Race, Order, and Control
While alcohol was under attack by temperance and prohibition advocates in Europe, Europeans were channeling vast volumes of alcohol into their overseas empires, where, along with textiles, beads, and guns, it was used as a trading commodity. The flow of alcohol swelled during the nineteenth century, especially in Africa after the territory not already claimed by European powers was divided up among them at the 1884 Berlin conference. Alcohol was also implicated as Europeans extended their domination over the whole of North America during the 1800s, as spirits were traded and sold to the native peoples. In both Africa and North America, the European administrators and governments wrestled with the implications of drinking by the indigenous populations, and most applied prohibition policies to them well in advance of such policies being widely imposed on Europeans anywhere. Just as the temperance movement in Europe and elsewhere informed policies enacted in the African colonies and imposed on the native populations of North America, it is possible that the lessons learned were absorbed by European, American, and Canadian governments as they dealt with demands for greater alcohol regulation in their own countries.
Europeans brought their alcoholic beverages, attitudes, and patterns of consumption with them, and in Africa they encountered indigenous peoples with their own alcoholic beverages and modes of consuming them. The interplay was complex and the results were sometimes unexpected, but they were always informed by the relationships of power in colonial societies. Within that framework, each colony presented unique cultural, political, and economic conditions. The degree of contact between European and African populations varied and could be minimal even where railroads were extended into the interior of the continent. Trading networks employed alcohol more in some colonies than in others, and while missionaries urged the indigenous people to drink moderately if they could not abstain entirely, their influence on local alcohol consumption appears to have ranged from a little to a lot. Some colonial administrators were content to see vast quantities of alcohol flow into their colonies because they brought a steady flow of tax revenues into their treasuries; others, motivated by economic or moral concerns, tried to control the access that local populations had to alcohol. Colonialism in Africa was a complex narrative, and alcohol was a constant theme.
Throughout the continent, alcohol became an important medium of exchange—less among the Muslim populations of North Africa than in the south—and it was used, sometimes alone and sometimes in conjunction with other trading commodities, for the purchase of the goods in demand by Europeans: palm oil, rubber, ivory, gold, diamonds, and slaves. A British trade commissioner sent to Nigeria in 1895 reported to the Colonial Office that trade was impossible without spirits because liquor was the most popular currency.1 Alcohol played an extremely important role in the acquisition of slaves; sometimes it was part of the actual price, and sometimes it was a gift to ensure that local leaders made slaves available for Europeans to purchase. In 1724, for example, French traders purchased fifty slaves for cloth, beads, guns, gunpowder, lead shot, and brandy.2Alcohol was also used as payment for territorial concessions. In 1843, the king of Assinie (a small state in Côte d’Ivoire) gave up sovereignty to King Louis-Philippe of France for cloth, gunpowder, guns, tobacco, hats, a mirror, an organ, beads, six 200-liter barrels of brandy, and 4 cases of distilled spirits. In 1894, a British trading company that wanted to extend its riverside frontage by twenty feet agreed to pay 20 cases of gin a year.3 In Cameroon, chiefs along the coast agreed to a treaty placing themselves “under the protection” of the Germans rather than the British because the German authorities provided them with liquor.4
During the nineteenth century, the consumption of European alcohol became far more common throughout native communities. By the middle of the century, the same alarm bells that were being sounded in Europe at what was believed to be the widespread abuse of alcohol among the working classes were also ringing in the colonies. European missionaries reported on the havoc that alcohol played on indigenous cultures, and accounts were published by temperance advocates in Europe to amplify their descriptions of the harm liquor was causing at home. Critics assumed that African villages were full of drunk men and women and that conditions in communities such as Cape Coast, Accra, and Lagos were worse than in the back alleys of London, Manchester, and Glasgow.5 In England, a crisply named United Committee for the Prevention of the Demoralization of the Native Races by the Liquor Traffic was formed in the 1880s, and similar lobbying groups were formed in the other major colonial powers, France and Germany. Decrying the effects of alcohol on the yet-to-be-civilized native peoples in Africa reinforced the notion that alcohol addiction (often referred to as alcoholism) was more prevalent among populations that lacked willpower and self-discipline.6
A number of indigenous leaders petitioned the European nations to halt the flow of alcohol. In the 1880s, Etsu Maliki, emir of Bida, an emirate in central Nigeria, wrote to the bishop of Nigeria, “Rum has ruined my country; it has ruined my people. It has made them become mad.” He asked the bishop to beg “the English queen to prevent the bringing of rum into this land . . . to spoil our country.”7 Rather than wait for Queen Victoria to act, the emir outlawed the sale of imported spirits and demanded that the Europeans remove their stocks of gin. The issue was taken up at the 1889–90 Brussels conference convened to deal with the slave trade and the commerce in arms and alcohol. The conference banned the extension of trafficking in alcohol and the local distilling of alcohol in regions where they did not already exist, between latitudes 20 degrees north and 22 degrees south. This ban excluded South Africa, which by then was a major alcohol-producing colony and was regulating its own affairs, and France’s mainly Muslim North African colonies (such as Algeria and Tunisia), whose wine was, at the time the conference was held, helping the French deal with the shortages of French wine caused by phylloxera. On the other hand, the conference’s decision intended to end the further spread of the alcohol trade throughout most of Africa.
