Jordan B. Smith's "The Invention of Rum"

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

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Invention of Rum: Creating the Quintessential Atlantic Commodity, and reported the following:

Page 99 of The Invention of Rum falls on a part opener, which introduces the second section of the book: “Extraction.” This is a major theme of the book. To make rum required the extraction of labor from coerced and free laborers. It demanded natural resources including soil nutrients sapped through sugarcane cultivation and wood consumed by heating rum stills and crafting barrels to contain it. The newfound ability to turn rather cheap ingredients into a highly desired spirit allowed the makers and movers of rum to trade an eminently consumable good for more durable things including furs, land, and even people. Extraction in all of its forms is integral to the book’s broader argument that the invention of rum introduced the world to a new type of commodity defined by how it treated nearly everything as transmutable, and thus replaceable.

The only tick stopping page 99 from acing the test, is that this single word might underplay how central human behaviors are to these dynamics. Titles of the other sections—“creation” and “connection and conflict”—are good reminders that commodity histories are, at their core, histories of human decisions and actions.

If you think that relying on one word is too much of a stretch, we can turn to page 101 where readers will encounter the opening of my fourth chapter, “Slavery and the Work of Making Rum.” Each chapter begins with an examination of an uncommon source—usually an item of visual or material culture. Here I analyze prints of the interior and exterior of a plantation rum distillery published in William Clark’s Ten Views in the Island of Antigua. These are imperfect illustrations of historical processes because they present the distillery as more orderly and safer than Caribbean plantations usually were. But Clark captured the vast amount of work completed by nearly two dozen people, mostly men of African descent held in slavery.

The Invention of Rum connects the production, trade, and consumption of rum in the Caribbean, North America, Britain, and West Africa. No single page can encompass this geographical and topical breadth. But page 101 is an exemplar of the expansiveness of the evidence I assembled and the care with which I approached analyzing it. Like much of the rest of the book, the focus here remains on the people making, trading, and drinking rum.

Learn more about The Invention of Rum at the University of Pennsylvania Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue