Thank God for the Crusades, so to speak.
On their 11th-century romp through the Holy Land, the Christians came upon a fabulous new foodstuff: sugar.
A few centuries, some genocide and a slave trade later, Europe had commandeered most of the Caribbean, turned cotton and coffee fields into sugar-cane plantations, and taught the slaves to distill the molasses into rum. It's the booze with the bloodiest, most egregious history, but let's not dwell on all that.