It’s been 10 years since, thanks to Luis Ayala, I had the pleasure of getting acquainted with Professor Jordan Smith. Alas, it was only an acquaintance by pen – or rather, by keyboard – but nonetheless, an incredibly stimulating one. I read some of his articles and we exchanged a few opinions on what Professor Smith calls the “Invention” of Rum. Moreover, he kindly provided me with valuable material for my own research on American Rum. Some time ago I read his PHD Dissertation and now his fine book, just published: “THE INVENTION OF RUM Creating the Quintessential Atlantic Commodity”, 2025.
Professor Smith’s book is one of the few works on the history of Rum written by a Scholar, and it is rich in information and reflections, an important contribution to the understanding of our favorite subject, impossible to summarize adequately in the brief space of a Review. I have therefore decided to present some excerpts, focusing on the origin of the new beverage, which, I hope, will spark the interests of our readers and encourage the reading of the full text.
The few existing studies on the History of Rum often start from the much better- known History of Sugar, a far more important commodity “which was responsible for more than 3 percent of the British gross domestic product late in the eighteenth century. … But understanding the history of rum is about more than amending how we make sense of the history of sugar (as important as that is). It also exposes something substantively new about the Atlantic world. The invention of rum rested on a fledgling idea that a combination of labor, ingenuity, and technology could shape-shift trash into treasure. Specifically, the detritus generated by early modern sugar production was no longer simply disposed of but was collected, mixed, fermented, distilled, packaged, shipped, sold, and consumed. Making, marketing, and drinking rum constituted a new kind of alchemy, almost magically transmuting the physical characteristic of matter – and equally firm attitudes – to conjure a highly desired comestible.”
The Invention of Rum
“The invention of rum – a process and not just a moment – depended on the sorts of thinkering that remain integral to modern production and profit making.” Professor Smith has carried out extensive research, drawing from sources of exceptional interests. His book “incorporates evidence from forty-five libraries and archives in Barbados, Jamaica, England, Wales, Scotland, and the United States. It also draws from digitized versions of newspapers and rare books, published document collections, and rapidly expanding digital archives.” And here allow me a personal note: what a marvel! And what envy! How I wish I had such a wealth of qualified sources at my disposal.
The book focuses on Barbados and the British Empire, and explains the reasons for their importance: “People in Britain, its colonies, and the space where British traders operated embraced rum because it met individual tastes while simultaneously serving many goals of empire. Starting in the mid-seventeenth century, English colonizers grasped the incredible potential of repurposing the waste products of colonial sugar plantations as a distilled spirit that could lessen their dependence on continental European brandies and wines. Intent on protecting domestic viniculture, Spanish and French officials found the possibility of colonial rum industries threatening for precisely the same reasons, and they actively discouraged alcohol production as a result. Geography circumscribed rum’s potential within other empires. Dutch colonies centered on exceedingly small islands unfit for widespread sugar cultivation. And while Brazil exported tremendous volumes of sugar-derived spirits to Angola, its production took place in centralized mills and distilleries in the South Atlantic with few connections to the North Atlantic. Non-British sugar plantations sometimes produced rum or a close analogue, but published treatises on distilling and private correspondences of distillers alike rarely reveal distilling practices or even preferred qualities for rum being consistently shared between metropoles. These empires were far for hermetically sealed, however. Colonists in Brazil and French Caribbean experimented with making alcohol from sugar in the seventeenth century, and Indigenous people transported from South America to Barbados introduced new alcohols to English settlers on the island. North American distillers transformed molasses smuggled through Dutch and French entrepôts into rum despite British mercantilist policies designed to outlaw this activity. In West Africa and the American interior alike, French and Danish traders sometimes found little recourse other than to acquire and resell rum produced in Britain and its colonies. While each of these transimperial contexts is described in this book, whether the patterns observed in British Atlantic contexts can be traced in the archives generated by these localities and other empires await further study.”
This book “examines rum’s place in the Atlantic world from the moment of its creation around 1640 until its meaning and utility became harder to change by 1810.”
Professor Smith then states that “The invention of rum was never so simple. Native, African, and European people possessed – and created anew – their own ideas about both alcohol and best way to make it. … Piecing together the creative collisions between distinct cultures of alcohol production in three places purported to be cradles of rum production – Brazil, The French West Indies, and, especially, Barbados – reveals processes of experimentation that drew in people and ideas originating in Europe, Africa, and the Americas and ultimately created something new.”
