Dan Snow's History Hit - How Alcohol Built the British Empire

Episode Date: October 18, 2021

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as the British Empire expanded across the globe an almost ubiquitous but often underappreciated commodity went with it; alcohol. The distillation, sale and drinking of booze played an essential role in trade, seafaring and colonial societies. But for many indigenous communities this came at a terrible price as, previously unfamiliar, distilled spirits wreaked havoc on their communities and reinforced the racial ideologies that legitimised imperialism. It is a more complicated story than this though and for some indigenous communities, alcohol was not ruinous instead becoming a vital source of income that enabled them to survive and in some instances flourish. For this episode, Dan is joined by Dr Deborah Toner, Associate Professor of History at the University of Leicester and author of Alcohol in the Age of Industry, Empire, and War, to uncover the central role that alcohol played in creating the British Empire.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History. I'm standing looking down at the most exciting maritime building project in Britain at the moment. I'm in Woodbridge in Suffolk on the banks of the River Deben and just across the river from here I can almost see out of the workshop I'm in now on the far side of the River Deben is where the Sutton Hoo ship burial was found. The most remarkable ship burial ever found in Britain one that everyone of course talking about recently because of the dig on Netflix but those of us who love maritime history did not need this Netflix series to get excited about it and indeed this replica building project was started years ago now I've been supportive from the beginning because what they're doing in this workshop

is they are building a replica of that ship found in that excavation just before the Second World War in the 1930s. It is a thing of beauty. I'm looking down now. There's a keel that's been laid. The first planks are about to be attached. The bow and stern sections are about to go on. The ship is taking shape, folks. There's a couple of years left to go,

and I'll be coming back here for the podcast. I'll be coming back here for the TV channel channel and we'll be at every step of the process as this ship takes shape and then we're going to launch it and i'm going to take my place on one of the thwarts and i will pull an oar and we will send this beautiful early medieval ship back out where it belongs down the river to the sea it's's very exciting. We're filming here for History Hit TV today. If you want to check out History Hit TV, it's the world's best history channel, really. We have documentaries on there about things from the Stone Age to the Nuclear Age. This will sit beautifully in our early medieval history section, alongside great documentaries

like the one Kat Jarman made about the Great Heathen Army, the Viking Army defeated by Alfred the Great, and other documentaries too. So please head head over you've got 30 days free if you try it out today historyhit.tv is the website to go to but this episode the podcast is not about that Sutton Hoo ship burial although I think the people that settled on the east coast of England Germanic settlers the people that came across the north Sea and settled would be familiar with alcohol. This podcast therefore is appropriately about alcohol. Alcohol and the forging of empire. How alcohol was essential to the establishment of empire, how it was vital for the economic self-sufficiency of colonies, but also the social welfare, the social cohesion of those colonies, and also impossible to understand

the economic, social, and race relations between the indigenous peoples, the settlers, without understanding the impact of alcohol. We're a funnily old species. We like a drink, and that has played a massive part in imperial history. Here to tell you all about it is the very brilliant Deborah Toner. She is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Leicester. She's just written a book, fantastically, called Alcohol in the Age of Industry, Empire and War. So she is the best person on earth to talk to about this subject. Don't forget to go and check out historyhit.tv.

But in the meantime, here is Debra Toner. Enjoy. Debra, thank you very much for coming on the pod. Oh, you're welcome. Very happy to be here. You know, alcohol, booze, it's so funny because I love 18th century history and it's always there. It's always floating around, but I've never thought about it coherently because I'm stupid. I love 18th century history. It's always there. It's always floating around,

but I've never thought about it coherently because I'm stupid. I've never thought about like coherently as a theory. It's not just kind of weird bit of set dressing when you're talking about empire, but it's like essential to the imperial story. Your work has blown my mind. Alcohol is hugely important. Alcohol is hugely important

and especially in empire building. So I would say that alcohol was fundamental to the establishment and expansion of empires, both economically and ideologically. And because it's important in both of those senses, it means alcohol is involved in all sorts of different social relations between the colonial states and the people that are living under colonial rule, but also in terms of developing local economies and local relations in a social sense and in a cultural sense too. So it's involved in everything, basically. I can hear, I can feel people going, yeah, really?