What brought the situation to this point was the rapid diffusion of European alcohol throughout much of Africa during the later 1800s. Before European contact (and afterward in many interior regions little touched by Europeans), various kinds of alcohol were regularly made in many parts of Africa and were consumed in a range of contexts. In some areas, enough alcohol was made for it to be consumed on a daily basis. In other areas, it was consumed primarily at occasions such as festivals and funerals. In eastern Africa, for example, the Haya, who live in the northwest of what is now Tanzania, made beer from bananas, the staple element in their diet, before European contact. Bananas were artificially ripened by hanging them above the hearth or burying them in the ground for several days until their starches were transformed into sugars. They were then mashed, the juice was extracted and mixed with an equal volume of water, then the mixture was allowed to ferment. The result of this process, carried out only by men, was a fairly low-alcohol (4 to 5 percent) beverage that was drunk by men and women at celebrations and rituals of all kinds, including marriage negotiations and offerings to ancestors. Adult men expected to drink banana beer during the day, and while becoming “happy” as a result was approved of, the Haya disapproved of drunkenness. One form of punishment was to force someone to drink to the point of drunkenness and suffer the humiliation it brought upon them.8
On the Atlantic side of the continent, in west central Africa, two alcoholic beverages were commonly made before European contact: a milky wine (called malavu in Angola) made from the sap of a palm tree and having an alcohol content of about 5 percent, and a beer (walo) made from either millet, sorghum, or corn, with an alcohol level less than half that. (It is possible that some of these beverages could reach higher levels of alcohol.) Palm wine seems to have been made in quite small volumes, as each tree gave up at most a liter of sap a day. Moreover, the wine seems to have become very acidic within twenty-four hours of being made. It seems to have served many purposes: as a widely consumed beverage at meals, as a complement to festive and other occasions, and as an offering to social superiors. Palm wine, which required relatively little labor, was made by men, but beer, which demanded a series of brewing processes, was the responsibility of women, as brewing generally was throughout Africa. As we might expect, because cereals grew more widely than palm trees, beer was produced in larger volumes and was even more widely consumed. It appears to have been drunk by the mass of the population, but its consumption is poorly documented because the early European explorers were more interested in the indigenous elites than in the diets of ordinary women and men.9
When Europeans began to establish settlements in the coastal regions of Africa, many tried the indigenous beverages, but few appear to have been impressed. Instead, Europeans brought their own supplies of alcohol, and after they settled, they arranged for regular shipments to provide alcohol for their own consumption and as a trading commodity. In Angola, wine, brandy, and gerebita (a cheap rum made from the waste of sugar production) were used by the Portuguese not only to acquire slaves—by enticing local leaders to make slaves available for purchase—but also to pay various taxes imposed by indigenous leaders on Europeans who wanted to do business in their territory, and as diplomatic presents to lubricate relationships between the Portuguese and local political leaders. In 1807 and 1810, the governor of Luanda tried to smooth relations with the king of Kasanje, an important source of slaves, by giving him 59 liters of gerebita and 56 liters of brandy for his personal consumption and another 30 liters of gerebita to be shared among his councillors.10
Alcohol had also been used to acquire slaves, as well as gold and ivory, from the southern regions of Nigeria in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It had a higher value than other trading commodities such as beads, textiles, guns, and gunpowder, and it retained its status after the end of the slave trade in the first half of the 1800s. European merchants established trading posts on the Nigerian coast to consolidate shipments of rubber, palm oil, gold, elephant tusks, and other commodities for shipping to England, Germany, and other destinations. They negotiated directly with Nigerian agents, and they in turn acted as intermediaries for suppliers who brought their products from the interior to the coast. The intermediaries were paid in gin (a generic name for any grain-based spirits in England) and rum, and they paid their suppliers the same way. The latter then returned to their homes in the interior to drink some of the alcohol and use the rest as a trading commodity in their own communities. In this way, alcohol became effectively a currency throughout the colonies, and between a third and two-fifths of southern Nigeria’s exports were exchanged for alcohol by the early twentieth century. Exchange rates were fixed but subject to change as commodity prices fluctuated. In the 1890s, 60 to 75 cases of gin could be exchanged for a 180-gallon barrel of palm oil, an almost equal (at 75 cases of gin) gallon-for-gallon exchange of gin for oil. But as the price of gin increased, less was needed, until by 1925 the barrel of oil cost only 20 cases of gin.11
Although this flow of alcohol to the British colonies in southern Nigeria declined with the start of the First World War, it was so important in the 1800s that the tax revenues paid for much of the cost of colonial administration. From the 1860s, alcohol was the single most important import, in terms of value and volume, to these colonies, and the duties on it accounted for half to three-quarters of all the colonies’ revenues. Insofar as the taxes were factored into the value of the alcohol for bartering purposes, they were effectively paid by the Nigerian producers and merchants. The colonial administrations could never have collected these revenues in money, as the indigenous population shied away from coins and bills. Alcohol fueled so much of colonial Nigeria’s economy that Herbert Tugwell, the Anglican bishop of Western Equatorial Africa and a strong supporter of alcohol control, noted in 1901, “How is the Railway being built? By Gin. How was the Carter-Denton Bridge built? By Gin. How is the town lighted? By Gin. And now if it be asked, how is the town to be drained, or how are we to secure a good supply of good clean water? The answer is with gin.”12
Because alcohol was used as currency in southern Nigeria, much of it was never consumed but continually changed hands. Owners were known to open bottles and drink some of the contents before topping them up with water and carefully resealing them. If this happened often enough, eventually one recipient would end up with a bottle of water that had the value of a bottle of alcohol. Even so, and despite the weight of a case of alcohol and the risks of bottles breaking, distilled spirits were an ideal currency because they did not deteriorate like wine and beer or like other trading commodities such as textiles and tobacco. So pervasive was this “gin currency” that currency exchanges were established at some courts, enabling people convicted of offenses to convert their gin to money in order to pay fines in cash. Moreover, a case of spirits was a flexible unit of currency, as it could be traded intact or broken down into its constituent dozen bottles. When the British introduced money into the Nigerian economy, they found that the native population was already prepared to grasp the principle that there were 12 pennies in a shilling.13
Even so, the use of money rather than gin was resisted. Gin was so cheap that it was useful as payment for small items, while the coins initially put into circulation were of too large denomination. (The authorities eventually issued a coin worth a tenth of a penny.) Alcohol was a tangible asset with visible exchange value, not like a metal disc or a piece of flimsy paper that was merely reputed to represent some value and could be easily lost or stolen.14 In a sense, the prevalence of alcohol as currency might have been a deterrent to alcohol consumption. It is one thing to use money to purchase alcohol for drinking and thus to consume money indirectly. It is another thing literally to consume “money” in the form of gin. It is notable that Bishop Tugwell’s main criticisms were directed at the role of alcohol in Nigeria’s economy, which he characterized as immoral. Unlike his counterparts elsewhere, he was not as preoccupied with drunkenness and the other sorts of immorality that were generally associated with alcohol, possibly because of the role of alcohol as currency in southern Nigeria’s economy.
As a general rule, because most colonial administrations relied on revenues from taxing alcohol, they resisted calls to introduce temperance or prohibition policies. Alcohol accounted for 46 percent of all import duties in Côte d’Ivoire in 1911 and 38 percent of total government revenue in the Gold Coast (now Ghana) the following year.15 Revenues like these represented the difference between colonies that were self-sustaining and colonies that were financially dependent on the colonial power. All colonial powers wanted their colonies to be profitable, not drains on finances, and it is hardly surprising that they resisted any policy that would reduce the steady income stream that duties on alcohol represented.
