The Paperclip ✓
@Paperclip_In · joined 12 Aug 2021
A digital media house. Binding stories from India & beyond. History | Culture | Sports | Politics | Life
85 847Followers
122Following
18 016Posts total
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@Paperclip_In "Fifteen men on the dead man's chest
Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum!Drink and the devil had done for the rest
Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum! [1] (https://t.co/cHXqoJGa63)
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It was the only successful military coup in Australian history. History remembers it as the Rum Rebellion.
Sometimes the truest stories sound the most absurd. 15/16
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It's almost unbelievable how a rum distilled in India, shipped halfway across the world, turned into money in a cash-starved colony, and then into the leverage that brought down a governor.
16/16
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The dispute escalated into a standoff between the governor and the Corps' officers, and on 26 January, the New South Wales Corps marched on Government House and arrested Bligh. 14/16 https://t.co/Dacl5WRfRe
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The fight was never really about drinking; it was about who ran the colony, with rum simply the visible battleground. His fiercest opponent was John Macarthur, a former Corps officer turned wealthy landowner and merchant. 13/16
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When William Bligh, famous as the captain of the Bounty, became governor in 1806, he finally tried to break that system, attacking the use of spirits as currency and challenging the commercial power built up around it. 12/16 https://t.co/ALbIApppH1
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Whoever controlled the trade in Bengal rum from Calcutta controlled real money — and real influence. The military garrison in New South Wales, had officers heavily invested in commerce, rum especially, which gave them economic power on top of their military authority. 11/16 https
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The contractors had permission to bring in 20,000 gallons of Bengal rum from Calcutta. Australia's first public hospital financed in Indian rum.
It was a cash-starved penal colony where alcohol had become an economic and political weapon. 10/16
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In 1810, Governor Lachlan Macquarie contracted three businessmen to build the hospital, paying them with a three-year monopoly on importing spirits instead of cash. 9/16 https://t.co/anVZlhgSlC
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It was strong stuff. Contemporary accounts put some Bengal rum at 83 per cent over proof — an extraordinary reading by modern standards. It almost became a currency of its own, so much so that it ended up financing Sydney's first public hospital. 8/16 https://t.co/W8FHzGa4YN
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Indian cane spirits were routinely logged as "arrack" or "rum" interchangeably in the trade records of the day. What made it attractive in Sydney was less its name than its strength and its ready supply through the existing India trade route. 7/16
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Because the British had already built a vast trading network around India. Calcutta was one of the empire's great commercial hubs, connected by shipping lanes across the Indian Ocean, and among the cargo moving out of it was a cane spirit Australians came to call Bengal rum. 6/16
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Rum was one of them. It could be swapped for food, livestock, labour, almost anything — and it worked so well as a substitute currency that the men who controlled its supply accumulated real power.
Why Bengal Rum, specifically? 5/16 https://t.co/ukFnMchuda
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When Britain established New South Wales in 1788, the colony had a basic problem: almost no money. Coins were scarce, there was no banking system, and trade ran on barter, promissory notes and whatever commodities held value. 4/16
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History remembers it as the Rum Rebellion, and strangely enough, an Indian spirit — shipped from Bengal to a cash-starved penal colony — was tangled up in the middle of it. 3/16
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However unbelievable it sounds, this really happened. In 1808, a group of mutinous soldiers marched into Government House in Sydney and arrested the colony's governor, William Bligh. 2/16
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The recent news on Old Monk might surprise you: India's most famous rum may not legally be rum. Long before Old Monk, though, India had a rum with an even stranger history that sparked a rebellion in Australia and brought down a government. 1/16 https://t.co/i9qat0eijB
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Mirzapur: The Movie hit screens last week, reviving Kaleen Bhaiya's gang wars for one more round. Mirzapore has always had a taste for stranger history and drama — a century earlier, it was busy sending English cricket's greatest legend off on a very awkward honeymoon. 🧵 1/21 htt
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India's GDP grew by a remarkable 7.8% during the most recent (Apr-Jun) quarter. The announcement of the numbers has led to the opening of a proverbial Pandora’s Box. Skeptics and proponents both have raised the pitch – the former, led by a former GOI Finance Secy. – claiming http
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@Paperclip_In Thank you for this. I had no idea. Takes cultural approriation to a whole nother level.