So let's just, this podcast is going to blow your mind, everyone. Let's talk first of all about, is it a bit like gunpowder weapons? Does Europe at this particular period, in the early modern period, even late medieval, is it pulling away from the rest of its ability to create alcohol? What's going on there? Is there a disparity? So in the early modern period, with especially colonisation in North America and South America, as well as the beginning of the slave trade in Africa, the exchange of distilled spirits, especially with various indigenous peoples from all those countries, becomes fundamental to the establishment of kind of getting a foot in the door for British,

French, Dutch, Spanish traders, first of all, and then spreads from there. And is that because people don't have distilled spirits? I mean, take me through the science. I don't know anything about alcohol. I'm enjoying it very much. But like, did the peoples of the Americas, of West Africa, did they not have distilled spirits? We don't think so. There is some archaeological evidence that there may have been distillation going on already in places like Mexico and the northern part of South America and in parts of Africa as well. The equipment was expensive for Europeans as well at the time. And most of the indigenous societies, certainly in Central and South America and Africa, did brew alcoholic drinks, so different forms of beers and other kind of low alcohol content drinks. But if they did have distilled

alcohol forms, they weren't widespread or produced on a large scale. And the other key advantage for the European traders, as well as the different indigenous peoples they traded with of distilled spirits, is that they don't go off and you can transport fairly large quantities of them much more easily than you can transport large quantities of beer or wine, which also tend to spoil. So they have that higher value in the early trading relationships of empires around the world. So obviously the old expression, guns, germs and steel, the reasons why Europeans were able to conquer, colonise, spread over such a huge percentage of the planet. Should we put booze in there as well? Is that an essential missing component? And I guess one that in the West,

we've been more embarrassed about talking about. Yeah, I would definitely put it on the list along with those other things and possibly even more so in a way, because after the early trading period of establishing relationships and links between European colonists and indigenous peoples, alcohol is produced in those colonies on a massive scale on occasion. So if you think about the sugar plantations that were the most important aspect of British colonialism and French and Dutch in Caribbean colonies and for the Portuguese in Brazil, rum is a really important by-product of the sugar industry and was traded transatlantically on a massive scale, but being produced in the colonies by enslaved and other forms of exploited

labour and then being exported around the world. So talk me through, this is obviously no such thing, but a typical, the arrival of alcohol in a territory. Is there a case study, if you like, what would typically happen and how would it affect those relations at first contact? So I think I'm going to go to North America and particularly sort of British and French traders with various indigenous nations in North America, all of which are kind of overlapping with one another. And the typical entry of distilled spirits into these trading relationships was first, often as a form of gift exchange between the opposing sides as they get to know each other and what they can get from one another. And as one of the commodities that was attractive

to indigenous people, distilled spirits became very important. And what's really interesting about the North American context is that alcohol consumption, even in the form of brewed drinks, was not widespread. However, other intoxicating substances like tobacco, peyote, other kinds of drugs and practices created altered states of being, which of course consuming alcohol does as well. So that's one of the reasons why to various indigenous societies, distilled spirits were an attractive and high value commodity that they exchanged along with things like guns and other items with the European colonists. I guess what's so fascinating to me when you think about this is that, yes, beads, guns,

we're all familiar with these European trading goods. Obviously, each one of those subsequently would have knock-on effects around extinction of animals, around increased lethality and violent confrontation. But alcohol, as we all know, must have had a massively destabilising effect. It's not just a trade good. It is a trade good that can destroy, well, lives and societies. That's one side of the story. And certainly the negative impacts of alcohol did make themselves known in pretty much every colonial place around the world, not just in the early modern period, but later on in history as well.

However, there is an important other side to that story. In the same way that alcohol forms the basis for a jolly night out down at the pub, it also had a positive dimension for forging social relationships. So in early colonial America, for instance, most towns had two important public institutions, the tavern and the church, both of which were really important to forming communities amongst the colonists, the European colonists on one side, but also in terms of their relationships with other people as well. And so in addition to being a place where people go to form social bonds, taverns were also critically important to other economic activities. So other kinds of trade going on there too, the spread of political news and information and the exchange of ideas. So alongside the problematic

impacts that alcohol can have on native communities in different parts of the Americas and around the world, there were also positive aspects to those transformations as well. Well, except you get the Adams brothers in Boston plotting sedition against their rightful king in the old pubs of Boston. Okay, so obviously there's so many areas in which alcohol has to be considered because you're right, also those long sea voyages, impossible without alcohol. They literally, the crew drank beer and then subsequently grog, which is a whole separate podcast, but that was a way of sustaining themselves over long voyages. Well that's another really important part of the story to remember that, you know, throughout most of our history, alcohol consumption in all of its forms was considered

important for health and vitality. So that might sound strange to modernise today, where there's so much concern about how many units you might be drinking in a given week, for instance. But in terms of the calories that it provided, the warming kind of effects that it could have, really until about the later 19th century, the idea that alcohol was a fundamentally healthy part of the diet wasn't really challenged. Throughout that time, of course, drinking to excess, becoming drunk, and especially becoming drunk on a regular basis, was known to be unhealthy and bad in all sorts of different ways. But drinking regularly as part of your daily diet was considered healthy and normal for hundreds and hundreds of years.

