MOUNT GAY RUM
By Stanley Collymore
The genius was absolutely Barbadian via whose
entrepreneurial skills a commonplace garden
reed or conversationally the grass, later to
be globally known as sugar cane, was
first anywhere in the world to be
chosen, and its prized contents
skilfully turned into a liquid
gem that’s unique and
quite deservedly
World Class!
© Stanley V. Collymore
14 July 2001.
(2001)
It was in Barbados that rum was invented with Mount Gay Rum the oldest and most eminent rum globally. On this island too, sugarcane was first cultivated and the sugar extracted from it, in the first agrarian enterprise of this sort anywhere in the world, first commercially exploited.
England’s oldest, wealthiest, unbrokenly associated and only autonomous colony globally until its full independence asked for and granted in November 1966 - the Barbados Parliament dates back continuously to 1627; older than the creation of the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, many countries in the EU and Europe generally, including my beloved Germany, and is the second oldest in the former British Empire, now the Commonwealth, after the Westminster one.
Significantly too, it was the wealth of Barbados from sugar and rum predominantly and the monopoly that Barbados and England jointly had on these commodities - there was no United Kingdom at the time - which funded and gave birth to the English Industrial Revolution.
