Goodman Lecture Series
2024 Lecture Details 
Speaker: Allan Greer, Emeritus Professor, McGill University
Topic: Canada in the Age of Rum
Dates: October 1-3, 2024
Location: Western University
Beginning with Newfoundland in the 1670s, rum came pouring into the colonies that would later constitute eastern Canada, establishing itself as the dominant alcoholic beverage until the rise of whisky and the effects of the temperance movement ended the age of rum in the nineteenth century. A by-product of sugar manufacture, rum linked Canada to the Caribbean sugar slave plantation complex and to the global circulation of intoxicating commodities. It played a crucial role in the northern staples trades of fish and fur, mainly as a device for recruiting, retaining and underpaying fishermen and voyageurs. Employers in these industries kept their men attached to their jobs by providing them with rum on credit and at inflated prices to ensure that they never had to pay salaries in full. In these circumstances, drinking on the job was not only tolerated, it was virtually mandatory. Rum had been overshadowed by premium brandy when France ruled the St Lawrence Valley, but the British Conquest of 1759-60 brought in its wake an invasion of cheap New England rum and consumption skyrocketed. Heavy drinking spread through the Quebec countryside, contributing to the commercialization of cereal agriculture as habitants struggled to pay their liquor debts. The Northwest Company built a western commercial empire by shipping thousands of gallons of rum to remote corners of the continent where it was deployed to encourage Indigenous hunters to participate in the fur trade as well as to claw back the salaries of non-indigenous employees.
Oct 1 Drinking on the Job: The Atlantic Fisheries
Oct 2 Rum Conquers Quebec
Oct 3 Rum in the Fur Trade
About our 2024 Speaker: Professor Allan Greer, McGill University
Allan Greer is emeritus professor of History at McGill University. Greer's work on the early history of Canada in the context of the Americas and the Atlantic World has received recognition at home as well as in Europe, Latin America and the United States. His books, including Peasant, Lord and Merchant: Rural Society in Three Quebec Parishes, 1740-1840; The Patriots and the People: The Rebellion of 1837 in Rural Lower Canada; Mohawk Saint: Catherine Tekakwitha and the Jesuits; Property and Dispossession: Natives, Empires and Land in Early Modern North America, have won a number of national and international prizes. He was awarded residential fellowships at Cambridge University, l'Institut d’études avancées in Paris, and the British Library and has been an invited speaker at Oxford, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Sciences Po, Penn, Texas, NYU and the National University of Ireland. Greer was selected for a Killam and a Guggenheim fellowship. Recently he received the Royal Society of Canada's J.B. Tyrell Historical Medal. In addition to his research on the history of rum, Greer is currently writing a 15,000 year "deep history" of Canada.
About the Joanne Goodman Lecture Series
Presented by the Department of History
Every autumn a distinguished historian is invited to Western University to deliver three public lectures on consecutive afternoons to students, faculty and members of the London community. The lecture series was established in 1975 by the Honourable Edwin A. Goodman and his family of Toronto to perpetuate the memory of their beloved elder daughter, a second year History student who died in a highway accident in April of that year.
The theme of the series is the history of the Atlantic Triangle (Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom). The first lectures were given in 1976 by the leading Canadian military historian, Colonel Charles Stacey, on 'Mackenzie King and the Atlantic Triangle'. Occasionally there have been lectures outside the general framework. In 1995, for example, the topic was 'The Birth of the "New" South Africa', tracing the collapse of apartheid and the construction of a new political and social system since 1990, by Rodney Davenport, a South African historian and opponent of apartheid.
The endowment also supports publication so that these important lectures may be shared by a readership well beyond the immediate audience at Western University. Most of the lectures have been published as books, either in a form similar to lectures or as part of a larger work. The lectures are widely recognized as being the most important history lecture series in Canada. The invitation to deliver them and the publications that result are highly regarded in this country and around the world.
Past Speakers
To see a list of our past Goodman Lecturers, click here. Many of the lectures are also available as books, please click here for a list.
For recorded past Goodman Lectures, click here.
In The News
(Oct 1, 2019) CBC Radio London - London Morning with Rebecca Zandbergen
(Oct 3, 2018) CBC Radio London – London Morning with Julianne Hazlewood
(Sep 24, 2017) The Gazette - "Popular history comes to 2017 Joanne Goodman Lectures"[Read Article]
(Sep 21, 2016) Western News - "Making a Middle Ages connection in politics" [Read Article]
(Sep 20, 2012) Western News - "Goodman Lectures create a legacy from tragedy" [Read Article]
Accessibility
Contact the History Department at history-inquiries@uwo.ca if you require information in an alternate format, or if any other arrangements can make this event accessible to you. For a campus accessibility map please visit: http://www.accessibility.uwo.ca/resources/maps/index.html.
