The History of Rum

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[SPEAKER_01]: This is Unsung History, the podcast where we discuss people and events in American history that haven't always received a lot of attention.

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[SPEAKER_01]: I'm your host, Kelly Theresa Pollock.

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[SPEAKER_01]: 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.

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[SPEAKER_01]: Be sure to subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app so you never

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[SPEAKER_01]: 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

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[SPEAKER_01]: The Portuguese had held the island for a while, previously, and before them, the Spanish had added it to their maps.

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[SPEAKER_01]: And of course, various groups of indigenous people had lived there on and off for centuries.

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[SPEAKER_01]: The English stayed, enslaving indigenous people, and growing crops on the island, including tobacco, cotton, and sugar cane.

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[SPEAKER_01]: The process of refining sugar from sugar cane left behind waste products, including molasses.

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[SPEAKER_01]: And over time, the people of Barbados began to ferment the sugar waste, turning it into alcohol.

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[SPEAKER_01]: They were hardly the first people to ferment the waste of the sugar cane and it was a time of experimentation on the island

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[SPEAKER_01]: including cassava, sweet potatoes, and palm sap.

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[SPEAKER_01]: By the 1640s, they were taking the process a step further and distilling the fermented alcohol in a still.

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[SPEAKER_01]: In distillation, the fermented alcohol is heated.

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[SPEAKER_01]: The boiling point of potable alcohol is lower than the boiling point of water.

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[SPEAKER_01]: So the alcoholic vapors can be separated out, captured, and then condensed.

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[SPEAKER_01]: The end result of distillation, usually after several passes through a still, is to produce a liquid with a higher alcohol content.

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[SPEAKER_01]: Today, Mount Gays silver, for instance, is 40% alcohol by volume, or 80 proof.

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[SPEAKER_01]: which is much more alcoholic than is possible through fermentation alone.

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[SPEAKER_01]: In the 1640s, the distillers would not have been able to measure the ABV so accurately.

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[SPEAKER_01]: Instead relying on measures like pasting, 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.

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[SPEAKER_01]: By distilling the fermented sugary wash, for Baitians created what we now know as rum, although they weren't yet calling it that.

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[SPEAKER_01]: Would start it 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.

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[SPEAKER_01]: By 1651, a resident of Barbados wrote about the drink, when she described as, quote, a hot, hellish and terrible liquor, on quote, calling it rumbullion and killed devil.

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[SPEAKER_01]: Another source called it rumbushgin.

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[SPEAKER_01]: Not surprisingly, the name was quickly shortened to Rome.

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[SPEAKER_01]: A term in use in Barbados and North America by the mid-1650s.

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[SPEAKER_01]: By the late 1680s, Barbados was exporting 1.4 million liters of from annually, making up more than a quarter of the island's exports,

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[SPEAKER_01]: It didn't take long for this industry to spread to other places.

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[SPEAKER_01]: 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.

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[SPEAKER_01]: Barbedians and the people they enslaved had a Jamaica, along with the equipment they needed to distill Rome.

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[SPEAKER_01]: By the late 1680s, Jamaica was exporting over 24,000 liters of from annually.

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[SPEAKER_01]: Far short, the volume of Barbedian exports, but impressively quick growth of the industry.

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[SPEAKER_01]: 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.

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[SPEAKER_01]: A century later, just one of Philadelphia's 14 distilleries was distilling more than 17,000 gallons of molasses annually.

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[SPEAKER_01]: Philadelphia was only the fourth largest distilling center in British North America at the time, after Boston, Newport, in New York City.

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[SPEAKER_01]: 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, quote, have pint of rum per man every day, unquote.

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[SPEAKER_01]: That was just minimum.

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[SPEAKER_01]: In some states,

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[SPEAKER_01]: Rum was so important to the revolutionary cause that a Connecticut distillery owner petitioned for Cooper's and a distiller to be released from military duty so that they could help provide the rum.

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[SPEAKER_01]: American distillers were not producing rum just for soldiers, though.

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[SPEAKER_01]: Around 22% of North American rum in 1770 was exported to West Africa, as part of the slave trade.

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[SPEAKER_01]: In a typical voyage, a distiller might send a ship full of rum to West Africa.

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[SPEAKER_01]: Along the way, they would trade some of the rum with other slave traders, for wares like weapons, tobacco, textiles and beads.

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[SPEAKER_01]: 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.

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[SPEAKER_01]: Starting on January 1, 1808, the United States outlawed the importation of enslaved people from

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[SPEAKER_01]: at least legally.