In pre-Columbian America, many fermented beverages were known, but distillation was not. “The earliest European stills date back to twelfth-century Italy. It is unlikely that this technology existed in West Africa or the Americas before Europeans established trade centers in those places in the early modern period.” “Although sugarcane was transported to earlier sites of colonization in the Atlantic and Caribbean islands, plantation production in the Americas first prospered in Brazil, and a strain of accompanying experiments regarding its alcoholic potential began there too. … It was only in the early seventeenth century, however, that both the consumption of sugar by-products and the practice of distillation became commonplace.”
According to Professor Smith, the earliest steps in the history of Rum are shrouded in obscurity. “Nobody recorded when somebody in Barbados – or Brazil or Martinique – first collected sugary wastes, fermented them, loaded them into a still, and decided to consume the resulting product. Nobody asked how early makers knew what they did”
At the outset, the new drink had little value; it was consumed only locally and did not even have a name, but things changed rapidly. “By the 1660s, and more so by the 1680s, sales of rum produced in Barbados and sent to distant markets added considerably to the island’s economy. … The many hands that rum passed through from plantation to market exacerbated the need for a standard name for the commodity. Early observers used different names for the spirit before beginning to settle on the modern name for their invention in the 1650s. Befitting a commodity whose invention was shrouded in mystery but depended on the presence of Indigenous, African, and European knowledge of alcohol production, the origin of the name remains opaque. … By the mid-1650s, the term was in use in both Barbados and North America.” And later, in 1684, in the aftermath of a fiscal quarrel with a Scottish rum distillery, “The exchequer dictated, however, that any distillate removed from the distillery ‘must be marked with the word RUM’. The mandated label unequivocally established the linkage between the Scottish distilleries and their American counterparts in terms of what they made.”
Yes, because very soon, indeed quite early, rum production expanded well beyond Barbados. “By 1660, Massachusetts distillers began to focus their efforts on distilling Caribbean molasses into local variants of rum. … Thomas Ruck, who traded with the Drax family and outfitted ships to trade foodstuffs for sugar in Barbados by 1648, began retailing spirits from Boston in 1653 and became a licensed distiller in 1658. Likewise, a London merchant named Simon Lynde settled in Boston by 1650 and bought a brewery (which he then converted to a distillery), a warehouse, and a wharf in the city in 1653. While Lynde continued to focus on trade to West Indies, he hired a distiller to turn his imports into New England rum. Distillery owners and operators attracted the disdain of Massachusetts’ governing bodies by 1661 when the general court complained of abuses by retailers of rum and ‘by the distillers thereof’ and outlawed liquor sales smaller than a quarter cask. Legislating against small liquor transactions was one popular way to price laboring people out of the alcohol trade.”
All over the British World, “Producers endeavored to make stronger and better-tasking rum more efficiently and in new places. This experimentation thrived on the frequent exchange of information …People moving throughout Britain’s Atlantic world carrying ideas about how to make rum linked the seventeenth-century origins of the industry to eighteenth-century innovation.”
If the 1600s may be considered the pioneering century, it is in the 1700s that rum reached its maturity: distinct kinds emerged and prices varied accordingly. For example, “In 1764, the Georgia Gazette listed the price of Jamaica rum at four shillings per gallon; Barbados and Antigua rum at three shillings, sixpence; New York rum at two shillings, four pence; and New England rum at two shillings, two pence.”
In conclusion, although I do not always entirely agree with Professor Smith, his work is undoubtedly a must read for every scholar and enthusiast of the subject. Moreover, it proved useful to me in correcting an error of mine.
In fact, in my article HISTORY OF CUBAN RUM 16. THE RON LIGERO CUBANO in the February 2024 issue of our magazine, regarding the emergence of the new type of rum in Cuba during the second half of the 1800s, I had written: “Last, but not least, ageing. Cuban distillers were maybe the first to consciously and deliberately age rum on a large scale, to deeply improve the product.”
Well, I was mistaken, because Professor Smith documents the practice of aging rum to improve its perceived quality, as well as the tricks to deceive the consumer, as early as the 1700s: “As a plantation operator explained in 1756, ‘We never think our rum in Barbados in any degree of perfection under three years old, the older the better’. Producers and consumers in the Americas and Britain thus associated the darker West Indian rums with the premium, aged product. Before even tasting the rum, merchants and consumers assumed that this process imparted a smoother, mellower, and sweeter taste. Sometimes the taste, strength, or color of rum diverged from what tasters expected, however. Such discrepancies could result from producers trying to emulate other styles of rum they had encountered. For instance, caramel-colored rum that did not exude the tasting notes of being aged was likely dyed with tea leaves or burnt sugar.”
Marco Pierini
Marco Pierini
