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Essay on Rum and its impact on the Caribbean's Economy
One of the most important by products of sugar was rum and another variant called tafia. Most of the French colonial manufactures concentrated on the production of cheap, low quality tafia rather than rum. Tafia is a cheaper version of rum. Whether or not it was produced depended on the state of the syrup and the conditions of fermentation and distilling. Tafia was produced for the domestic market where most of it was consumed. In Martinique, for example, annual production was estimated to be one million liters, which added 1 to 1.5 million francs to sugar plantation profits. In fact, it was cheaper to produce tafia than rum because "the distilling apparatus was compensated for by the sale price of tafia, which was 60 to 80 percent higher per gallon than of raw molasses.
On the other hand, "while molasses and tafia offered renumeration to the planter and allowed the development of an important supplemental trade that was the exclusive source of essential wood products, they represented waste, extra effort, and a loss of potential revenue for the colonial sugar industry"(Tomich 185).There was a large internal market for it and slaves especially enjoyed it. It was an excellent source of revenue for the planter. It was cheaper to distill although both rum and tafia required between five and nine slaves to produce.
While sugar production in the French Caribbean was inefficient, rum production in New England was very efficient as well as profitable. During the 1700s and 1800s, New England rum was considered to be the best rum. In 1761, Rhode Island, had 22 distilleries and three sugar refineries. In 1763, Massachusetts had 63 distilleries, with most of them based in and around the Boston and Salem. Rhode Island and Massachusetts used the profits from rum to industrialize New England with ventures into textile manufacturing.........