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[SPEAKER_01]: Although some illegal transatlantic slave trading certainly continued after that date.

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[SPEAKER_01]: 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 233.

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[SPEAKER_01]: a Philippine company founded in 1854.

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[SPEAKER_01]: In 2024, Tondue sold 23.8 million cases of rum, which was over 4 million cases more than its next closest competitor, Bacardi.

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[SPEAKER_01]: Within the US market though, Bacardi, which was founded in Cuba, but it's now

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[SPEAKER_01]: Joining me in this episode is Dr. Jordan Beesmith, Associate Professor of History at Widener University, and to author of The Invention of Rum, creating the quintessential Atlantic commodity.

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[SPEAKER_01]: Hi, Jordan.

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[SPEAKER_01]: Thanks so much for joining me today.

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[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, thanks for having me.

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[SPEAKER_01]: I want to start by asking how you first got into this project deciding to write about, wrong, I'm sure you spent many years of your life thinking and writing about, wrong.

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[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, so I think long-term projects sometimes have multiple origin points.

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[SPEAKER_02]: 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.

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[SPEAKER_02]: wrote a senior thesis that looked at taverns in Port Royal Jamaica with the belief that kind of looking at these spaces were different groups of people interacted and spent time with people of different political bands of different kind of class status race gender.

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[SPEAKER_02]: There was something unique we could find out about the Atlantic world through that sort of

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[SPEAKER_02]: 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 ramen and things like it touched the lives of almost everybody who lived in the Atlantic world.

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[SPEAKER_02]: 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 dissillary there.

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[SPEAKER_02]: And after spending a lot of time making alcohol, trying to do my hand at making different things through historic trades, I came to realize that just about everything has a history of expertise

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[SPEAKER_02]: So those two things carried with me into graduate school where I became even more enamored with Debarkival research, which is the basis of this project.

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[SPEAKER_01]: Let's talk about that piece then.

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[SPEAKER_01]: What are some of the archives that you are visiting?

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[SPEAKER_01]: What are the kinds of sources that you're able to look at?

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[SPEAKER_01]: And of course, some of the people you're writing about don't leave archives, but you're able to get out their stories.

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[SPEAKER_02]: 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 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

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[SPEAKER_02]: 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 and a lot of different archives.

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[SPEAKER_02]: And so I've spent time in archives in...

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[SPEAKER_02]: Jamaica and Barbados throughout the United States, as well as England, Wales and Scotland.

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[SPEAKER_02]: And there's not one archive that forms the basis of this project.

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[SPEAKER_02]: I like to think that this project would look similar.

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[SPEAKER_02]: 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.

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[SPEAKER_02]: And so some of those documents are letters, a lot of times distilleries were owned, especially in the Caribbean by absentee owners of plantations.

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[SPEAKER_02]: And so things would be kind of written in those letters, sometimes details about individual people would be written in those letters.

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[SPEAKER_02]: It involves looking at documents that tried to reduce people to commodities, including inventories of the states, where sometimes there are short references to the expertise possessed by

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[SPEAKER_02]: same thing with some business records from North American distilleries and British distilleries as well 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.

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[SPEAKER_02]: And the archive does a lot of good for this project, I think, and kind of helps me tell the stories out the story of individual people making choices to determining how they're going to engage or not engage with rum.

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[SPEAKER_02]: But it's not enough on its own, and so I pride myself on some of the material culture work.

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[SPEAKER_02]: 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

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[SPEAKER_02]: involves looking at songs and other kind of pieces of culture that didn't tell us a story of kind of rum's place in society.

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[SPEAKER_01]: You read 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 wrong, but like whiskey and gin and you know, I assume it's very different now than it was back then.

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[SPEAKER_01]: So could you talk a little bit about.

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[SPEAKER_01]: 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.

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[SPEAKER_02]: I'm really happy that you picked up on this theme of danger kind of throughout and kind of almost largely the violence of commodity production because I think it's really in a role to the book in its entirety.

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[SPEAKER_02]: 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.

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[SPEAKER_02]: And part of that, of course, is the people conducting the work.

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[SPEAKER_02]: Some of those people conducting the work were kind of working in the kind of king fields of the Caribbean in very dangerous conditions, both because of the diseases that festered in the Caribbean in the tropics, but also being kind of expected to work son up to sundown under coercion threat of physical harm.

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[SPEAKER_02]: The distillers 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.

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[SPEAKER_02]: And so these became sites of disasters with an alarming frequency.

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[SPEAKER_02]: And I talk about that in the book.