Okay, so alcohol makes trans-oceanic migration, colonisation, and then sustaining those early colonies, it's almost impossible without alcohol. Let's talk though about the other side of it, which is alcohol's effect on those indigenous societies. Because I'm so struck by this, because having read a lot of 18th century primary sources, letters home, the hopelessness of the indigenous population, often riddled with alcohol, social breakdown, is given as a reason for their colonization. It legitimizes their servitude. It legitimizes that colonization. I've never thought enough about how actually that's a product of the alcohol that's been given to them. And so that is a deeply pernicious argument.

deeply pernicious argument? Yeah, so there is very much a pattern between alcohol and imperialism where relations of dependency are created in that imperial relationship. And when that happens, especially in places where there are exploitative labour systems, whether it's slavery or some other form of coerced labour, often wages were paid in the form of alcohol. So it kind of creates this destructive cycle amongst particular communities. But there is, and I don't want to diminish the impact of that in how negative and long-lasting effects those kinds of relations of dependency can have on particular communities. But there is also an important other side to the story, which is that indigenous peoples also actively embraced the production and trade of alcohol themselves. And so where there wasn't that relationship of dependency between an indigenous

community and European traders or colonists, it could actually provide an important source of income and livelihood for indigenous communities. One really great example of this comes from the area of the Americas I know best, which is Mexico, where actually the exchange of distilled spirits wasn't so important because there was already a thriving alcohol production tradition in central Mexico around a substance called pulque. And while it hadn't been openly commercially traded before the Spanish conquest of Mexico and the establishment of the Spanish empire there, indigenous communities rapidly became involved in expanding the commercial enterprise of pulque making. And this became vitally important to the livelihoods of those

communities and also keeping their own traditional culture alive. So there's some really exciting emerging research coming out of the early pulque trade in the 16th and 17th centuries, which became so profitable then the Spanish colonists started taking it over for themselves but in that 200 year period or so between the early 1500s and the late 1600s the pulque industry helped indigenous communities to survive and indeed thrive so this did play out in different ways, sometimes with a much more positive outcome, I think, for Indigenous communities

where that pattern of dependency wasn't established. Of course, everywhere is different. And I've had some, Paul-Cain. It's pretty disgusting, but it gets the job done. An acquired taste. You're listening to dan snow's history i'm talking about booze and empire two big subjects more coming up land a viking longship on island shores scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed.

We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. Let's move beyond the 17th and 18th centuries to maybe the 19th, the industrialising empires. Again, you point out that alcohol is essential here in terms of its... People talk about railways, they talk about industrialization, but alcohol is at the heart of that.

Yeah. So I recently published a book called Alcohol in the Age of Industry, Empire and War. And you can tell from the title of that book that I argue that alcohol is fundamental to the processes that we think of as central to the modern historical period from by 1800 onwards. So the alcohol industry was a pioneer of industrialisation and actually worked hand in hand with things like the railways. So just to give an example, the expansion of railways across North America, connecting large parts of rural territories to big growing cities. So urbanization is also a huge part of this story. Massively expands alcohol markets and their profitability. So loads of farmers making whiskey from their surplus corn in the Midwest

of the United States with the establishment of railways are able to transport all of that whiskey back to the major cities on the Eastern seaboard. So the industry becomes hugely more profitable and this establishes a cycle and a pattern of expansion of the industry and a kind of mutually reinforcing relationship with the other aspects of industrialization. That reminds me, I was making a program in St.ancras the other day, and St Pancras was built, apparently there was a great fashion from Burton on Trent, these Burton pale ales, and it was St Pancras specifically designed to manage the delivery and storage of that beer into London, in that kind of undercroft or arcade where all the shops now are. So,