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What's fashionable to you took someone else a lifetime to be forgiven for. Let’s remember them. 11/11 https://t.co/jlHqNWDP4y
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The very famous ‘cornrow hairstyle’, which is a worldwide pop-culture icon now, was once used to pass secret escape route maps of slaves in the Americas. A fashion statement that symbolizes sheer resistance.
Just how fascinating is that? 10/11 https://t.co/OM4w0UHo4h
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The number of plaits worn may indicate where to meet someone to escape the plantation or how many streets they must cross before finding the safe passage. This is how a secret and complex language system was developed using the geometric patterns of hair braids. 9/11
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With amazing creativity, the slaves devised a unique mechanism of creating maps and passing the information of their escape route.
They started to embed and hide the escape route in the form of their unique hairstyle. 8/11 https://t.co/ZLJnsVxErE
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Their desire for freedom often pushed them to take insurmountable risks to escape. However, they would be hunted down easily, often with the help of bloodhounds, and put back into the cage for severe punishment. 6/11
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Since slaves were rarely given the privilege of having any kind of writing material they couldn’t even draw a map for safe passage or writing messages for communication or even if they did have it, it was too risky to pass those pieces of paper. 7/11
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But the enslaved Africans always yearned to escape from the settlements. It's a pity that they seldom made it to the free world owing to the lack of knowledge of the area. Thus our thrilling story began. 5/11
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As women endured the trauma and suffering of slavery, they needed a hairstyle that could last the entire week as Sunday became the only day when women could treat their hair. The popularity of braids started growing. 4/11
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When the people of Africa were brought to the New World as slaves, their heads were often shaved to dehumanize them. The helpless slaves, especially women, started to grow braids in a way to demonstrate their heritage as a symbol of strength. 3/11
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Cornrow styled braids are not just a fashion statement, but truly an ancient heritage. Evidences of such braids can be found in many prehistoric artifacts. This clay sculpture from the ancient Nok civilization of Nigeria was dated 500 BCE.
2/11 https://t.co/ypo3fIQxMS
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Against accounts of the same size
32 posts from the last 90 days, next to the 10K–100K follower range. reaches fewer people than peers of the same size.
Median views952this account1 070median for 10K–100K
Reach, %1.11%this account3.77%median for 10K–100K
Engagement, %1.25%this account1.65%median for 10K–100K
| Metric | This account | Median for 10K–100K | Ratio |
|---|---|---|---|
| Median views per post | 952 | 1 070 | 0.89× |
| Reach (views ÷ followers) | 1.11% | 3.77% | 0.29× |
| Engagement rate | 1.25% | 1.65% | 0.76× |
Others in this range → Compare with another account → How these benchmarks are built →
Growth & engagement
How the posts we collected actually performed: views and reaction rate post by post, what the audience did with them, and where the follower count goes.
Views per post
1.4K10 Sep
1.3K
1.2K
1.1K
1.1K
985
1.5K
918
903
777
777
1K
1K
4011 Sep
Last 14 collected posts, oldest on the left. The scale is logarithmic: one post can outrun the rest a hundred times over.
Engagement rate per post
0.73%10 Sep
0.98%
0.74%
0.70%
0.90%
1.22%
0.78%
0.87%
0.89%
1.29%
1.03%
1.80%
1.39%
7.50%11 Sep
Reactions — likes, reposts, replies and quotes — divided by views. Median for 10K–100K accounts is 1.65%.
What the audience does
Likes67.6%448 in total
Reposts11.8%78 in total
Replies5.6%37 in total
Bookmarks15.1%100 in total
Share of every reaction we collected for this account. Replies mean argument, reposts mean endorsement, bookmarks mean the post was worth keeping.
Followers by day
13 Sep
Daily snapshots since 13 Sep 2026; the dashed line is the starting count.
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