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[SPEAKER_02]: And I would agree, yes, there are examples of formerly enslaved people who did not want to seek out this work outside of slavery.

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[SPEAKER_02]: 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.

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[SPEAKER_01]: 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.

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[SPEAKER_01]: Did you talk a little bit about that piece and were you surprised by that?

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[SPEAKER_01]: 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?

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[SPEAKER_02]: So I was not expecting that.

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[SPEAKER_02]: I think when I started the project, I worked with one of the professors who I worked with as an environmental historian, J.R. McKinill, and I took classes with him where I came to think about how the environment was more of a presence than we sometimes think about in kind of historical decision-making and the advent of commodities and colonies and things like that.

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[SPEAKER_02]: And I would also add that a project that's the thing about a commodity like Rome is thinking a lot about the materiality of the world of the early modern world.

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[SPEAKER_02]: And so what people were touching, what they were tasting, just everything that they were surrounded by.

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[SPEAKER_02]: And so these, I think that environmental history and commodity history is actually fit together really well.

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[SPEAKER_02]: And that's something that I came to appreciate as I was working on this project.

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[SPEAKER_02]: From the start, from kind of dissertation to book, there was always kind of an emphasis in my writing and in my research process, into how the environment was shaping human choices.

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[SPEAKER_02]: I think that 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.

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[SPEAKER_02]: And I was really, you know, again, I was shaped by other things I was reading, including kind of Katherine Johnson's work and Katherine Oliveris's work.

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[SPEAKER_02]: But I was struck that people in the early modern period thought a lot about the environment, wrote about the environment, had ideas about what their actions were doing to the environment more than I might have realized.

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[SPEAKER_02]: 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 seated islands, after the

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[SPEAKER_02]: to preserve some woodlands because it was thought that would preserve kind of a rainfall for plantation icons.

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[SPEAKER_02]: And so there are these moments where there are paths not taken, that show 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.

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[SPEAKER_02]: And so I think that that became, that that surprised me.

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[SPEAKER_02]: And again, I was building a lot of other people's work who had kind of studied these things.

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[SPEAKER_02]: But I think kind of the peace 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 distillers and plantation distillers, but also was unique to urban production and distillers in a place like Philadelphia, which is another kind of case study that I use.

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[SPEAKER_02]: like it allowed me to think a little bit about why people were making the decisions that they were.

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[SPEAKER_02]: 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 individuals shaping the history of the places that they lived.

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[SPEAKER_01]: mentioned a lot of people when they think about Rome think about the Caribbean for obvious reasons, but you're writing about distilleries at least all over really the Atlantic world.

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[SPEAKER_01]: And one of the things that was striking is the ways in which the American Revolution kind of cut off

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[SPEAKER_01]: the United States, you know, it's no longer part of the British Empire and suddenly doesn't have a strong of a position in rum creation, you know, there are lots of other reasons and things going on, of course.

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[SPEAKER_01]: But, you know, as American who grew up on stories about had the revolution is great, you know, 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.

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[SPEAKER_01]: But you read about the ways that at least in that industry and the run industry, you know, there are challenges after they break away from the British Empire, wonder if you could talk some about that.

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[SPEAKER_02]: And I'm really glad that you picked up on one of the themes of the book diversifying how we think about the history of Rome.

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[SPEAKER_02]: That it's not just a Caribbean history, but it's a history that ties together a different regions of the Atlantic world, including West Africa, Western Europe, and also as you suggested British North America.

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[SPEAKER_02]: And so, you know, that's really kind of at the heart of the project, and I do detail as much as I tang through the sources, the ways in which a disruption of trade and 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.

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[SPEAKER_02]: 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.

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[SPEAKER_02]: 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.

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[SPEAKER_02]: Even during the American Revolution, an argument can be made at the kind of army, and it's more than an argument.

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[SPEAKER_02]: The kind of army was partially being fueled by rum rashes, and so rum was integral to the American project of independence.

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[SPEAKER_02]: That being said, Rome's role did change as kind of Americans had to seek out new sources for foreign molasses.

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[SPEAKER_02]: Sometimes, you know, they were already relying on trade with kind of French Caribbean islands like San Domingue, which would eventually become Haiti.

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[SPEAKER_02]: But they also kind of seek out new connections with islands like with merchants and islands like Guantaloupe, but eventually Cuba as well.

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[SPEAKER_02]: So,

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[SPEAKER_02]: There are long-standing interpretations that perhaps when Americans were throwing tea into Boston Harbor, they were also foregoing their relationship to Rome, but that, I think that process

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[SPEAKER_02]: happened a lot more slowly than we might think.

