The Invention of Rum (eBook)

Creating the Quintessential Atlantic Commodity

Jordan B. Smith (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025
444 Seiten
University of Pennsylvania Press (Verlag)
978-1-5128-2819-1 (ISBN)

Infos

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.

Autor

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

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 7.10.2025
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Essen / Trinken ► Getränke
• Themenwelt: Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► Neuzeit (bis 1918)
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
• Themenwelt: Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Wirtschaftsgeschichte
• Schlagworte: African slave trade • Alcohol • Atlantic World • Barbados • British Empire • Capitalism • Caribbean • commodity history • Distilling • Early America • history of capitalism • indigenous people • public drunkenness • Rum • Slave revolt • Slavery • Sugar production • where did rum come from • where was rum invented • who invented rum
• ISBN-10: 1-5128-2819-X / 151282819X
• ISBN-13: 978-1-5128-2819-1 / 9781512828191