An exception was the French colony of Côte d’Ivoire, where one governor launched a temperance campaign in the first decades of the twentieth century. Gabriel Angoulvant became governor in 1908 and soon saw alcohol as an impediment to the economic development of his colony. There were minor matters of respect, such as when local chiefs met the governor-general of French West Africa drunk, seated, hats on heads, and pipes in mouths. There was the problem of drunkenness that arose when French employers paid their workers in alcohol, as railroad builders did with their African migrant workers. But the a bigger issue lay in the threat that Angoulvant thought alcohol posed to colonial economic development. He drew on prevailing French temperance arguments that alcohol led to a decline in fertility, to poor-quality offspring, and to various diseases, and he argued that an inebriated African workforce would be unstable and unproductive and that Africans who drank would be unreliable taxpayers.16 Alcohol, in short, was an obstacle to the economic development of French colonies and the moral improvement of their populations.
Côte d’Ivoire was part of a federation of French colonies, and in 1912 Angoulvant persuaded his fellow governors and the governor-general of the federation to raise the tariffs on alcohol in order to make it more expensive and to reduce consumption. To lessen the dangers of alcohol consumption, the importation of absinthe to these colonies was banned, and in the interest of health, the inexpensive Dutch and German spirits that made up most of the alcohol consumed by the local population were analyzed. They were found generally unfit for human consumption. The governors discussed the possibility of importing more wine, which was, in the eyes of French temperance advocates, a safe beverage. In the meantime, colonial administrators throughout Côte d’Ivoire were charged with explaining the new alcohol policy to the African population. They warned about the addictive properties of alcohol, stressed the need for self-discipline, and advised Ivoiriens to think beyond the short-term pleasures of drinking and consider the long-term implications for their health and fertility and the well-being of their societies. They were also advised not to start producing more palm wine to compensate for the reduced supplies of European spirits, and here we can see colonial moral and economic interests align: taking too much sap from palm trees for wine killed the trees and reduced the supply of palm oil that was so valuable to the French as an industrial lubricant and in the manufacture of soap.17
Angoulvant was not the only colonial administrator to see alcohol as a problem. While Angoulvant was working toward reducing the flow of alcohol into Côte d’Ivoire, Theodor Seitz, the governor of the nearby German colony of Cameroon, wanted to prohibit alcohol entirely but was reluctant to do so for fear that it would result in smuggling from adjacent colonies and make alcohol even less controllable. Instead, he limited sales of spirits in many parts of the colony and allowed unrestricted sales to a small area near the coast. The result was a decline in spirits imports but an increase in commodities that contained spirits: cosmetics, patent medicines, and perfumes, including lavender water with an alcohol content of 47 percent. Not only did these products circumvent the alcohol restrictions, but they entered Cameroon free of taxes. Merchants could make good profits from them, and the colonial government lost the revenue from duties. But beer was not affected by the regulations, and imports rose, with the taxes imposed partly offsetting the loss of taxes on spirits. Any regulations imposed on alcohol distribution and sale in the colonies exempted Europeans, as it was understood that they needed or were entitled to drink as much as they wanted. With the exception of missionaries (and not all missionaries), Europeans who lived in the colonies are thought to have been regular and sometimes heavy drinkers.
As the colonial economies developed during the nineteenth century, European employers began to provide local workers with alcohol, sometimes as part of their wages and sometimes to purchase with their wages. This appears to be similar to the practice in early modern Europe (although payment of wages in alcohol had almost died out by the nineteenth century), but there was a key difference. In Europe, alcohol (especially wine and beer) had been part of the daily diet, so that paying workers in alcohol provided them with a necessity. In most of Africa, in contrast, payments in alcohol were generally far above the quantities that local workers would otherwise have consumed. Indigenous alcohols, generally beer and palm wine, were relatively low in alcohol, and the distilled spirits supplied by European employers were much higher, generally about ten times stronger than beer and palm wine. (Spirits were preferred by colonial employers because their high alcohol-to-volume ratio made them less expensive than other beverages to ship.) Europeans used this sort of alcohol not only to provide their workers with energy but also to dull the impact of their working and living conditions and to keep them in a state of subordination. If the European socialists were correct in thinking that alcohol was a weapon used by factory owners to keep their workers docile, it was that much more correct in the race-based economies of the colonies.
Yet there were regions where alcohol appears to have played a smaller role in European colonization. In Ghana, alcohol imports certainly rose at the end of the nineteenth century, by 107 percent from 1879 to 1895, but the rate of increase was half that (206 percent) of other commodities. Liquor represented a declining share of all imports: 19 percent in 1879, 15 percent in 1894, and 7 percent in 1910.18 Recollections of older Ghanaians suggest that alcohol ranked well behind other commodities (cotton textiles, salt, tobacco, and gunpowder) in purchasing and consumption patterns at the turn of the century. One much-qualified calculation of per capita alcohol consumption puts it at about 1.83 liters in 1895, well below contemporary European rates and almost certainly below the likely rates in other West African colonies.19 In Akan, the dominant society in Ghana, women and young people (even in their twenties) seldom drank, and children never did, so that consumption was concentrated among older men, who thus had access to a much higher volume of alcohol.
Even so, and insofar as we can rely on accounts of such culturally sensitive behavior, intoxication appears to have been rare. Social controls on drinking seem to have been strong, even if they weakened during the nineteenth century, but many accounts note the rarity of drunkenness. In the 1880s, a temperance-minded and nondrinking Methodist missionary wrote, “I have not the slightest hesitation in saying that instances of drunkenness are comparatively rare in the streets of Cape Coast.” He also reported the comment of a district commissioner, also a temperance supporter: “Out of hundreds of cases tried at his court during [his] first 12 months [in the colony], not one was traceable to the use of strong drink.” A British district officer wrote in 1897, “Notwithstanding the enormous quantities [of liquor] imported into the Colony, it is very exceptional indeed to see a drunken native. . . . It would be absurd to deny that there is drunkenness among the natives, but habitual drunkenness is practically unknown.”20 Comments like these are extraordinary, given the cultural lens through which most Europeans—especially those who supported temperance or prohibition policies—viewed African society. If there were episodes of heavy drinking (often accompanied by quarreling and brawling), they seem to have been associated with certain festivals.
