MOUNT GAY RUM

The genius of Barbadian entrepreneurial spirit and business acumen.

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.

 

 

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.