The History of Rum

Kelly Therese Pollock  0:00  
This is Unsung History, the podcast where we discuss people and events in American history that haven't always received a lot of attention. I'm your host, Kelly Therese Pollock. I'll start each episode with a brief introduction to the topic, and then talk to someone who knows a lot more than I do. Be sure to subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app so you never miss an episode, and please tell your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, maybe even strangers, to listen too. In February of 1627, an English captain named Henry Powell landed on an island in the Caribbean called Barbados, with a party of 90 that included enslaved individuals, there to occupy and settle the land. The Portuguese had held the island for a while previously and before them, the Spanish had added it to their maps, and of course, various groups of Indigenous people had lived there on and off for centuries. The English stayed, enslaving Indigenous people and growing crops on the island, including tobacco, cotton and sugar cane. The process of refining sugar from sugar cane left behind waste products, including molasses. And over time, the people of Barbados began to ferment the sugar waste, turning it into alcohol. They were hardly the first people to ferment the waste of the sugar cane, and it was a time of experimentation on the island, using many different crops that could be fermented, including cassava, sweet potatoes and palm sap. By the 1640s, they were taking the process a step further and distilling the fermented alcohol in a still. In distillation, the fermented alcohol is heated. The boiling point of potable alcohol is lower than the boiling point of water, so the alcoholic vapors can be separated out, captured and then condensed. The end result of distillation, usually after several passes through a still, is to produce a liquid with a higher alcohol content. Today, Mount Gay Silver, for instance, is 40% alcohol by volume, or 80 proof, which is much more alcoholic than is possible through fermentation alone. In the 1640s, the distillers would not have been able to measure the ABV so accurately, instead relying on measures like tasting, shaking and observing bubbles, seeing if a drop of oil sank in liquid, or soaking gunpowder in the liquor and seeing if it would still ignite. By distilling the fermented, sugary wash, Barbadians created what we now know as rum, although they weren't yet calling it that. What started as a local product, and one that wasn't much different than what had been distilled in other places first, became a major export of Barbados, as it still continues to be today. By 1651, a resident of Barbados wrote about the drink, which he described as,"a hot, hellish, and terrible liquor," calling it rumbolian and Kill Devil. Another source called it rumbustion. Not surprisingly, the name was quickly shortened to rum, a term in use in Barbados and North America by the mid 1650s. By the late 1680s, Barbados was exporting 1.4 million liters of rum annually, making up more than a quarter of the island's exports, and becoming a major driver of its economy. It didn't take long for this industry to spread to other places. In 1655, the English had attacked Jamaica, about 1200 miles northwest of Barbados, forcing out the last of the Spanish soldiers just five years later. Barbadians and the people they enslaved, headed to Jamaica, along with the equipment they needed to distill rum. By the late 1680s, Jamaica was exporting over 24,000 liters of rum annually, far short of the volume of Barbadian exports, but impressively quick growth of the industry. While distillers in Barbados and Jamaica used sugar and sugar waste from their own cane fields or those of their island neighbors, distillers in North America imported molasses from the West Indies for their rum as early as the 1660s. A century later, just one of Philadelphia's 14 distilleries was distilling more than 17,000 gallons of molasses annually. Philadelphia was only the fourth largest distilling center in British North America at the time, after Boston, Newport, and New York City. Rum was popular enough in North America that in 1775, the Continental Congress approved the rules for regulation of the Navy of the United Colonies, which promised sailors, "half pint of rum per man every day." That was just the minimum. In some states, the allotment of rum for militiamen was even higher. Rum was so important to the revolutionary cause that a Connecticut distillery owner petitioned for coopers and a distiller to be released from military duty so that they could help provide the rum. American distillers were not producing rum just for soldiers, though. Around 22% of North American rum in 1770 was exported to West Africa as part of the slave trade. In a typical voyage, a distiller might send a ship full of rum to West Africa. Along the way, they would trade some of the rum with other slave traders for wares like weapons, tobacco, textiles and beads. Upon reaching West Africa, they would trade the diversified merchandise for enslaved laborers, who would then be forcibly transported to the Caribbean, where the ship would stock up on molasses to begin the cycle again. Starting on January 1, 1808, the United States outlawed the importation of enslaved people from Africa into the United States, cutting off that triangular trade, at least legally, although some illegal transAtlantic slave trading certainly continued after that date. Today, rum is in the top 10 most consumed alcoholic beverages worldwide, and is expected to reach sales of nearly 28 billion US dollars by the year 2033. By volume, sold the largest rum brand in the world is Tanduay Distillers, a Philippine company founded in 1854. In 2024, Tanduay sold 23.8 million cases of rum, which was over 4 million cases more than its next closest competitor, Bacardi. Within the US market, though, Bacardi, which was founded in Cuba, but is now headquartered in Bermuda, is the biggest seller. Joining me in this episode is Dr. Jordan B. Smith, Associate Professor of History at Widener University, and author of, "The Invention of Rum: Creating the Quintessential Atlantic Commodity."