yeah, I mean, everywhere in the world, it's all around us, I guess. Well, Burton Pale Ale was being exported to Japan by about the 1860s. So in terms of this process of industrialisation and commercialisation, it happens on an increasingly global scale across the 19th century. And that's how you see a connection between empire building and industrialization and i guess we're used to this discussion with if it's sugar if it's textiles from lancashire and the effect maybe that has on the bengal textile industry but what i'm really struck by with alcohol is like alcohol is not like well it is like steel and that you can make better weapons and therefore you can perpetrate warfare more successfully or whatever but alcohol has a profound effect when it's delivered you know it's a story of industrialization and of urbanization but its public health effect is so

profound right so what happens in these societies when you build these trains build these railways and deliver vast amounts of booze into previously fairly abstemious areas? It must have been extraordinary. So first of all, I think the public health concerns around alcohol, which do become very prominent by the end of the 19th century, are first and foremost concentrated actually on the industrial working classes, and far less so on the imperial subjects. And then subsequently, the concerns that arise around the industrial working classes in places like Britain and the United States are then kind of transferred to the imperial context where they take on an added racial dimension. So it's quite a complicated story, the emergence of public health concerns about alcohol, but they do become very critically important around the end of the 19th century and beginning

of the 20th century, where industrialising nation states are acquiring all of these new forms of state power to actually control the daily lives of their subjects. And at the same time, the rise of nationalism meant that that was very important in terms of national strength. So around the turn of the 20th century, there's a very powerful conversion of growing state power to control what people do and the nationalist desire to do so for the good of the whole nation. Yes, that's fascinating. So you're no longer trying to pump alcohol into a crumbling imperial frontier to try and expand. And the map's all been drawn by that stage. So what you need to do is keep everyone nice and healthy and strong so they can eventually be mobilised and go and fight the German enemy. Indeed, and go to war. And so often in times of war, there's a real upswing in political and social rhetoric and concern about the effect of alcohol on everybody

in society, but particularly the working classes who tend to make up the soldiers in war campaigns and on the imperial subjects who become, as we know, more and more difficult to control and keep under the control of empire as we get further into the 20th century. And yet that expression of they can't handle their drink, that does legitimise servitude or colonialism. Because if you assume that Australian Aboriginals or the people of South West Africa need the paternalist guiding hand of the white man because they're addicted because alcohol is so pervasive. Alcohol does provide quite a useful prop for empire in those places. It does indeed. And that was the driving force of several major

policy changes about the availability and accessibility of alcohol to different indigenous peoples around the world in exactly this time period. So much of this was informed by the idea that whether it's indigenous Americans or African peoples or Australian aboriginals, that they have less inherent self-control and ability to moderate their alcohol use. So therefore, they need that kind of paternalistic protection. And so increasingly, prohibitionist policies were introduced to prevent not alcohol throughout society, but specifically the access of alcohol to indigenous North Americans or indigenous Australians or Africans in the 1890s onwards, basically. I know this is true of some groups in North America, and I think it's true of Botswana as well, but do you see liberators? What's the relationship between would-be liberators of people, of indigenous peoples, and alcohol? Is the temperance movement embraced by people who seek to throw off the shackles of European empire?

raced by people who seek to throw off the shackles of European empire? In some cases, that's definitely the case. So one of the earliest temperance organisations to be formed was actually amongst the Cherokee in the very early 1800s, predating the huge growth of the temperance movement amongst white Americans and Britons in the 1830s. And there were powerful anti-alcohol movements that had the active support of various Native American nations and in different parts of Africa as well. Likewise, the temperance movement was very closely linked to the Indian nationalist movement in the 1930s and indeed in the Irish nationalist movement in the 1930s, and indeed in the Irish nationalist movement in the late 19th, early 20th century. So the idea being that alcohol is a tool of colonialism and helps to keep us in a state of oppression, and by committing to the temperance cause, that's a form

of empowerment. And also, certainly in the Indian case, Indian nationalists argued that British colonialism had introduced alcohol to India, which isn't strictly true, but they were able to associate the alcohol trade with the British empire. And so getting rid of one is tantamount to getting rid of the other. However, there's also a whole load of other interesting case studies where kind of the opposite is true, there's also a whole load of other interesting case studies where kind of the opposite is true, actually, because alcohol production had become very important to the material survival and incomes of various colonized peoples. Resistance to colonialism was expressed through defiance of prohibitionist legislation. So one example of that is in