Alcohol was a less common ingredient in European colonization in the Muslim regions, which were concentrated in the northern half of the continent. But the alcohol trade penetrated even these areas because not all Muslims abstained from alcohol, and because even populations in which Muslims made up the majority contained alcohol-consuming non-Muslim members. Most of the alcohol was smuggled into areas of prohibition from colonies where it was more freely available, but some was carried by train after railroads facilitated the movement of goods and people into interior districts. In Nigeria, temperance organizations tried in 1901 to have alcohol, locally known as “firewater,” banned as railway freight. The governor, anxious to see the new railroad make money (spirits accounted for between 8 and 13 percent of freight in the early 1900s), rebuffed them, pointing out that if the alcohol was not carried by rail, it would be taken by river transport, the railroad’s main competition.21 Later, in 1913, a different governor raised the rates charged to carry alcohol on the railroad, but there was continuous evidence of alcohol reaching the areas of prohibition. Many reports told of Muslims of all social classes drinking alcohol, sometimes to the point of intoxication. Access to liquor was said to be a status symbol in Muslim ruling circles, and it was consumed openly at occasions such as weddings. Overall, concludes one historian, liquor was consumed in these areas “without any external inducement.”22
The First World War reduced imports of European alcohol to many African colonies. The bulk of the alcohol supplied to Africa had taken the form of cheap Dutch and German spirits, and with the outbreak of war, German supplies were cut off. As for distillers in the Netherlands (which was neutral during the war), their shipments declined dramatically because they depended on Germany for bottles. Nor did French wine take the place of these spirits in the French colonies during the war, even though there had been some talk of replacing “harmful” spirits with “healthy” wine. The French government supplied huge volumes of wine to its armies on the western front (1,200 million liters by 1917), and when combined with high civilian consumption, there was little left for export. British colonies felt the same impact, as supplies of German spirits disappeared, and throughout Africa many colonial administrations found ways to raise revenues—generally from taxes imposed directly on Africans—to replace the duties on alcohol.23
During and immediately after the war, various ordinances to restrict alcohol were put in place in some colonies, as they were in Europe itself. In 1917, Nigeria was divided into “prohibition” zones, where the indigenous population was forbidden to drink imported alcohol; “licensed” zones, where alcohol could be sold only by licensed retailers; and “restricted” zones, where Africans could sell imported alcohol if they had a license. But in 1919, British colonial governments were instructed to prohibit the importation of any distilled spirits that were destined for sale to the indigenous population.24
After the First World War, an international commission was set up to consider revising the terms of the conferences of the 1880s that had divided Africa among the European powers and set controls on the importation of alcohol. The result was a convention, signed in 1919, to control the liquor traffic so as to continue “the struggle against the dangers of alcoholism” in Africa. It banned the importation of “trade spirits” of any kind throughout Africa, except in South Africa and the Muslim countries of North Africa, but left the governments in each colony to decide which distilled spirits should be classified as “trade spirits.” In addition, they agreed to impose prohibition in areas where spirits had not been used, although “non-native persons” could bring alcohol into these areas for their personal consumption. Finally, local distillation was prohibited, as was the importation and sale of any distilling equipment. The big loophole, of course, was that each government could decide which distilled beverages were trade spirits. The treaty proved largely unworkable because of this, and in practice it made little difference to the availability of alcohol in the colonies.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the European colonies displayed a range of alcohol policies and patterns of consumption that was as varied as in Europe itself. But the policies were rarely simple echoes of the policies adopted in Europe. There was a continuous expression of concern for the effects of alcohol on indigenous people and their culture, from missionaries on the ground, from temperance organizations at home, and from some colonial administrators. All reflected the sentiments current in Europe, where nearly all governments tightened alcohol policies, even if not to the extent that many antialcohol groups wanted. But they went much further in the colonies. Even though they were deficient in applying restrictions, the European powers negotiated regions where prohibition was mandated, at least to the extent that the indigenous population would be deprived of access to imported spirits. Britain, France, and Germany would never have adopted policies like this domestically, and they did so in the colonies because they could expect little resistance. Areas designated for prohibition were areas where European alcohol had not reached, so that prohibition did not so much involve withdrawing an existing commodity as preventing its arrival. Beyond that, European governments more readily imposed restrictive policies on their colonial subjects, to whom they did not have to answer directly. All these alcohol policies, then, must be understood as emerging from the interplay of many considerations: the reception of temperance arguments, calculations of economic loss and advantage, a paternalistic view of colonial populations, and the perception of power in the colonial context.
South Africa had a distinctive alcohol history through Africa’s late colonial and postcolonial periods because it was at times divided into self-governing republics until the Union of South Africa was formed in 1910. Moreover, formal dominance by whites lasted longer there than elsewhere in Africa, ending only in 1994 with the fall of the apartheid system. One of the main uses of alcohol was in the “dop” or “tot” system, by which wages were paid in alcohol. This system stretched back to the early settlement of the Cape region by the Dutch in the seventeenth century and continued to the end of the twentieth century. Although the system was abolished by law in 1960, the ban was not seriously enforced until the postapartheid period. By the 1800s, when Europeans began to extract gold and diamonds commercially from the region, the provision of alcohol to South African workers was a well-entrenched practice. In 1891 the benefits to mine owners of providing alcohol to African workers in the Kimberley diamond mines was described this way: “Familiarity with the glass [of alcohol] has built moderation in the black man, while it is admitted that better work is got out of him when he sees the prospect of a cheering glass at the end of a day’s labour. . . . At not a few works, [alcohol] permits are regularly issued for supplies to the native hands, the reasonableness of the request for refreshment being amiably admitted on the grounds that the ‘boy’ so humoured and so refreshed is the better labourer.”25
Vast quantities of cheap alcohol were made available to black workers in other South African industries. In the gold mining districts of Transvaal from the 1880s onward, canteens designated for blacks sold distilled spirits. Some were made from local grain in a massive distillery that turned out thousands of gallons of alcohol a day, and some were imported spirits shipped from Germany and the Netherlands via Mozambique. The German spirits were analyzed in 1902 and declared “unfit for internal use,” and most of the locally made spirits ended up in concoctions with names like “Kaffir Brandy” (“Kaffir” was a derogatory term applied to blacks in general), “Kaffir Whisky,” and “Dutch Gin for Kaffirs.” The first of these consisted of equal volumes of proof spirit and water, cayenne pepper tincture, mashed prunes, and small volumes of sulfuric nitric acid. The other drinks included additives such as orange peel, fennel, green tea, creosote, and turpentine. White workers were provided more or less the same beverages (with additives such as oak sawdust to give them a distinctive flavor), but they had to pay more, as would be expected of better-paid workers: “Kaffir Ginger Brandy” sold for 16 shillings and 6 pence a dozen bottles, while the “White” version cost 22 shillings and 6 pence.26