Kelly Therese Pollock  9:21  
Hi Jordan. Thanks so much for joining me today.

Dr. Jordan B. Smith  9:24  
Yeah, thanks for having me.

Kelly Therese Pollock  9:25  
I Want to start by asking how you first got into this project deciding to write about rum. I'm sure you spent many years of your life thinking and writing about rum. 

Dr. Jordan B. Smith  9:35  
Yeah. So I think long term projects sometimes have multiple origin points. And so the earliest that I can kind of track is that when I was an undergraduate student, I became enamored with the idea of Atlantic history, and I wrote a senior thesis that looked at taverns in Port Royal, Jamaica, with the belief that kind of looking at these spaces where different groups of people interacted and spent time with people of different kind of political bents, of different kind of class, status, race, gender, that there was something unique we could find out about the Atlantic world through that sort of kind of everyday interaction. And over time, I became more interested in what was being consumed, and thought about how even taverns might be a limiting factor to the way in which rum and things like it touched the lives of almost everybody who lived in the Atlantic world. During and then after undergraduate, my undergraduate years, I went to and worked at Mount Vernon for a number of years, and in part, worked in historic trades, and especially a distillery there. And after spending a lot of time making alcohol, trying to hit my hand at making different things through historic trades, I came to realize that just about everything has a history of expertise and skill building that we don't always recognize in our sources. So those two things carried with me into graduate school, where I became even more enamored with deep archival research, which is the basis of this project.

Kelly Therese Pollock  11:13  
Let's talk about that piece then. What are some of the archives that you were visiting? What are, you know, the kinds of sources that you're able to look at? And of course, some of the people you're writing about don't leave archives, but you're able to get at their stories.

Dr. Jordan B. Smith  11:29  
Right. And I think the last point that you mentioned, I think, is a really important one, because I'm aware of the limitations of archives, of kind of how they were constructed, what was included in those archives whose records, who had the ability to contribute to those archives, and whose records were prioritized. But I still believe that spending extended time in the archives and seeing what you find can be hugely beneficial. And so I designed a research plan as a graduate student, and then have continued to kind of refine that research plan that prioritized broad inquiry in a lot of different archives. And so I've spent time in archives in Jamaica and Barbados, throughout the United States, as well as England, Wales and Scotland. And there's not one archive that forms the basis of this project. I like to think that this project would look similar, even there's not like one document that is necessary for this project. But instead, it's kind of a process of accretion, finding small mentions in a variety of different documents. And so some of those documents are letters. A lot of times, distilleries were owned, especially in the Caribbean, by absentee owners of plantations. And so things would be kind of written in those letters. Sometimes details about individual people would be written in those letters. It involves looking at documents that tried to reduce people to commodities, including inventories of estates, where sometimes there are short references to the expertise possessed by enslaved people. Same thing with some business records from North American distilleries and British distilleries as well. It involves looking at prescriptive material that would tell people how to make rum or how to operate a plantation, or even how to kind of engage in international trade, or even how to counterfeit rum in some rare cases. And the archive does a lot of good for this project, I think, and kind of helps me tell the story, tease out the story of individual people making choices, determining how they're going to engage or not engage with rum. But it's not enough on its own, and so I pride myself on some of the material culture work I do in the book, looking at images that are not neutral kind of statements of fact, but we can nonetheless think about work through how work is depicted in images, involves looking at songs and other kind of pieces of culture that tell us a story of kind of rum's place in society.

