"All provisions...(are)...very dear, particularly Rum, which must be instead of Beer, which the Severity of the winter freezes in that cold country..." The Molasses Act of 1733, Part 2.
In Part 1 I explored the circumstances that lead up to the Molasses Act of 1733 and what was happening in the Atlantic Provinces of Canada at that time. We left off with: The plantation owners in the British West indies advocated in Parliament first that all trade with France be banned. When this did not pass, they suggested tariffs. In 1733 the English Parliament imposed a Molasses act imposing a tax of six pence per gallon on imports of molasses from non-English colonies. This tax also extended to the immediate siblings of molasses; sugar and rum. The plan was simple, to make French molasses more expensive than that of the English and force distillers to buy their molasses from English plantations. Nothing is ever simple... In fact, very little changed. New England distillers continued making rum as they always had. English sugar plantations saw very little as an uptick in sales. “Duties collected on all molasses imported into the northern colonies in 1735 – two years
