Sweet-Tooth Politics: African in the Caribbean - The Wise World Traveler: Becoming a Part of All that You Meet - page 324

British North America was, of course, unsuited for cultivating sugarcane, but British North
America was deeply enmeshed in the sugar trade. One of the first by-products to emerge
from the crushing of sugarcane is the brown, viscous, sweet liquid known as molasses. By
itself, molasses can be used for such sweetening chores as baking and for diluting the un-
pleasant taste of medicine. But its most income-generating use was in the distillation and
manufacture of rum. On the eve of the American Revolution, the sugar and molasses trade
was brisk and financially rewarding.
Figure 22.1. Triangular Trade
In fact, sugar, molasses, and rum constituted indispensable components of the infam-
ous triangular trade that held the British Empire together. Molasses and sugar from the West
Indies were distilled into rum in the American colonies. Rum was then exported to Britain
for sale there and throughout the world. Money from the sale of rum helped to outfit slave
ships setting out from Liverpool. These slave ships carried gold, guns, and goods to Africa,
where they could be exchanged for black gold, slaves, who were then carried across the
Atlantic to the New World. So lucrative for England's North American colonies was the
molasses-slave trade that in 1770 Rhode Island alone had more than thirty rum distilleries.
And respectable clergy gave thanks to the Lord for making the molasses-slave trade a siz-
able foundation of wealth in the American colonies. “From molasses to rum to slaves” says
the popular song from the musical, 1776 .