Kelly Therese Pollock  14:05  
You write a lot about how dangerous this work was for the people, you know, certainly, who were working the sugar cane fields and and in the distilleries. Could you talk a little bit about, you know, I've toured distilleries, not rum, but like whiskey and gin and, you know, I assume it's very different now than it was back then. So could you talk a little bit about what was that work like? What made it so dangerous to the point that formerly enslaved people with expertise didn't want to go take their expertise and work in distilleries anymore when they didn't have to?

Dr. Jordan B. Smith  14:39  
I'm really happy that you picked up on this theme of danger, kind of throughout and kind of almost arguably the violence of commodity production, because I think it's really integral to the book in its entirety. So one of the main points that I'm trying to make here is that rum represented a new type of commodity that relied on the disposability of the ingredients, but also every almost everything else that the rum touched at various kind of stages of the commodity process. And part of that, of course, is the people conducting the work. Some of those people conducting the work were kind of working in fields, in the kind of cane fields of the Caribbean, in very dangerous conditions, both because of diseases that festered in the Caribbean, in the tropics, but also being kind of expected to work sun up to sun down, under coercion, threat of physical harm. The distilleries themselves could be dangerous as well, because you have flames, sometimes you're working in low lit conditions. There's also the just the fact that distillation requires pressure, and so these, these became sites of disasters with a an alarming frequency. And I talk about that in the book, and I would agree, yes, there are examples of formerly enslaved people who did not want to seek out this work outside of slavery. There are examples of formerly enslaved people who sought out this work because it was an opportunity for employment in place in kind of societies that might not have always provided them with other opportunities to kind of labor.

Kelly Therese Pollock  16:17  
One of the most surprising things in the book, to me, was the environmental history, and the way that hundreds of years ago, people were acknowledging human made climate change, at least in local climates, and working to mitigate it. Could you talk a little bit about that piece, and were you surprised by that? Were you expecting to find that you know, how might we think about people from centuries ago reacting to and working on climate change issues?

Dr. Jordan B. Smith  16:49  
So I was not expecting that, I think, when I started the project. I worked with one of the professors who I worked with is an environmental historian, JR McNeill, and I took classes with him, where I came to think about how the environment was was more of a presence than we sometimes think about in kind of historical decision making and into the advent of commodities and colonies and things like that. And I would also add that a project that's thinking about a commodity like rum is thinking a lot about the materiality of the world, of the early modern world. And so what people were touching, what they were tasting, just everything that they were surrounded by. And so these, I think that environmental history and commodity histories actually fit together really well. And that's something that I came to appreciate as I was working on this project. From the start, from kind of dissertation to book, there was always kind of an emphasis in my writing and in my my research process, into kind of how the environment was shaping human choices. I think that's something that I became kind of more attuned to in the last half decade or so when I was working on this project, was that I wanted to kind of more and more focus on what people knew in the context of the environment. And I was really, you know, again, I was shaped by other things I was reading, including kind of Catherine Johnston's work and Catherine Olivares' work. But I was struck that people in the early modern period thought a lot about the environment, wrote a lot about the environment, had ideas about what their actions were doing to the environment, more than I might have realized. So I think the part of the book that you might be or that you're probably referencing, starts with the fact that on some Caribbean islands on the in the ceded islands after the American Revolution, there was an attempt to preserve some woodlands, because it was thought that that would preserve kind of rainfall for plantation economies. And so there are these moments where there are paths not taken that show that that people had ideas about how kind of human behavior shaped the world around them, the healthfulness of an environment and also its potential to create profit. And so I think that that became like that surprised me. And again, I was building on a lot of other people's work who had kind of studied these things. But I think kind of the piece on like there were ways in which some of the decisions that were made, especially about things like the use of fuel being kind of wood that was unique to distilleries and plantation distilleries, but also was unique to urban production and distilleries in a place like Philadelphia, which is another kind of case study that I use, like it allowed me to think a little bit about why people were making the decisions that they were and at the end of the day, that's what I'm interested in, in kind of historical study, right, focusing on individuals' choices, even when those choices were made under constraint, but but individuals shaping the history of of the places that they lived.