Between 1893 and 1896, the one distillery near the gold mines at Witwatersrand sold an average of 318,000 gallons of spirits a year to be made into these beverages, and hundreds of thousands of liters of poor-quality gin, rum, and other forms of alcohol flowed across the border from Mozambique. The market in the mining districts was massive—there were 100,000 black miners in the Transvaal by 1899—and the alcohol served the purposes of the mine owners well. Most of the black miners were migrant workers from Mozambique, and the more they spent on alcohol, the less they saved and the longer they had to stay at the mines before returning home. Not only did whites profit from sales of alcohol, but mine owners enjoyed a more stable workforce because of the lower turnover rates. The quality of the liquor caused some turnover as a result of mortality, because hundreds of workers, black and white, died from drinking the beverages. One report noted that it was “a common thing to find ‘boys’ lying dead on the veld from exposure and the effects of the vile liquids sold them by unscrupulous dealers.” The superintendant of the Johannesburg Cemetery is said to have commented, as he looked at one corpse, “Several of these every week—the cursed stuff burns their insides, and they never recover after a drinking bout.”27
These were the worst effects of the alcohol provided for workers, although they were not so important for mine owners who had a seemingly endless supply of labor. What worried them more than a few deaths was the extent to which alcohol consumption affected productivity. On average, they estimated, about 15 percent of their workforce was disabled by drink each day, but some put the figure as high as 25 percent. There was clearly a contradiction when alcohol both contributed to a docile and stable labor force in the mines and reduced the efficiency of the mining industry. (The same was true of agriculture; workers might be induced by alcohol to work on a farm, but in the long run, alcohol undermined farming operations.)28 After first trying to tighten up the liquor supply by cracking down on unlicensed suppliers and effectively becoming the only legal dispensers of alcohol to their workers, the Transvaal mine owners took the radical step of agreeing that the sale of alcohol in the mining districts should be banned altogether. They were successful in having parliament pass legislation to that effect in 1896, thus creating an island of near-prohibition (better-off whites could purchase their alcoholic beverages from farther away) in South Africa.
With the assumption of British control following the South African War of 1899–1902, new alcohol policies were put in place, but total prohibition was continued for blacks, with severe penalties for any contravention. Alcohol was smuggled into the mining camps, as we would expect—prohibition has everywhere generated resistance—but it appears to have been a trickle compared with the volumes that the mine owners had facilitated in the 1880s and 1890s. Those very mine owners reported that, as a result of prohibition, a mere 1 percent of their workforce was disabled each day, a big drop from the 15 percent accepted as the norm only ten years earlier.29
As we can see, in one African colony after another, some form of prohibition was eventually imposed on the indigenous population for ideological, cultural, or economic reasons. Similar policies were applied to Africans who were taken to the Americas, most as slaves. As early as 1692, a New Jersey law forbade selling or giving rum or any distilled spirits to African Americans, and by the mid-eighteenth century, most colonies had adopted similar rules, just as they attempted to keep alcohol from Native Americans. Slave owners similarly prevented their slaves from having access to alcohol, partly for fear of disorder should they become intoxicated. The exceptions were holidays, such as Christmas, when drinking privileges were extended. Reports suggest that at this time, when slaves were given up to a week off work, plantation owners would actively encourage the slaves to drink until they were so drunk that they passed out.30 Clearly, what was threatening to social order was drinking to the point of moderate intoxication, when slaves could coordinate their thoughts and their actions. Being cold sober or dead drunk was not threatening.
The prohibition of alcohol was also among the policies pursued by Europeans as they extended their control over North America’s indigenous populations in the nineteenth century. As European settlement moved west, European Americans confronted the issues they had first met in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: whether to offer alcohol to the Native Americans they encountered. They took with them the belief that Native Americans could not drink moderately, that they were innately prone to addiction, and that intoxication led them to all manner of rash decisions that often culminated in violence. Despite this alarming scenario, Europeans persisted in supplying Native Americans with alcohol because of short-term benefits. Alcohol was a very profitable retail commodity, especially when prices could be inflated and whiskey and rum watered down. Alcohol was also an important trading medium, and it became a feature of land negotiations, employed so that native negotiators made concessions they would not agree to when sober. Some Native American leaders recognized the strategy, and in 1801 representatives of the Choctaws refused alcohol before, during, and after their meetings with federal commissioners at Fort Adams.
Other Native Americans were aware of the broader effects of alcohol on their communities. In 1802, Chief Little Turtle of the Miami people pleaded with President Thomas Jefferson (referring to him in the then-customary way as “Father” and to his own people as “children”) to stop the flow of alcohol to his communities. “Your children are not wanting in industry; but it is this fatal poison which keeps them poor. Father: Your children have not that command over themselves, which you have, therefore, before anything can be done to advantage, this evil must be remedied. Father: When our white brothers came to this land, our forefathers were numerous and happy; but, since their intercourse with white people, and owing to the introduction of this fatal poison, we have become less numerous and happy.”31 Little Turtle might or might not have believed that Native Americans were more prone to addiction than Europeans, and he surely realized that not only alcohol but also European diseases and cultural dispossession had reduced the native population. But nothing could be done about diseases to which Native Americans had no immunity, and it was pointless to resist the diffuse forces that supported European hegemony. But stopping the flow of alcohol, which played a definable role in the cultural degradation of his people, must have seemed to be within the realm of possibility.
By approaching the president, Chief Little Turtle acknowledged a major change that had taken place as a result of the creation of the United States of America a quarter-century earlier. In the colonial period, attempts to restrict the supply of alcohol to Native Americans had largely failed, as there was no central authority with the power to do so. But after independence, Congress had the power to regulate trade with Native Americans, and that implied the right to stop trade. Jefferson responded sympathetically and urged Congress to heed calls from Native Americans for prohibitions on spirits, “in the spirit of benevolence and liberality” and in order to gain their friendship. But instead of imposing a blanket ban on trading or selling spirits to Native Americans, Congress empowered the president to “prevent or restrain the vending or distribution of spirituous liquors among all or any of the said Indian tribes” in federal territory.32 Between 1805 and 1815, a number of territories (Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Mississippi, and Louisiana) passed laws prohibiting the sale of spirits to Native Americans, but despite penalties of fines and jail sentences, the alcohol trade prospered. Policy was inconsistent. On one day in 1817, an Indian agent in Michigan informed the governor that he had prohibited all spirits intended for trade with Native Americans, but the next day he gave permission to a trader to exchange up to 6 gallons of whiskey for sturgeon.33 Weak enforcement was easily overwhelmed by the desire of merchants to sell and Native Americans to buy, notwithstanding the opposition to alcohol on the part of some of their leaders.
