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Abstract
In late-nineteenth-century Jamaica, notwithstanding a long-standing culture of drinking, especially in private elite spaces, the public consumption of alcohol and associated drunkenness earned the condemnation of social reformers. Considering the rum shops as "hot beds of idleness and dissipation" and sources of a variety of "social evils", these reformers called for their curtailment. The colonial authorities, however, were torn between the desire to regulate the "morality" of the people and the possibilities of earning revenues through the licences. The contestation between those who regarded drinking alcohol as a private matter and those who sought to "reform" and "improve" the society was manifested in a series of laws, campaigns by the churches against the distribution and consumption of alcoholic beverages, and the formation of temperance societies. As the reformers and the state intensified their efforts to contain those who were "drunk and disorderly", the struggles over alcohol consumption formed part of a wider contestation and negotiation over cultural behaviours and meanings.
Introduction
Both in Britain and its colonies overseas, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed a concerted campaign by moral reformers to curb the "vice" of alcoholic consumption and the drunkenness that often resulted from excess drinking.1 These reformers, mainly from the middle class, subscribed to a temperance movement whose ideology equated sobriety with decency and social respectability. Although the temperance movement may have originated in the United States early in the nineteenth century, its spread to and embrace by Britain's burgeoning bourgeoisie fitted well with their Victorian concepts of morality which they intended to proselytise throughout the empire. This new morality emphasised notions of self-constraint, individual responsibility, and "sober" reflection that were essentially parts of a body of social virtues that would promote self-improvement. According to Craig Heron:
Temperance had become a cornerstone of emerging middle-class identities through which . . . growing numbers of professionals, businessmen, whitecollar workers, master artisans, and their families differentiated themselves in various ways from the rougher elements of the manual workers below them and the decadent aristocracy above. ... Its members were not simply creating a narrow class culture, as the older aristocracy had done. The middling classes' promotion of and support for this ideology of self-improvement became part of a hegemonic way of...