Kelly Therese Pollock  19:57  
I imagine a lot of people when they think about, about rum, think about the Caribbean, for obvious reasons, but you're writing about distilleries at least all over, really, the Atlantic world. And one of the things that was striking is the ways in which the American Revolution kind of cut off the United States. You know, it's no longer part of the British Empire and suddenly doesn't have as strong of a position in rum creation. You know, there are lots of other reasons and things going on, of course. But you know, as as an American who grew up on stories about how the revolution is great, obviously wasn't for all populations, for all people. But you know, you tend to think of at least for people like George Washington, the American Revolution is a great thing. But you write about the ways that, at least in that industry, in the rum industry, you know, there are challenges after they break away from the British Empire. I wonder if you could talk some about that.

Dr. Jordan B. Smith  20:55  
 I'm really glad that you picked up on one of the themes of the book, kind of diversifying how we think about the history of rum, that it's not just a Caribbean history, but it's a history that ties together different regions of the Atlantic world, including West Africa, Western Europe, and also, as you suggested, British North America. And so you know that that's really kind of at the heart of the project, and I do detail as much as I can through the sources, the ways in which a disruption of trade and a disruption a disruption of kind of business relationships that had existed for a long time, or at least for a generation prior to the American Revolution, created ruptures that had to be kind of addressed in a variety of ways. One of the things that I will say, and I think is really important to recognize, is that the American Revolution did not sever all of those ties. One of the things that I kind of routinely saw when I would look at records of merchants who often own distilleries in places like Alexandria, Virginia or Philadelphia or Boston, was that as soon as the American Revolution ended, they wanted to start communicating with their old trade partners, and they were wondering whether that was possible. Even during the American Revolution, kind of the argument can be made that the Continental Army, and it's more than an argument, the Continental Army was partially being fueled by rum rations. And so rum was integral to the American project of independence. That being said, rum's role did change as kind of Americans had to seek out new sources for foreign molasses. Sometimes, you know, they're they were already relying on trade with kind of French Caribbean islands like Saint Domingue, which would eventually become Haiti, but they also kind of seek out new connections with islands, like with merchants, and islands like Guadalupe, but eventually Cuba as well. So there are long standing interpretations that perhaps when Americans were throwing tea into Boston Harbor, they were also foregoing their relationship to rum, but that, I think that process happened a lot more slowly than we might think. And even by the pure numbers, the rum industry largely recovers after the American Revolution. And it's really the cessation of the slave trade, the transatlantic slave trade in 1807 where we start to see the decline of American distilleries, though, the market share of rum vis a vis things like whiskey, had already started to shift a little bit. And so I think that there are other ways in which kind of Americans, too, kind of, in the earliest years of United States history, were kind of faced with choices about whether rum would be a part of that culture, and for a variety of reasons, they continued. They sometimes sought out different ways to make the rum, even using something like maple syrup to make the rum. But they were committed to kind of maintaining, kind of this Atlantic recipe for rum.

