The History of Rum

Rum is the distillate of fermented sugar cane products, principally molasses, but some is made from sugar cane juice.

The origin of the word rum is uncertain.

Taussig, the patriotic American rum-lover, claimed “The name ‘Rum’ is without doubt American: in fact it is an early manifestation of the American fancy for abbreviation, have been derived from a West Indian word, ‘Rumbullion.’”

Others suggested that rumbullion is derived from Rom or Romany, for gypsy and bouillon, but thus etymology of the falsest kind.

But the origins of rum are far more ancient, dating back more than 2,000 years. However, sugar wine was not called rum until after 1688.

The word may have been a term from the new pidgin English of Barbados and possibly derived from the distortion of a term, in the dialect of Seville, combining Low Latin ‘rheu’, ‘stem’, and bullion, boiling.

Actually half of the word treats rum as its very own. Like the other British export, the English language, rum is so ubiquitous and globally pervasive that people tend to forget where it came from and automatically naturalize it.

Before it was known as rum, the alcoholic spirit was called ‘kill devil’, so named because the crude rum made by English colonists in the Caribbean was, according to one seventeenth century author, a “hot, hellish and terrible liquor.”

Indian was the first learn how to crush sugarcane and extract white crystals.

The Saracens people from middle Ages, passed their knowledge of distilling sugar cane to the Moors, who made ‘arak’ (cane based proto rum) and planted sugar cane in Europe sometime after AD 636.

It was Alexander the Great, after conquering India, brought with him to Egypt “the weed that gives honey without the help of bees.”

In 1493, Christopher Columbus introduces sugarcane on his second trip to the Caribbean. The Caribbean was one of the points on what historians call the ‘triangle trade’: sugar and rum from Caribbean to Europe, goods from Europe to Africa, slaves from Arica to the Caribbean.

In this triangle also, molasses was shipped from Caribbean to New England, where it was processed into rum, then rum was traded for slaves in Africa.
The History of Rum