In 1815 a federal law prohibited the operation of distilleries in the poorly defined “Indian Country,” but this was also ineffective, as transporting distilled spirits efficiently and inexpensively, just as traders were doing in Africa at the same time, was not difficult. Nonetheless, these acts by Congress were the start of a long effort to limit or cut off Native American access to alcohol, especially to whiskey, which was easily and inexpensively produced in the 1800s. Whiskey was not only more intoxicating because of its high alcohol content—even when it was diluted to a third, it was far more potent than beer—but its advantageous alcohol-to-volume ratio made it efficient to transport along waterways and overland. Efforts to prohibit Native American access to alcohol continued until a clear prohibition policy was enacted in 1892. Until then, various attempts to keep alcohol from Native Americans failed for the same reasons that prohibition failed in the United States and elsewhere in the twentieth century: the production and sale of alcohol were profitable, and there was more than enough consumer demand to keep producers and merchants in business.
The commitment of the federal government to eliminating drinking by Native Americans fluctuated, and at times the government employed alcohol as an aid to land and treaty negotiations. Some 662 gallons of whiskey were supplied for the negotiations of the Saginaw Chippewa treaty of 1819, and 932 gallons were used for the Ottawa, Chippewa, and Potawatomi treaty in Chicago two years later.34 Still, most of the alcohol that flowed into Indian Country was channeled by private merchants. It was transported along waterways, notably the Missouri River, and overland, and traders employed various subterfuges. Fur trading companies insisted, reasonably, that their white employees needed rations of whiskey while working in remote areas and purchasing pelts. They were issued permits to take whiskey, based on the number of employees and the length of time they expected to be away. It was easy enough to exaggerate both and to take plenty of whiskey to sell to Native Americans. The commander of Fort Leavenworth estimated that twice as much whiskey was shipped up the Missouri River in 1831 than was legally permitted, while an Indian agent reported that a mere 1 percent of whiskey transported overland to Indian Country was covered by permits.35 These were clearly impressionistic assessments, but they show that officials believed there was a substantial flow of illicit alcohol.
Reports of the harmful consequences of drinking for Native Americans began to increase. In 1831 the Upper Missouri agent wrote to William Clark, the noted explorer, former governor of Missouri Territory, and at that time superintendent of Indian affairs, “Liquor flows as freely here as the Missouri. . . . For God’s sake, for the sake of humanity, exert yourself to have this article stopped in this country.” On the same day in 1831, Clark was writing that he considered it his duty to recommend “the total & entire prohibition” of spirits from Indian Country. It was clear, he wrote, that the regulations on selling alcohol to Native Americans had been abused by traders, who had thus shown “such disrespect for the government as to violate its most immanent laws & so little humanity toward the Indians themselves, as to disregard the most sacred provision for their protection.” Clark’s decision was predicated on the belief that Native Americans had an irresistible attraction to alcohol: “It is well known that not an Indian could be found among a thousand, who would not (after a first drink) sell his horse, his gun, or his last blanket for another drink—or even commit a murder to gratify his passion for spirits.”36
In 1832 a new federal law was passed making it illegal to take distilled spirits “under any pretense” into Indian Country. Soon after, in 1834, Indian Country was defined to encompass almost the whole of the United States west of the Mississippi River, except for the states of Missouri and Louisiana and Arkansas Territory, and alcohol would be confiscated from any trader who brought it into this region. These laws have been seen as an infringement on the rights and sovereignty of Native Americans, but they indicate the determination of the federal government to deprive them of alcohol.37 Unlike colonial governments in Africa, the federal government in the United States saw no benefit in continuing the alcohol trade with Native Americans—it did not provide the government with tax revenues—but only harm in its effects on the stability of communities and public health. Supplying Native Americans with alcohol was an obstacle to the proclaimed aim of the government to bring them into the mainstream of American society as productive citizens.
In 1834 there was no thought of creating new states farther west, and there was an expectation that the vast expanse of land called Indian Country would permanently remain alcohol-free. But despite the threat of heavy fines, the alcohol trade continued, as many merchants set up shop just over the border from Indian Country. The law was later amended to specify that sales to Native Americans were prohibited, as European Americans expected to be able to sell alcohol to military personnel, but that cleared the way for alcohol ostensibly destined for consumption by whites to be sold instead to Native Americans. Soldiers at garrisons sold some of their supplies, and emigrants traveling west took enough whiskey with them to cover their personal consumption, with surplus to sell to Native Americans for a tidy profit.
Native American leaders and revivalist prophets, who tied abstinence to cultural and spiritual rebirth, fought to halt the trade. Native American temperance organizations were formed, starting with the Cherokee Temperance Society in 1829, while some Native American women joined the WCTU.38 But the flow of alcohol was virtually unchecked. Indian Country itself shrank under the continued expansion of European settlement, and even the definition of “Indian” was called into question. By the 1860s, writes one historian, “it was virtually impossible to determine who an Indian was or, for that matter, where Indian Country was for purposes of enforcing the Indian alcohol statutes.”39 Eventually the term “Indian Country” became too unstable to be useful, and it was dropped from statutes. By then, a growing number of states were passing laws that either prohibited or severely restricted the sale of alcohol within their borders. Temperance and prohibition organizations were gaining the popular and political support at state and federal levels that eventually culminated in national prohibition. If alcohol was portrayed as harmful to European Americans, it could be shown to have had devastating effects on Native Americans.