Kelly Therese Pollock  23:57  
There is, not surprisingly, when we're talking about alcohol, lots of moralizing going on in different places, with people saying, "Oh, we shouldn't be drinking rum at all," or we should be less reliant on rum. And then when you get to the part where you're talking about abolitionists and thinking, well, rum is so dependent on enslaved labor, and how can we support this product that is coming from enslaved labor, and as you know, is part of the slave trade itself, which leads to lots of interesting ways of, sort of justifying or getting around. I was fascinated to learn that there was rum production in India. That had just never crossed my mind. Could you talk some about this in general, this idea of moralizing around rum, thinking about the ethics of rum, but then also, especially this production of rum in India?

Dr. Jordan B. Smith  24:52  
Yeah, I would start by saying that people in the early modern world and in early America and Britain and in the Caribbean, understood that kind of the objects that they were interacting with had stories and had histories and had kind of, like represented a series of relationships that led to, kind of the good existing, and at various points those stories became either assets or liabilities. Of course, rum has kind of a unique physical effect on people when it's consumed, because it's alcoholic and so to kind of move the story back to kind of earlier in the book, one of the points that I make is that the advent of rum and the advent of cheap and readily available distilled spirit, so highly concentrated alcohol, was something that people were unaccustomed to. And so the very idea of kind of inebriation being available for less money and in more places caused a lot of people to panic about who might be drinking rum, and in what context. And so early in the book, I make an attempt to connect wanton drunkenness in Port Royal, Jamaica, which was sometimes referred to as the Sodom of the West Indies, to panics over Indigenous drinking patterns in 17th and early 18th century North America, and two what's often referred to as the gin craze, but there were other distilled spirits that I argue were central to that, I would argue, in part, moral panic in like 1730s London. and so in all of these different places, one of the questions is, how should people be consuming alcohol? Who should be able to consume alcohol, and what does it mean when people drink to what some people consider to be excess? And so all of those stories kind of get at this question of the morality of drinking. One of the points that I make is that I think that sometimes the panic was kind of targeted towards certain groups of people more than others, right? It wasn't neutral who elites were saying should or should not be drinking alcohol. And so I think understanding this broader context is important so that we don't kind of replicate some of these ideas that certain people are particularly prone to alcoholism. The other thing I would say about kind of what some would consider problematic drinking is that, again, elites and others were sometimes concerned about over consumption of alcohol. They sometimes observed symptoms that looked like a clinical modern definition of alcoholism, but the general mindset was that if individuals wanted to stop drinking alcohol, that was within their control, and so you know this, this was a hard decision that they arrived at over time, but I think it's important for us to try to understand rum as it was experienced by the people living in that world, and not associate kind of different kind of health definitions than what they would have, would have had. That being said, there were a lot of advocates at various points in the 17th and especially the 18th century, who advocated for some form of temperance, who advocated for, you know, the Mathers, the famous kind of preachers likened rum to the Dead Sea, and they use that. I think it's a great metaphor. There are Indigenous prophets like Neolin in what's now western Pennsylvania, who advocates for Native people to give up rum, among other colonial products. There are in kind of the era of the American Revolution, and especially in the aftermath of the American Revolution, there are doctors like Benjamin Rush, who think that rum, in particular, if we think about that moral thermometer, is damaging to people's health. There are also people who recognize, especially in the generation after the American Revolution, that rum might not entirely fit within a society that is abolishing slave trade, or ideally slavery. And so there are several moral movements going on, but the one that you alluded to in your question also involves rum, like sugar, being a part of an anti slavery campaign, of anti slavery protests where people realize that their purchasing power might end kind of a community's relationships to slavery, and so they give up sugar and rum. And I think a lot of times we hear about the anti saccharin movement, but until I got kind of knee deep in this project, I didn't really think much about the role of rum in that movement. And it honestly, in some ways, rum is the perfect target for these sorts of anti consumption campaigns, because they're seen it's seen as luxuries, and it's seen as as kind of an add on, not something that's integral to somebody's diet. And so again, like in this moment, where a variety of people often kind of being pushed by enslaved people themselves, are thinking about ways to end kind of an American reliance on the slave trade and on slavery. A variety of different campaigns throughout the world the globe are undertaken to try to find alternative sources of rum. And so you alluded to India, where kind of early colonization efforts in parts of the Indian subcontinent involved setting up what were considered free labor plantations, and then kind of centralized distilleries where rum could be made. There were also attempts to create free labor plantations in a place like Sierra Leone, which was a site of kind of recolonization of people formerly enslaved people in the Americas. And they also experiment, and this is the one that that is one of my favorite stories to tell. They experiment with trying to produce rum out of maple sugar in as it's sometimes referred to as the sugar bushes of North America. And so places like Northern Pennsylvania and New York areas like Cooperstown, New York today. And so I'm interested in these attempts to kind of think about a commodity that many people saw as problematic but weren't sure that they could do without, and to find alternative ways to produce it, unreliant on slave labor. The short answer is they found it really hard to produce a rum that tasted right, like rum that looked like rum that cost, that low price, that rum cost without relying on coerced labor.

