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.