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[SPEAKER_02]: And even by the pure numbers, the wrong industry largely recovers after the American Revolution.

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[SPEAKER_02]: And it's really the cessation of the slave trade, the centralized slave trade in 1807, where we start to see the decline of American distillers.

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[SPEAKER_02]: Though the market share of wrong vis-à-vis things like whiskey had already started to shift a little bit.

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[SPEAKER_02]: 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.

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[SPEAKER_02]: They sometimes sought out different ways to make the rum, even using something like maple a syrup to make the rum, but they were committed to kind of maintaining kind of

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[SPEAKER_01]: 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 ramen at all, or, you know, that we should be less reliant on run.

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[SPEAKER_01]: And then when you get to the part where you're talking about abolitionists and thinking, well, rum is so dependent on enslaved labor.

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[SPEAKER_01]: And how can we support this product that is coming from

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[SPEAKER_01]: enslaved labor, and as you know, was part of the slave trade itself, which leads to lots of interesting ways of sort of justifying or getting around.

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[SPEAKER_01]: I was fascinated to learn that there was rum production in India that had just never crossed my mind.

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[SPEAKER_01]: Could you talk to them about this, in general, this idea of moralizing around from thinking about the ethics of rum, but then also especially this production of rum in India?

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[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I would start by saying that people in the really modern world 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 representing a series of relationships that led to kind of the good existing.

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[SPEAKER_02]: Of course, Rome has kind of a unique physical effect on people when it's consumed because it's alcoholic.

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[SPEAKER_02]: And so to kind of move this way back to kind of earlier in the book, one of the points that I make is that the advent of Rome and the advent of cheap and readily available distilled spirits, a highly concentrated alcohol,

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[SPEAKER_02]: was something that people were on a custom to tip, and so the very idea of kind of a neibriation being available for less money and in more places cause a lot of people to panic about who might be drinking rom and in what kind.

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[SPEAKER_02]: And so early in the book, I make an attempt to connect want and 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 to what's often referred to as the gin craze, but the rather distilled spirits that argue were central to that.

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[SPEAKER_02]: I would argue in part moral panic in,

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[SPEAKER_02]: And so, in all of these different places, one of the questions is how should people be consuming alcohol?

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[SPEAKER_02]: Who should be able to consume alcohol?

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[SPEAKER_02]: What does it mean when people drink to what some people consider to be excess?

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[SPEAKER_02]: And so all of those stories can get this question of the morality of drinking.

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[SPEAKER_02]: 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?

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[SPEAKER_02]: It wasn't neutral who elites were saying, shoulders should not be drinking alcohol.

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[SPEAKER_02]: And so I think understanding this broader context is important so that we don't replicate some of these ideas that certain people are particularly prone to alcoholism.

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[SPEAKER_02]: The other thing I would say about what some we 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.

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[SPEAKER_02]: And so, you know, this was a hard decision that, hey, arrived at it for a time, but I think it's important for us to try to understand Rome 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 had.

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[SPEAKER_02]: That being said, there were a lot of advocates at various points in the 17th, especially the 18th century, who advocated for some form of temperance, who advocated for, you know, the matters, the famous kind of preachers, like in Dram to the Dead Sea.

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[SPEAKER_02]: And they use that, that I think it's a great metaphor.

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[SPEAKER_02]: There are indigenous prophets like Newland in what's now Western Pennsylvania who advocates for native people to give up a rum among other colonial products.

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[SPEAKER_02]: There are in kind of the era of the American Revolution, especially in the aftermath of the American Revolution.

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[SPEAKER_02]: There are doctors like Benjamin Rush who think that rum in particular, if we think about that

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[SPEAKER_02]: There are also people who recognize, especially in the generation after the American Revolution, that rum might not entirely fit within a society and is abolishing slave trade or ideally slavery.

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[SPEAKER_02]: 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.

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[SPEAKER_02]: of anti-slavery protests, where people realize that they're purchasing power might end in a community's relationships to slavery, and so they give up sugar and ramen.

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[SPEAKER_02]: I think a lot of times we hear about the anti-saccharine 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.

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[SPEAKER_02]: And honestly, in some ways, rum is the perfect target for these sorts of

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[SPEAKER_02]: and it's seen as as kind of an add on not something that's in a row of somebody's diet.

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[SPEAKER_02]: 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 non-slavery, a variety of different campaigns throughout the world.

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[SPEAKER_02]: The globe are undertaken to try to find alternative sources of rock.