Kelly Therese Pollock  31:29  
Was anyone trying to use sugar beets? Because I remember reading about abolitionists who were thinking, you know, like that might be a way to get sugar, but I don't know if you could possibly make rum from that.

Dr. Jordan B. Smith  31:41  
So I am not an expert on sugar beets. This is a recommendation that I had at one point to think about sugar beets. My recollection is that sugar beets were a little bit like, really kind of hit the mainstream, a little bit later than things like maple sugar and even free labor sugar. I don't see that in the abolitionist movement, at least of what I read in the 1790s, but I would imagine at some point, people wondered whether sugar beets could be used to make alcohol. But there are other examples. People thought about replacing sugar with an army of honey bees, for instance. And I again, like this is kind of pursuing a counterfactual. But I think some of what distinguished these alternative plans, this commodity substitution that caught on even a little bit, and the commodity substitution that didn't catch on, was the question of whether there was an analog to rum available as well.

Kelly Therese Pollock  32:39  
So we've talked about different groups of people who consumed rum. One of the major groups, of course, is the British military, especially the British Navy. I can't believe this, but at one point they were getting as rations, up to a pint a day from that is a lot of rum. Could you talk a little bit about what's going on here? Why? Why is the British Navy so reliant on rum, and how does that actually itself influence the rum trade?

Dr. Jordan B. Smith  33:06  
This is something that I never would have thought would become such a prominent part of the book, even when I wrote the dissertation. And I would say that in the dissertation, the rum ration was dispensed with in a couple of sentences in the conclusion, and I got a lot of comments, including from people like my father, on how interested they were in the rum ration. And I also had kind of people pushing me, like experts, pushing me to think about how the rum ration kind of connects the British state and the British kind of Imperial apparatus to the rum business, because the British Navy quickly became the largest single purchaser of rum. And so if you kind of put yourself in the position of naval administrators and naval leaders, a couple of things were going on in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. One is that there's a long history, not just a European history, but also a Western African history of people expecting alcohol from whoever was requiring work of them. And again, like alcohol being a part of daily society for many people. And so customarily, the British Navy would have been closer to Europe, would have only been kind of going to sea for maybe a couple of weeks at a time, and would be supplying with maybe ale, maybe wine, but often ale like something that's kind of bulky, more locally produced, also very prone to spoilage. And so by the early and especially the mid 18th century, the British Navy has become, in some ways, arguably, a global fleet. They're spending far longer at sea than they ever have before, which creates supply issues, both in terms of how much you can fit on the ship, and how prone to spoilage it is. And a lot of the Navy's hours were being spent in the in the western Atlantic, in the Caribbean, and to a certain extent, off of the coast of North America. And then sailors in those communities, when they were at shore were finding rum on their own. And again, there was a lot written about perhaps that was problematic, getting back to this point of a lot of kind of conversations about who should be drinking and in what quality, quantities, and in what contexts. So there are all of these different reasons why rum kind of intersects with the Navy, but starting in the 1730s and becoming more and more formalized over the rest of the 18th century and into the 19th century, the British Navy makes the decision to supply with rum, often produced by British plantations. But ultimately, sometimes by the 19th century, some of that rum was even being produced outside of the empire. And so sometimes people talked, especially in the 19th century, about how this was like a planter's monopoly, and wondered why, maybe whiskey, or especially gin, which was another kind of cheaper distillate often made in London or in Britain, couldn't kind of fulfill this, this role, but the British Navy seems to have kind of regularly doubled down on their investment in rum. I think, again, thinking about this as individual stories, I think some of that has to do with sailors asking for rum and the Navy's rum ration, the fact that they aged the rum, which makes it slightly more healthy, because any lead particles in the rum sunk to the bottom. It was they were trying to kind of control how was rum was being consumed. The other part of this puzzle, I believe, is that the British Navy was most present in the Caribbean during times of war, when it was harder to move rum and sugar to the markets that normally consumed them, and that had a negative effect on individual planters who were relying on that trade to pay their bills at the end of the year. And so something else that was happening is the rum ration made sure to infuse, continue to infuse, money or capital into these rum producing parts of the empire, even in times of warfare. So the rum ration actually makes the British government an investor in rum production and all that that entails.

