This well-known illustration pulled from the digital archives of the Library of Congress might look familiar: a federal tax collector, tarred and feathered and hog-tied to a pole, being paraded through the streets of some unnamed town in western Pennsylvania. The image is dated 1794, the year of the Whiskey Rebellion, when the simmering pot of resentment toward the fiscal (over)reach of the US federal government finally boiled over in the western territories. This was not the first time in history that a government trying to control the production of liquor in its hinterlands faced an armed resistance, and it wouldn’t be the last. Today we may not see moonshiners mustering militias to battle the tax code, but as long as governments continue to try and repress, control, or eradicate liquor-making in the countryside, the countryside will continue to resist.
With the benefit of the whole historical record to examine, the Whiskey Rebellion is a predictable story with a predictable ending. The newborn federal state was deeply in debt and desperate for revenue. Alexander Hamilton proposed an excise tax on distilled spirits, calculated on the size of one’s still, to be paid in cash. From one point of view, it made sense to tax something that many folks saw as a luxury—and a sinful one at that.
But the lesson that the new statesmen hadn’t learned from the many, many booze-related rebellions that had already happened, throughout every colonial empire, was that for peasants, liquor isn’t a luxury. In rural communities, it’s a form of both economic and cultural currency, it is key to material livelihoods, and it is inseparable from seasonal family traditions. It isn’t just about drinking (though surely it is about that too). It is about control over land. Self-determination. Popular sovereignty.
You might think that Washington and Hamilton would have known this. Some say that the early settlers of Appalachia left Scotland to escape whisky taxes imposed by the British crown.
But taxation was a powerful way to both generate badly needed revenue, and to integrate the relatively isolated and independent western territories into the territorial state.
As Steven Stoll argues in his 2018 history of Appalachia Ramp Hollow,
[Hamilton] wanted the people of the backcountry to make more things for money, to live on money (to some degree at least), and to pay taxes with surplus money. … The proliferation of money as a medium of production and exchange encompassed much of Hamilton’s conception of the United States.
But the state wasn’t making peasants pay taxes on their homemade jam or honey. Only liquor. As Stoll says, whiskey was different.
As I’ve argued in previous Substack posts, liquor is a unique product of the rural economy for its alchemical transmutation of waste to value. Value that is not only material and economic, but social and cultural as well. Value that is not perishable. Value that can be saved over long periods of time. That acts as a form of currency. Imposing an arbitrary set of rules on rural distillers was an act of social control. And it made money. It was morally defensible from the perspective of the eastern planter class, and it provided cover for the growth of the state apparatus. Around the world, even today, new bureaucratic mechanisms are being created to extend government control of land and people through the fiscal and/or legal restriction of making booze.
Over the last 10 years, the state government of Goa, India—a former Portuguese colony on the country’s west coast—has created a raft of new regulations to formalize the market for feni—a spirit distilled from the fruit of the cashew tree that has been produced in villages for at least 500 years. As one feni distiller recently told me, regulation requires bureaucrats, and bureaucrats require salaries, and salaries require revenue. It’s a cycle that’s vicious or virtuous depending on which side of the desk you’re sitting on. Taxes are justified by the need for regulation, which is usually framed as being for the good of the people.
Indeed, distilled alcohol can be dangerous—even deadly—when made incorrectly. But rural home distillers stake their reputation in the community on the quality of their product, and they take exception to the idea that some bureaucrat who has never seen a still in his life might come and tell them that they’re doing it wrong.
In one of my very earliest interviews in Romania, someone told me that making țuică in the old way, without paying taxes, was “kind of a fuck you to the state”. The concept of the state includes the contemporary Romanian government that says you can only make 50 liters of țuică per year for home use when everyone knows that the only limit to the amount of țuică you make is the amount of fruit you have. Nothing else.
It reaches back to the Ceaușescu regime when slaughtering your own cow was illegal, and people did it anyway, under the cover of night.
And it extends outward to the European Union, which is working to “modernize” peasant industry as part of a project of European integration. One interview subject from Salaj County told me, we have been cutting the pigs, making the țuică, for hundreds and hundreds of years. This is how we have survived for centuries. We do not need Brussels to come here and tell us we don’t know how to do it properly.
[Above, the outflow from the cooling tank inside the barn turns a water wheel that powers the stirring paddle inside the pot still]
I mentioned this resentment of the EU to some friends in Western Europe, and they pointed to the billions of dollars in development funding that the EU has siphoned to their eastern members. But how much of that is seen in the remote Romanian countryside? I’ve seen many places in Romania where it seems that not much has probably changed in the last 50 years, where water wheels and animal traction are still the main sources of mechanical energy, and hot water heaters are fueled with wood.
In Bulgaria (also a member of the EU), home distillation is even more illegal than it is in Romania. Every home cazan, no matter how small, is supposed to be registered with the state, and taxes paid. You can imagine that this is not a popular policy. As one rural distiller told me, This is our fruit, our land, our equipment, and we are making rakia for our own use. We aren’t making money. So why should the have to pay money to the state?
Here, liquor and sovereignty seem tightly intertwined. Rakia (tuica, palinca, feni) is both the stuff and the symbol of independence.
One of my hypotheses in this project, based on my research on moonshine in the mountains of Tennessee, is that home distillation is an act of resistance. This is a bold claim, since my project is global in scope, and each socio-economic-political context is completely different. Vastly different legacies of empire, of occupation, of liberation, of statehood and governance mean that it is probably foolish to think that there’s a common spirit of “resistance” that animates home distillers across these different contexts.
But history shows that controlling the local production of alcohol is a common project of empire, because it is a proxy for control over rural people. And nowhere are rural people kindly complying with the state’s rules. I expect that I will find this everywhere. Every culture distills spirits from whatever grows on the land where they are. Every state tries to tax, restrict, or criminalize that activity. Every person who distills liquor at home is a revolutionary. Hyberbole? Maybe. Stay tuned to find out…
yet another brilliant account of state encroachment in rural life-worlds, where hooch, as a singular and un-fetishized form of value, is a real expression/symbol of sovereignty - love it! PM
thanks for your work on this, Emilie! At your recommendation, we've been reading Ramp Hollow too. Helping me better understand what behind the self-serving "oh those uncivilized country bumpkin hillbillies" false narrative pushed by the state to assert control. I've been learning deeper respect for highlanders/peasants and their resistance to that control. Appreciate all your data gathering, making the connections.