Origins and Rise of the British Distillery.

Brennan, Thomas

Origins and Rise of the British Distillery. By William T. Harper (New York & United Kingdom: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1999. vii plus 30lpp.).

The dramatic rise in the British consumption of spirits through the early eighteenth century still has the power to startle and intrigue a modern audience. A population that had long consumed large quantities of beer turned with a sudden vengeance to imbibing distilled alcohol, increasing its intake to a level unsurpassed in modem times. Gin Lane, as the episode is often called, raises a host of social, cultural and moral issues surrounding the role of alcohol. Historians continue to ponder the reasons for the sudden popularity of gin, the efforts taken by the government to resist it, and the social implications of both. Professor William Harper has written a book that attempts to understand how British industry supplied this new demand for distilled alcohol. It is an interesting subject but the book is disappointingly vague in its analysis and could have used more editing.

Beginning with a cursory look at the classical world, Harper shows the very slow development of distilling through the Middle Ages and the even slower development of any desire to consume what was distilled. The aqua vitae created by alchemists remained a scientific curiosity, a substance not easily assimilated into regular diet. Most of those who wrote about it appear to have identified aqua vitae as a medicine and to have used it accordingly. Only in the sixteenth century were spirits gradually integrated into the dietary and social uses of other alcoholic drinks. Harper presents evidence for the spread of commercial distilling through the early seventeenth century, but gives little detail about production techniques or quantities. Figures for importation of French brandy, however, show a three-fold increase, to two million gallons, in the three decades following the Restoration. Domestic distilling finally took off when war with France slowed the import of brandy to a smuggled trickle. In the next half cen tury, production of spirits in England (we are told much less about distilling in Ireland or Scotland) increased ten-fold to more than seven million gallons, with consumption keeping pace. London, and perhaps other parts of the country, had become Gin Lane.

Someone was developing a taste for spirits, but it is never clear who. Harper emphasizes the demands of the growing military and commercial fleets and their longer service at sea, which certainly increased the need for the higher alcohol levels in spirits that would stay fresh for longer periods. Yet this can only have been a very small part of the million of gallons of brandy, gin and rum that were consumed through this period. About domestic consumption he offers little insight, beyond those found in the generally hostile descriptions of contemporary pamphlets. There were plenty of such pamphlets written in reaction to the scandal of Gin Lane, which occupies the second half of the book. These pamphlets, which form the basis of his evidence for both production and consumption of spirits, threaten to hijack the book at this point, diverting its focus from distillers and their trade to their temperance critics and regulatory responses. Harper is judicious in his use of this material, but he rarely looks beyond it.

There is much interesting information here, gathered from a great many printed primary sources that are quoted at length and from rather dated secondary sources. But there are few facts. We learn almost nothing about the people and businesses that actually made the spirits. The most obvious questions one would ask about a commodity and its producers--how was it made, how much did it cost to make, how was it sold, for how much was it sold, to whom was it sold, how large, powerful and profitable were the producers--are answered in only the most general terms. Readers might find a useful model of studying the distillers in the work by Louis Cullen, The Brandy Trade under the Ancien Regime. [1]

Instead, Harper relies almost exclusively on the work of the early modem chattering class, the Fieldings, Defoes and a host of social observers, leavened with the occasional Parliamentary report. This is rich, entertaining material, written by astute and literate commentators, and it tells us much about how the elites perceived the issues of Gin Lane, social policy, temperance, and popular culture. But it is no substitute for detailed and archival research on the people who actually made the gin and other spirits, nor does it help us understand the rapid rise in the consumption of spirits. Historians must continue to ponder these questions.

ENDNOTE

(1.) Louis Cullen, The Brandy Trade Under the Ancien Regime (Cambridge, 1998).