Rum

"Rum shaped the modern world. The drink, and the molasses that it was made from, was to the eighteenth century what oil is to the present, and nowhere more so than in North America. Rum was used by the colonists to clear Native American tribes and to buy slaves. To make it, they regularly traded with the enemy French during the Seven Years' War, angering their British masters and setting themselves on the road to Revolution. And the regular flow of rum was essential to keeping both armies in the field. From Valley Forge to the trenches of the First World War, soldiers relied on rum to keep up…