A book that takes this long to write is bound to have multiple origin stories. One came from my attempts as an undergraduate to think about Caribbean taverns as one place where many different corners of colonial society—including pirates—would have interacted with each other. Shifting to what was often consumed in those spaces widened the lens even further. It situated me to embrace the full promise of Atlantic history—a field that I believe yields the greatest insights when historians transcend national borders and geographical regions to explore how early modern European colonization, the transatlantic slave trade, and endemic imperial warfare changed the lived realities of just about everybody inhabiting the ocean basin.

Moreover, I spent several years working at a public history site in college, after I graduated, and while studying for my PhD. Working in historic trades heightened my sensitivity to the experiences of work in a pre-industrialized world. And while working in a reproduction of an eighteenth-century distillery I became quite aware of various keys to fermentation and distillation that were more easily learned by practice than any written text. In light of these experiences, I could no longer see rum (or much of anything else) as something that simply existed. I wanted to know how people divided by thousands of miles and heavily patrolled social divisions knew what they knew about rum. My work in public history also convinced me that I wanted to tell this story in a way that would be interesting to historians and non-historians alike.

The shape that the book took was also influenced by my experiences with archival research in graduate school. I find poring over two-hundred-year-old paperwork absolutely fascinating. Snarky letters between feuding business partners or siblings can make one laugh out loud. Piecing together a narrative from entries in an account book is oddly thrilling. And you might be surprised by some of the stories revealed in documents as formulaic as an inventory or a legal deposition. Material culture can also unveil histories of production and consumption that were never written down. I am well aware of the inequalities and extreme power differentials that shape what was created in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and what has been preserved in archives. But I also firmly believe that there remains an incredible amount to be learned when we prioritize open inquiry and extended time in them.