33; on river transfers, see William Forbes to Robert Forbes, 5 Jan. 1776, Forbes papers, A727.30.

70 Barham to Forbes, 15 Nov. 1775, Forbes papers, A727.26; Dunn, Two plantations, p. 8.

71 Messrs Johnson and Purs to Mr Brymer, 25 Oct. 1779, Quebec, Forbes papers, A727.76.

72 After becoming a major naval contractor during the imperial war of 1775–83, Forbes was able to purchase Callendar House in Stirlingshire in 1783 at a cost of £100,000, and went on to join the landed gentry. John Abercrombie to William Forbes, 23 Aug. 1783, Forbes papers, A727.118.36; Eric Williams, Capitalism and slavery (New York, NY, 1944).

73 Mintz, Sweetness and power, p. 40; Broadberry, S., Campbell, B. M. S., Klein, A., Overton, M., and van Leeuwen, B., British economic growth, 1270–1870 (Cambridge, 2015)Google Scholar.