Described as “a complex history of rum, from its production to its consumption, and from its origins in the Caribbean to its impact on the Atlantic world,” Jordan B. Smith’s The Invention of Rum: Creating the Quintessential Atlantic Commodity (University of Pennsylvania Press) was published in October 2025. There are three related lectures scheduled this June: the author will speak at the Charles River Museum of Industry and Innovation (154 Moody Street, Waltham, Massachusetts) on June 10, 2026, at 7:00pm; and at the Rhode Island Historical Society (at the John Brown House Museum
52 Power Street, Providence, Rhode Island) on June 11, at 5:30pm. These two in-person events will be followed by a hybrid (in-person and virtual) talk at the Fraunces Tavern Museum (54 Pearl Street, New York, New York) on June 22, at 6:30pm. See description below.
Book Description (Penn Press): 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.
For more information, see https://www.pennpress.org/9781512828184/the-invention-of-rum/ and https://www.pennpress.org/events/jordan-b-smith-at-the-fraunces-tavern-museum/