Kelly Therese Pollock  37:17  
And then, of course, sometimes they brought the rum back home, and, you know, get more audiences interested in rum.

Dr. Jordan B. Smith  37:25  
Absolutely. And, and that's there are I read, like sailors' diaries to get at some of those points, songs of of kind of musicians like Charles Dibdin, where kind of rum becomes kind of part of of this experience of being a sailor. And it's it's hard sometimes to figure out why people decided to drink what they did. They don't always have much of a reason to write that down. But I would agree, right? Like this is a world where not just kind of, the British Navy is in transit, but people who are in transit are bringing different ideas together, bringing different tastes together in places that they wouldn't have been a generation prior.

Kelly Therese Pollock  38:04  
There is a lot more in this book. It's a fascinating story. Could you tell listeners how they can get a copy?

Dr. Jordan B. Smith  38:11  
Absolutely. So "The Invention of Rum" should be available wherever you choose to buy your books. You can buy it through the University of Pennsylvania Press website. You can buy it at a local bookstore. It's also available through kind of Amazon as soon as probably 24 hours from now.

Kelly Therese Pollock  38:30  
Is there anything else that you would like to make sure we talk about? 

Dr. Jordan B. Smith  38:33  
One thing that I'm very aware of right now is that we are talking about a history of rum that includes both kind of stories that would sound tragic, of kind of the brutality of plantation production, places where kind of people did terrible things to each other. And that is an undeniable part of the history of rum. The other thing that's an undeniable history, I believe, of the history of rum and the invention of rum is that I am telling a story of innovation and ingenuity in a part of the world that we don't always think about innovation taking place. And so both for historians, but also as we kind of think about the world and kind of intellectual trajectories of the world, I think It's important to kind of recognize the Caribbean as this cradle or birthplace of something that really caught on. And I would argue that if we miss either piece of that story, we get the wrong idea about the early modern world. The other thing I would note is that I'm talking about this several weeks after a devastating hurricane hit Jamaica, and it kind of centered on St. Elizabeth Parish, which is where I believe the largest producer of rum in Jamaica, Appleton Estate is produced. And so I have been thinking a lot about what I what I have to offer those communities in need, and I would encourage others, especially fans of rum, to do the same.

Kelly Therese Pollock  40:00  
Great, and I will put in the show notes some links to places where people can donate to help the people of Jamaica. Jordan. Thank you so much for speaking with me. This was really great conversation. 

Dr. Jordan B. Smith  40:11  
Thank you. 

Teddy  40:27  
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