When Alaska was purchased from Russia in 1867, more indigenous populations fell under the jurisdiction of the American government. By this time they had been exposed to alcohol for several decades, despite treaties of 1824 and 1828 in which the Russian, British, and American governments agreed that distilled spirits and firearms should not be sold to the indigenous populations in the regions of the northwest coast that each power controlled. The system broke down as traders from each country competed to purchase skins from the native hunters. In 1835 the Hudson’s Bay Company would exchange a gallon of spirits and a blanket, or 3 gallons of spirits, for a large beaver skin.40 In 1842, concern about the effects of imported spirits on indigenous communities led both the Hudson’s Bay Company and its Russian counterpart, the Russian-American Company, to agree to a ban on supplying them with spirits. In that year, the director of the Hudson’s Bay Company and the governor of Alaska were present at an alcohol-fueled clash between two native communities when the chief of one killed a member of the other. But this ban, too, was frequently ignored by European traders, and by 1860 the Hudson’s Bay Company had resumed using alcohol as a trading commodity. The official Russian policy of imposing prohibition on the indigenous populations was occasionally enforced; a steward of the Russian-American Company had his salary reduced from 1,000 to 600 rubles in 1862 when he was found selling spirits to two Aleuts.41 But Russian control over Alaska was partial at best, and any restrictions their authorities might make were ignored or easily circumvented by independent or organized traders, whether they were Russian, British, or American.
When the governance of Alaska was transferred to the United States in 1867, the captain of the revenue cutter sent to establish control declared that, in the absence of any instructions, he would consider the territory as Indian Country and destroy any alcohol brought into it by any vessel, no matter what its nationality. This policy was confirmed by Congress the following year.42 As in the rest of the United States, alcohol flowed liberally into Native and white communities despite what appear to have been rigorous attempts to suppress illicit alcohol production. Federal agents searched Aleut houses for distilling equipment, imposed fines and mandatory work for drinking, put people in irons for being drunk in public, and even banned the sale of sugar, a necessary ingredient for alcohol production where ripe produce was in short supply.43
In 1892, Congress passed a definitive and comprehensive law enacting prohibition on all Native Americans under U.S. jurisdiction. This legislation encompassed not only spirits, which had historically been viewed as the main problem alcoholic beverage, but also wine and beer. It was a recognition that many Native Americans no longer lived in isolated locations far from centers of European American population. Shipping alcohol over long distances was no longer necessary, so Native Americans now had access to the more bulky beverages, beer and wine. By the late 1800s, except where state prohibition laws prevented it, beer was being brewed widely in communities across the United States, and significant wine industries were located in Indiana, Ohio, and California. As of 1892, it was forbidden to “sell, give away, dispose of, exchange, or barter” any of these alcoholic beverages or any beverage “which produces intoxication” to any Indian. In 1920 this legislation effectively became redundant, as national prohibition applied the same rules to all Americans; but unlike prohibition for other Americans, Native American prohibition was not repealed in 1933, and it persisted until 1953.
Native peoples in Canada experienced a narrative similar to that of Native Americans, although with differences in chronology. They, too, were believed to be innately prone to abusing alcohol, but until the early nineteenth century, they were amply provided with it by traders who exchanged rum for furs. In the late 1700s, there were attempts to prevent the sale of rum to Aboriginals, partly to guarantee their effectiveness in aiding the British against attacks from Americans. As the military threats ended following the War of 1812, Aboriginals were transferred from military to civilian authority, first British and then Canadian, and were designated to undergo a “civilizing” process. This meant they were dispatched to reserves (designated Aboriginal territories) where they would learn agriculture and convert to Christianity.44Between 1777 and 1860, there had been a number of ordinances restricting or prohibiting the sale of alcohol to native peoples. Some were responses to petitions from Aboriginal leaders, while others reflected Europeans’ concern for heavy drinking in Aboriginal communities. As in the United States, Native Canadians were widely portrayed by whites as generally lazy and immoral and given to intoxication and alcohol-fueled violence, qualities invoked to justify the seizure of their lands.45
With the creation of Canada as a federal state in 1867, authority over Aboriginals passed to the federal government, and in 1876 the Indian Act imposed complete prohibition on anyone who had legal “Indian status” and anyone who followed “the Indian mode of life.” Any Aboriginal who was found in possession of alcohol or selling alcohol could be imprisoned for up to six months. The only way an Aboriginal could legally drink was to be enfranchised, which meant surrendering Indian status and becoming a Canadian citizen. As in the United States, to become a citizen a native person had to demonstrate good character, which meant abstaining from alcohol.46 The essential terms of the 1876 Indian Act remained in force until 1985, when band councils were given the authority to permit or prohibit alcohol and other intoxicants on reserves.
There were vast differences in the material and cultural conditions among the indigenous inhabitants of the African colonies and the native peoples of North America, but there were significant similarities in the policies adopted by authorities in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. All were influenced by the temperance and prohibition sentiments current in Europe and North America, but the European authorities were far more ready to impose prohibition on indigenous peoples than on their own populations at home. The American case is more complicated and less clear-cut as a race-specific policy applied to indigenous peoples, because in the 1800s, before the blanket ban on alcohol applied to Native Americans in 1892, many white populations had been subjected to coercive prohibition. By that date, a dozen states had imposed prohibition on all their inhabitants, and many more would do so before national prohibition came into force in 1920.
Beyond Africa and North America, European alcohol was a factor in cultural contacts in Asia and the Pacific region. Taxes drove colonial policies in parts of Asia as well as Africa. In Indochina, for example, the French began in the 1890s to tax rice alcohol, the alcoholic beverage most widely consumed by the Vietnamese population. The tax was initially resisted and difficult to enforce because much of the alcohol was produced clandestinely. But in 1902 a French company developed a method of purifying rice alcohol that not only was less expensive than the small-scale domestic production common among the Vietnamese but was easily distinguishable from it. The government gave the company a monopoly on production, expecting increased revenues.47 Instead, the attempt to impose a European style of rice alcohol ignited vigorous objections that were often expressed in sensory terms. In 1907, Vietnamese members of the colony’s governing council complained that the French were “forcing the natives to drink an alcohol that is not to their taste, that lacks the aroma of the alcohol made by Asian methods.”48
Whether the French alcohol really represented a sensory affront to the Vietnamese or whether the Vietnamese wanted to avoid appearing that they did not want to pay for the taxed beverage, the Vietnamese won important concessions. The price of the beverage was lowered, as was the rate of tax on it, and the distilling company was ordered to improve the purity of its product (it had used water of dubious quality to dilute it to 40 percent alcohol) and to bring it more in line with the aromas and flavors of the traditional beverage.49 It was a rare example of a colonial power treating its subjects as consumers. A historian able to shelve skepticism might think that the French authorities, with their cultural attachment to wine, were able to empathize with their Vietnamese subjects.
