The Invention of Rum - (Early American Studies) by Jordan B Smith (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

Making and consuming rum created a new means of profit that transformed the Atlantic world

It was strong. It was cheap. It was ubiquitous. Fermented and distilled from the refuse of sugar production, rum emerged in the seventeenth-century Caribbean as a new commodity. To conjure something desirable from waste, the makers, movers, and drinkers of rum arrived at its essential qualities through cross-cultural experimentation and exchange. Those profiting most from the sale of rum also relied on plantation slavery, devoured natural resources, and overlooked the physiological effects of overconsumption in their pursuit of profit. Focusing on the lived experiences of British colonists, Indigenous people, and enslaved Africans, The Invention of Rum shows how people engaged in making and consuming this commodity created a new means of profit that transformed the Atlantic world.

Jordan B. Smith guides readers from the fledgling sugar plantations and urban distilleries where new types of alcohol sprung forth to the ships, garrisons, trading posts, and refined tables where denizens of the Atlantic world devoured it. He depicts the enslaved laborers in the Caribbean as they experimented with fermentation, the Londoners caught up in the Gin Craze, the colonial distillers in North America, and the imperial officials and sailors connecting these places. This was a world flooded by rum.

Based on extensive archival research in the Caribbean, North America, and Britain, The Invention of Rum narrates the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century history of one of the Atlantic world's most ubiquitous products. Smith casts this everyday item as both a crucial example of negotiation between Europeans, Africans, and Americans and a harbinger of modernity, connecting rum's early history to the current global market. The book reveals how individuals throughout the Atlantic world encountered--and helped to build--rapidly shifting societies and economies.

Review Quotes

"Beautifully written and deeply researched, The Invention of Rum is at once a history of a commodified beverage and of the Atlantic basin in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Jordan B. Smith evocatively explains how something that had its origins in 'sugary wastes' became an incredibly desirable drink and commodity. He also helps us understand the immense changes that transformed the Atlantic world through the interconnected processes of colonization, trade, and plantation slavery that together formed a brutally oppressive and ecologically disastrous system of extraction. No less this book is a history of how people--and their ideas, materials, and technologies--from the Indigenous Caribbean, West Africa, and Europe converged to invent and create rum."-- "Marcy Norton, author of The Tame and the Wild: People and Animals After 1492"

"Fiery yet mellow and full of flavor, The Invention of Rum is a groundbreaking analysis of the transformation of waste from sugar production into a commodity that was highly desirable and profitable and of global significance. Rum, as a product of the intellectual and physical labor of free and enslaved people and experiments from the vast spirit-making cultures of the Americas, Africa, and Europe, earmarked the Caribbean as a region of innovation, knowledge production, and site of modern cultures of taste and sociability. This book is a sobering challenge to the long reign of king sugar in histories of the Caribbean and Atlantic world and early modern labor regimes and consumption and commodity production."-- "Sasha Turner, author of Contested Bodies: Pregnancy, Childrearing, and Slavery in Jamaica"

"Rum was global integration in liquid form, a distillation of the greed, ingenuity, violence, and resilience that organized the early modern Atlantic world. In The Invention of Rum, Jordan B. Smith displays the best of the historian's craft as he ranges across multiple scholarly fields, revises familiar interpretations, recognizes the complexities of the past, and reckons with the continuities that shape our world today."-- "Seth Rockman, author of Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery"

About the Author

Jordan B. Smith is Associate Professor of History at Widener University.