The Tiger Lily’s mix of brandy, rum, curaçao, orange and lemon juice gives us a potent history of the links among international trade, international law, and the quest by European powers to dominate and monopolise various plant species in service of their imperial and colonial projects. Each of the ingredients enabled imperial expansion and dominance, was a product of that expansion, or both.

First, brandy.  Brandy was, from the early 16th century, central to the transatlantic trade in enslaved peoples, a trade where Africans were forcibly transported to the Americas to labour producing sugar, cotton and tobacco.  These products were shipped to Europe, often on to Africa, in a ‘triangle trade’ where goods formed currency and commodity. Local agents in the slave trade were often paid in Brandy, and later rum.  Brandy had been the commodity of choice given its high alcohol content and thus long, stable shelf life on the voyage. Rum emerged as a major by-product of the sugar refining process, and one of the most important commodities of the slave trade.  The distilling of rum turned a waste product of the sugar industry into its own lucrative product, and the development of the industry rested on the appropriation of both physical and intellectual labour of enslaved persons.  Despite its wide consumption in both Europe and North America, its connection to slavery made it increasingly problematic to European consumers in the later 18th century (though we should not forget that African consumer preferences also shaped the trade).  For abolitionists, rum, and sugar were tainted by the inhumanity of slavery.  In a 1791 pamphlet (the most widely circulated of the 18th Century) radical abolitionist William Fox wrote that if an average British family were to forego sugar and rum for two years, they would ‘prevent the slavery and murder of one fellow creature’ and equated the consumption of sugar with the consumption of human flesh.  

Abolitionism and the subsequent international legal prohibition of slavery and the slave trade have been celebrated as central to the development of international human rights and to jus cogens norms of international law.  However, as Buckner-Inniss writes, attention is also due to how the transatlantic slave trade ‘made the Atlantic world a vital framework for the development of international commerce and the corresponding system of laws that governed that commerce.’ 

Let us now turn to the citrus ingredients in the tiger lily.  Curacao is a liqueur flavored with the dried peel of the bitter orange variety laraha, a citrus fruit grown on the Caribbean island of Curaçao. The Dutch West Indies Company took possession of Curaçao in 1634. The Bols distillery, maker of the liqueur, was founded in 1575 in Amsterdam. It had shares in both the West and East India Companies to guarantee its access to spices required for its distilled drinks.  The Dutch quest to monopolize the lucrative spice trade through the Dutch Chartered Trading Companies and the international laws that grew to protect it, are indicative of the private rights and private property vocabulary that came to underlie international law.  

Exercising rights to trade, and inhabiting trading posts to exploit non-European commodities, required long sea voyages. It is in this that citrus – the orange and lemon juice of our tiger lily – come into their own.  While naval technology made these voyages possible, European medicine lagged, and scurvy (caused by vitamin c deficiency) was responsible for the deaths of more than one million sailors.  Arriving weak from scurvy also gave Europeans a further disadvantage: they were then even more prone to a range of diseases to which they had little resistance, such as malaria.  These sicknesses decimated colonists and armies alike.  While official medical science – and naval policy – was slow to adopt, captains and crew themselves had long understood that orange and lemon juice prevented the disease, as did the Indigenous inhabitants where these Europeans disembarked.  For example, Spanish sailors arriving in Mexico in the 1550s were cured by Mexicans with the juice of oranges and lemons.  Citrus groves were planted by European voyagers to support the movement of Europeans around empires, and, simultaneously, to lay claim to territory through the act of gardening.

The tiger lily, then, is a drink made possible by processes of trade, empire, and colonization, backed by international legal rules and regimes.  It is embroiled in the campaign for the abolition of slavery and the slave trade, the quest for the cure for scurvy, and thus dominance of seas and new lands.  This drink then, carried all these echoes as glasses clinked in the UN Delegates dining room in August 1953.  How far the UN Charter that those statesmen and women toasted reckons with these legacies continues to be debated. 

Jessie Hohmann