Japan is a case apart, as it was not colonized by Europeans. For centuries, from the mid-1600s, the only outsiders to have regular contact with Japan were the Dutch, who had access to Nagasaki. The Dutch brought beer for themselves, and gradually it infiltrated small segments of Japanese society. But the main alcoholic beverages consumed by the Japanese remained, by far, sake and plum wine. The policy of national seclusion ended when, in 1854, the Japanese government agreed to open diplomatic relations with the United States. Commodore Matthew Perry, who signed the agreement for the Americans, brought gifts that demonstrated American modernity: a small-scale working steam locomotive, a telegraph, and three casks of beer. Japanese descriptions of the beer were mixed, ranging from “magic water” to “bitter horse-piss wine.”50 As Japan opened for trade, alcoholic beverages of all sorts began to be imported, and within two decades a domestic brewing industry began production. But attempts by American temperance organizations to dampen the Japanese demand for alcohol were fundamentally unsuccessful (see Chapter 10).
As Europeans dealt with alcohol in many parts of Asia, their preoccupation in China was with opium, which had many of the characteristics attributed to alcohol: it was addictive, it had stimulant and intoxicating effects that bring on euphoria, and it was believed to have medicinal and therapeutic properties. Ironically, however, opium was said to be an effective cure for drunkenness. In the commentaries of missionaries in China, the word “alcohol” could easily be substituted for “opium,” as in this 1856 report: “The ravages of opium we meet with here on every hand, and the deterioration of the morals of the people . . . I cannot but ascribe, in great part, to the use of this ensnaring and destructive drug.” At least one Western commentator, a botanist, objected to those who criticized opium: “I would recommend the well-intentioned persons who have of late been raising such an outcry on the subject of opium, to reform their own [rum-sodden] countrymen.”51
In the Pacific region, some alcoholic beverages were known before European contact, but Europeans introduced their own varieties, as they did elsewhere. For much of the nineteenth century, however, supplies of European alcohol to the distant and relatively remote colonies were anything but consistent, a fact that was lamented by many of the heavy-drinking missionaries. In the early 1800s, missionaries on Tahiti lived on fish, breadfruit, and water and received alcohol only from the ships that occasionally visited the islands.52 Despite the limited supplies, alcohol made its way into the native communities, and there was growing concern among the missionaries for the consequences. Already in the early 1800s, Tahitians were said to have developed a taste for gin (“the waters of Britain”), and King Pomare II—plied with alcohol by visiting captains as a way of lubricating their arrangements to resupply their ships—was said to have became not only a habitual drinker but a habitual drunk.
Tahitians began to distill their own spirits by the 1820s, and there are reports of common intoxication as much among the European missionaries as among the indigenous population. In 1833 the Tahitian Temperance Society was formed (its founder was a missionary with a reputation for hard drinking), and the following year the Tahitian Assembly forbade the importation and use of distilled spirits on the islands. A native found guilty of having “in his possession, even one glass of ardent spirits” would be fined ten hogs; a foreigner would be fined $10 and be banished from Tahiti.53 One result was that fewer ships visited the island, as they were no longer able to resupply with alcohol. Notably scarce were the “temperance ships” from America, which carried no alcohol for the crew. But their crews were notorious for drinking onshore, leading one missionary to observe, “The word ‘temperance’ applies only to the ships, and not to their crews.”54
Europeans also dealt with alcohol in other parts of the Pacific region. Missionaries to Fiji found the population consuming kava, a beverage made from the root of the kava plant (variously known as yagona and ava), which promotes mild euphoria and relaxation. In 1862 the Reverend Joseph Waterhouse denounced kava in the same breath as spirits: “In addition to ardent spirits the yagona or kava root, is the curse of Fiji. For 12 years I have preached moderation, but in vain. With the Fijian of the present day it is all or none,—stupefaction or sense.”55 Europeans took part in kava ceremonies, and some noted that they were dignified and orderly occasions, like this report from 1845: “The cava [sic] has been considered sacred; and almost everything to be settled in these islands is done at a cava meeting, at which great order is observed.”56
Such an account contrasts with the situation in Micronesia (thousands of small islands between Hawai’i and the Philippines), where many Europeans of marginal status had settled by the mid-1800s. One ship’s captain described them as “runaway convicts, expirees or deserters from whalers” who lived “in a manner easily to be imagined from men of this class, without either law, or education to control them, with an unlimited quantity of ardent spirits which they obtain from distilling the toddy that exudes from the coco-nut tree.”57 When trading ships began systematically to visit the islands, much commerce was done using alcohol (and other commodities, such as firearms and tobacco) as the medium of exchange. Cheap gin was the usual beverage, and it was used to purchase copra and other products from the native populations. On the Tuamotu islands, pearl divers were paid in whiskey or rum, and there are reports of land trading hands for alcohol and firearms.
Such transactions, and the use of alcohol and tobacco generally, were opposed by Christian missionaries as they spread through Micronesia from the 1850s onward. They were appalled by the levels of crime, violence, and sexual promiscuity, and because they attributed such behavior to alcohol, they blamed the Europeans who had introduced alcohol to the islands.58 Alcohol became a pivotal issue in the competition between the early European settlers and the missionaries for influence over the indigenous elites. Foreseeing a threat to their position, the resident Europeans had warned local leaders that the missionaries would try to take over the government, and in a few cases the missionaries were forbidden by chiefs to come ashore. Most were welcomed, however, and over time they converted many of the indigenous people to both Christianity and abstinence. In Kiti, in the Caroline Islands, a sort of prohibition was enacted by 1876 when missionaries persuaded Christian chiefs to appoint policemen to enforce the policy of abstinence.59 In Micronesia, abstinence from alcohol became a defining characteristic of a Christian, a quality that distinguished Christians from non-Christians. (In a rare case, as on the island of Truk, where there was no alcohol, Christians were defined by their abstinence from tobacco.)
There is no defining pattern to be discerned as Europeans confronted alcohol in their far-flung colonies. In each case, the policies they applied ranged from laissez-faire to prohibition, and in most cases policies went through a number of phases, each representing a different level of coercion and rigor. There is no doubt that colonial alcohol policies were fashioned from competing interests, notable among which was the revenues that colonial powers could obtain from taxing alcohol in their colonies. At the same time, they had to deal with the demands of temperance organizations at home, often informed by their missionaries on the ground, and many policies (such as those forged in the international conventions dealing with alcohol in Africa) were compromises that attempted to balance restricting alcohol supplies while securing existing fiscal advantages.