Dear Jose: You wrote that your "inclusion of the Caribbean with the Americas .. can be viewed as a methodological problem[, b]ut only, it seems to me, if you look at the islands in isolation." One of the things that has frustrated my advisors here at the University of Alberta has been my constant changes from one specialized field to the other. At some point, I have pursued British, European, African, Latin American, American, Canadian and Caribbean histories of the seventeeenth and eighteenth century. I've roamed through that literature primarily because of my need to understand why alcohol was so important in these societies. I do not, therefore, look at the islands in isolation. I am well aware of the tremendous body of literature on these subjects and I do think that I have an appreciation of the totality of the process. My concern however is, not to explore the South American world where, incidentally, the matter of rum and slavery is dealt with very differently from the North American but, to open a discussion on the importance of rum to the North American world. In order to do that, my focus must necessarily be the West Indies, the area from which the vast bulk of rum in North America originated. But in concentrating on the West Indies, I became aware of the many areas of history which have either been excluded from the history of the United States and Canada or have not been explored in these histories. Historians have included the West Indies in discussions of the Atlantic economy but they have not dealt with the ideas that developed in that world. American historians have exerted themselves tremendously to explain the somewhat convoluted European origins of their social and political world but they ignore or have not pursued the very different un-European social and political developments which came into their society from the West Indies. Thus, when I speak of the two solitudes which developed in the United States, I am not speaking of hyphenated peoples such as Euro-American and African-American, terms which I find objectionable for the simple reason that such distinctions are divisive and not truly representative of the whole or its parts. My sense of history is informed, rather, by that sentiment which was so well articulated by Derek Walcott: "I who am poisoned with the blood of both,/Where shall I turn, divided to the vein?/I who have cursed/The drunken officer of British rule, how choose/Between this Africa and the English tongue I love?/Betray them both, or give back what they give?/How can I face such slaughter and be cool?/How can I turn from Africa and live?" As far as I'm concerned the two solitudes which developed in the United States is North versus South, so-called freedom versus slavery. But you are correct in raising the matter of the Amerindians. Their situation cannot be explained without reference to rum and to the slaves, slave holders, and traders whose combined efforts brought it to the Amerindians. American historians are becoming increasingly aware of the significance of rum but they have not attempted reseach (as far as I'm aware) which would firmly link it to specific West Indian plantations and traders (North American and West Indian) who produced, transported, and distributed it. On the other hand, Canadian historians have not looked at the subject and its importance to the trade in furs. West Indian rum became important to me because I was fascinated by the way one fur trader used it in his pursuit of furs. I could not understand why Alexander Henry, the Younger, would hold this product in such high esteem. I was fascinated by the many ways he used it to control the behaviours of those Indians who worked with him. In short, my work _West Indian Rum in the Canadian Fur Trade: 1670-1850_ seeks to explain one important aspect of what happened to the other outsiders, the Amerindians, as they became enmeshed in that grand unfolding of the frontier. Anatol L. Scott Department of History and Classics University of Alberta