Jordan B. Smith

In a nutshell

The Invention of Rum is my attempt to answer how people living in the Atlantic world invented rum and subsequently wrestled with the wide-ranging implications of its production and consumption. Rather than focusing on a particular region or narrow time period, I instead wrote a book that connects the makers, movers, and drinkers of rum in the West Indies, North America, Britain, and West Africa over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The book unpacks the Atlantic-wide circulation of information necessary for rum to be created, the high human and environmental costs of producing something so “cheap,” and the extended contestations over who should profit from it.

I chose to frame my study in this way in order to account for the fundamental place that the spirit played in the history of the early modern world. More than a tropical curiosity, rum constituted a significant portion of the annual profits of British sugar plantations. This was a shocking development because people made rum from sugary wastes with no other clear use. Such an invention resulted from the creative collisions of Indigenous American, West Central African, and European cultures of alcohol production and consumption.

Once people living outside of the Caribbean encountered this new invention, it spread rapidly. North American merchants eagerly embraced it as a means to wring profits out of the cheap sweeteners that French and other merchants were eager to unload. Distilleries in England and Scotland could even turn the sweepings from the decks of merchant ships and the scum pooling in state-of-the-art sugar refineries into fermentable material in their own distilleries. Combined, these hundreds of distilleries fed burgeoning consumption patterns in British and American cities, the American backcountry, scattered garrisons of sailors and soldiers, Atlantic fisheries, and several regions of West Africa engaged in the slave trade. We might not always stop to think about it, but rum was nearly everywhere.

Rum’s spectacular emergence was predicated on a substantively new idea that trash could be transformed into treasure. Sugarcane damaged by hurricanes, rat-bitten pieces of cane, and impurities skimmed off in the boiling house could now be collected, fermented, and distilled into something highly desirable and marketable. In short order, those controlling the sites of rum production embodied this concept of disposability in just about everything they did. They redoubled their investment in unsustainable labor patterns dependent on coercion; they prioritized short-term profits over sustainable agricultural techniques; and they created trade relationships that yielded exhaustible resources like land and people for parcels of eminently replaceable rum. Capitalizing on disposability was a fledgling concept in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that helps to explain the rise of some of the most iconic new commodities of the modern world, from cigarettes and tea bags to chicken nuggets.

A close-up

I tried to tell a story when writing The Invention of Rum, and like most stories this one is probably best enjoyed from the beginning. If readers start with the introduction, they will encounter my description of a modern-day auction of eighteenth-century rum and a taste test that followed. This anecdote connects past and present. It also reveals what the commodity itself tasted like. But most importantly, it initiates a broader reflection on how rum morphed from something ubiquitous to something prized for its rarity. I hope this sets the stage for considering rum’s constant presence in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when its cheapness and potency were its most important qualities.

If a browser continues leafing through the pages in a bookstore, they are very likely to pause on a page where I delve into the experiences of a person responding to the invention, production, trade, or consumption of rum. They might encounter Quacqo, who was enslaved as a cooper in Barbados before being sold to a distillery owner in 1720s Boston. His inability or unwillingness to complete the work expected of him led to a showdown in court. Or they could learn about a merchant in late eighteenth-century Maine named Thomas Robison who mislabeled his rum as being Caribbean in origin. When the market for his rum suffered as a result, he chose to engage in the transatlantic slave trade. Perhaps the name “George Washington” or “Thomas Jefferson” will leap off the page, revealing how both expressed hopes that “rum” made from maple sugar could wean a fledgling United States off of Caribbean-produced goods.

Collectively, these stories form one of the central arguments of the book. There are many histories of commodities that claim that the good in question changed the world or some part of it. Of course, goods themselves can’t change anything without human input. As I detail, an array of people who touched and tasted rum made individual decisions with outsized impacts. The Invention of Rum tells a human-centered history of an everyday good.

Lastly

Connoisseurs of rum will readily tell you that the spirit is more complex than it has often been given credit for. And indeed, the market has begun to agree with them. Premium rums now sometimes receive the attention that has customarily been more often reserved for fine whiskeys.

I hope that readers will realize that the history of rum is equally complex. It resists straightforward categorization. To study the history of rum entails reading about the enslavement of huge numbers of Africans and Indigenous Americans on Caribbean plantations. In part because of the expertise created and acquired by enslaved people, slavery also prevailed in distilleries throughout North America and even Britain late into the eighteenth century.

Yet amongst this harshness, there is also a story of resilience and innovation to be recovered. The Invention of Rum offers a history of invention and knowledge production unfolding in the very sites of slavery and colonization. It locates creativity and thought in places where casual observers and scholars alike have not always looked for it. I hope that readers will agree with me that if we lose sight of either the brutality or the innovation at the heart of the invention of rum, we are missing the point.

In the final pages of the book, I also weigh in on what a history of rum in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries might unveil about the experience of being human across time. One of the central takeaways of The Invention of Rum is that the invention of rum represented a substantial shift in what people were willing to put in their bodies and the lengths that societies were willing to go to create something desirable. This process was not foreordained. It was not straightforward. It entailed extended experimentation and negotiation between people of Indigenous American, African, and European descent. Nobody could have predicted that rum would emerge from this maelstrom. Originality and creation are predicated on a human exploration of what is possible and preferable. This sort of labor falls far beyond the capabilities of any algorithm.