About Al’s talk:
Age of Punch: imperialism and cocktail history from the seventeenth century through the postwar years
Cocktails are woven into the fabric of American culture and, like this country, the Cocktail is a product of imperialism. Beginning with punch in the seventeenth century–one of the main antecedents to the American Cocktail–white European colonization of tropical places and peoples was in part spurred on by the desire for valuable commodities like spices, sugar, chocolate, and coffee. The first punches were made in India and Indonesia, consumed by English and Dutch colonizers. In the 1700s, taverns in the colonized eastern seaboard of what is now the so-called United States served drinks that similarly employed the products of empire. In this period, a contract was forged between white Americans and their overlords: participate in the system and you will have access to valuable goods from around the world–and booze. This contract has remained in effect since that period and has a striking analog in the “California Tropical” cocktail movement (later known as “tiki”), which created a genre of drinks meant to transport (mostly white) Americans to the South Pacific and Hawaii–giving them access to the effects of U.S. military-imperial activities in that region.