the nation that's now known as Ghana, but formerly the Gold Coast, under the British Empire, where in the 1830s, local production of distilled spirits, which had become very economically important, was banned by the British Empire. And in defiance of that, producers kept producing their distilled spirits illegally. And people who would normally disapprove of alcohol altogether, and indeed of criminal behaviour, refused to cooperate with the colonial state in shutting that down. And it became a very important part of defending their material rights to make a living through the alcohol trade became an important part of the nationalist movement there, which succeeded in the 1950s. So it worked both ways in different cases. I'm really interested in your book, how you talk about, and this rings

true for me of probably a long time ago now, but when I would be in Southern Africa and there was still a sense of racial tension. And there was this idea of drinking separately, so you didn't show the fragility of this white group, this sort of self-appointed elite who didn't want to show their weakness for alcohol in front of whether it's the workers in the copper belt in Zambia, for example, I was once filming with. And I'm really struck by that and how the segregation of drinking became quite important to the maintenance of a kind of racial hierarchy in these places. Yeah, that's a really interesting one to pick up on. And there are examples of that in Africa, in India as well, and in parts of North America too, where the narrative we were talking about earlier that indigenous peoples are uniquely susceptible to

drinking to excess and not being able to control themselves that kind of breaks down when they're able to see British colonial officials and British workers getting drunk and fighting and all the rest of it so and in addition to that as well as well as having segregated drinking places so that the bad drunken behavior of the colonists, the imperialists, couldn't be seen by imperial subjects, there were also quite substantial concerns about the effects of drinking local forms of alcohol by the colonisers. So drinking the quote-unquote native spirits might have the effect of transforming British imperialists, for example, into more like Indian people. So there were those kinds of concerns as well. Yeah, that was interesting. I was once filming with a group of white Zambians in the same trip on a fishing trip. And the great taboo was that they might drink the local spirit. And it was a great sort of naughty thing that they were going to do. And I found that really extraordinary because they spent the whole

time drinking other things, but to drink this kind of locally brewed spirit was like transgressive. It's some form of corruption, I guess, into your body. So those concerns are surprisingly widespread. And I guess you'd see that with having sex with people of different races in those cultures as well, in those societies as well. Just to finish up, why is it that we tend to have ignored, or maybe it's just me being an idiot, but why we tend to ignore things like, in the last 20 years, we hear about imperialism and we now talk much more about sugar. We talk much more about alcohol. We talk much more about sex and disease. more about alcohol, we talked much about sex and disease and the sort of corporeal elements of empire rather than, whereas I feel that when I was growing up, we talked a lot more about Whitehall, the official mind, strategy, imperial competition. And it feels now that we're getting a far more

earthy and realistic approach to empire with you and other scholars talking about these kind of things. I think there has been, you know been an expansion of the range of subjects that we're interested in in history over the last probably 40 or 50 years, but really gathering a pace recently, where in order to get at the lived experience and kind of mental worldviews of imperial subjects especially, we need to think about the day-to-day realities of existence. So what you eat, what you drink, what you wear, who you socialise with and where you do that. These are the fundamental elements that make up day-to-day lives. The tricky part of that, of course, is the types of sources you need to be engaging with in order to access that are

very different from official government records, for instance. So you have to get a bit creative sometimes to do this kind of history. But when you do, the rewards, I think, that it reaps are endless. Because I remember, if I was studying empire, I would start with Richard Hackliot, you know, the great evangelist for empire and the thinker and writer and someone who advocated the English colonisation of North America. And it's sort of very much scholarly and based in a library and printing. And actually now I'm thinking, well, what's more important really in this story is what's going on in the imperial frontier and who's flogging booze to who and what's going on. It's turning that, maybe it's just my understanding, but it seems to be turning

a traditional telling of empire on its head slightly. Yeah, so it's much more of a bottom-up perspective to what's happening on the ground rather than the powerful individuals who are in charge of the process. And certainly I describe myself as a social and cultural historian, much more interested in what a particular period or process is like for an ordinary person in the street than an official sitting on top of a pile of policies. Yeah, no more Hackliot. Right, so thank you very much. Deborah, what is your book called? My book is called Alcohol in the Age of Industry, Empire and War, published with Bloomsbury Academic Press. Well, I'm glad you stayed off the booze long

enough to get it done. It's the enemy of all book deadlines, in my experience. Thank you very much for coming to the podcast. It's great to be here. Thanks very much for having me. Thanks, folks. You've made it to the end of another episode. And finished. Thanks, folks, for being in the middle of the episode. Congratulations. Well done, you. I hope you're not fast asleep. If you did fancy supporting everything we do here at History Hit, we'd love it if you would go and wherever you get these pods, give it a rating, five stars or its equivalent.

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