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[SPEAKER_02]: And so you alluded to India where kind of early colonization efforts in parts of the Indian subcontinent involved setting up what we're considered free labor plantations and then kind of centralized distilleries where rom 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 incite to people in the Americas.

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[SPEAKER_02]: And they also experiment and this is the one that is one of my favorite stories to tell.

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[SPEAKER_02]: They experiment with trying to produce from out of maple sugar in as it's sometimes referred to as the sugar bushes of North America.

30:55.775 --> 31:01.245
[SPEAKER_02]: So places like Northern Pennsylvania and New York air is like Cooper-Stown, New York today.

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[SPEAKER_02]: 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 on reliant on slave labor.

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[SPEAKER_02]: The short answer is they found it really hard to produce a rum that tasted like rum that looked

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[SPEAKER_01]: was anyone trying to use sugar beats because I remember reading about abolitionists who are 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.

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[SPEAKER_02]: So I am not an expert on sugar beats.

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[SPEAKER_02]: This is a recommendation that I had at one

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[SPEAKER_02]: My recollection is that sugar beats 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.

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[SPEAKER_02]: I don't see that in the abolition movement.

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[SPEAKER_02]: At least of what I read in the 1790s, but I would imagine at some point people wondered whether sugar beats could be used to make alcohol.

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[SPEAKER_02]: But there are other examples.

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[SPEAKER_02]: People thought about replacing sugar with an army of honeybees, for instance.

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[SPEAKER_02]: And again, like this is kind of pursuing a counterfactual, but I think it's all 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

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[SPEAKER_01]: So we've talked about different groups of people who consumed from one of the major groups, of course, is the British military, especially the British Navy.

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[SPEAKER_01]: I can't believe this, but at one point they were getting as Russians up to a pint a day from that is a lot of from, could you talk a little bit about what's going on here, why is the British Navy so reliant on rum and how does that actually itself influence the rum trade?

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[SPEAKER_02]: This is something that I never would have thought would become such a prominent part of the book, even when I wrote the dissertation.

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[SPEAKER_02]: And I would say that in the dissertation, the rum russian was dispensed with in a couple of sentences in the conclusion.

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[SPEAKER_02]: And I got a lot of comments including from people like my father on how interested they were in the rum russian.

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[SPEAKER_02]: 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.

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[SPEAKER_02]: And so, if you kind of put yourself in the position of naval administrators and naval leaders, a couple of things we're going on in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, one is that there's a long history, not just in a European history, but also an Western African history of people expecting alcohol from whoever was requiring work of them.

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[SPEAKER_02]: And again, like alcohol being a part of daily society for many people.

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[SPEAKER_02]: And so, customarily, the British Navy would've been closer to Europe, but it would've only been kind of going to see for maybe a couple of weeks at a time, and it would be supplying with maybe AL, maybe wine, but often AL, like something that's kind of bulky, more locally produced, also very prone to spoil it.

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[SPEAKER_02]: And so by the early and especially the mid-18th century, the British Navy has become in some ways that are arguably global fleet.

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[SPEAKER_02]: 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.

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[SPEAKER_02]: in a lot of the navy's hours were being spent in the western Atlantic in the Caribbean and to a certain extent of the coast of North America.

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[SPEAKER_02]: And then sailors in those communities when they were at shore were finding rum on their own.

35:12.360 --> 35:22.116
[SPEAKER_02]: 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 in what quality, quantities, and what contexts.

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[SPEAKER_02]: So there are all of these different reasons why Rome kind of intersects with the Navy.

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[SPEAKER_02]: 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 Rome.

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[SPEAKER_02]: often produced by British plantations, but ultimately sometimes by the 19th century some of that rum was even being produced outside of the empire.

35:48.078 --> 36:00.473
[SPEAKER_02]: And so sometimes people talk, especially in the 19th century about how this was like a planter's monopoly and wondered why maybe whiskey or especially Jan, which was another kind of cheaper distillate, but

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[SPEAKER_02]: often made in London, or in Britain, couldn't kind of fulfill this role, but the British Navy seems to have kind of regularly doubled down on their investment in rock.

36:13.335 --> 36:19.525
[SPEAKER_02]: I think again, thinking about this as individual stories, I think some of that has to do with sailors asking for rock.

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[SPEAKER_02]: And the Navy's rum ration, the fact that the age of the rum, which makes it slightly more healthy because any lead particles in the rum sunk to the bottom, they were trying to kind of control how rum was being consumed.

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[SPEAKER_02]: 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 from and sugar to the markets that normally consumed them.

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[SPEAKER_02]: 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.

36:55.820 --> 37:09.315
[SPEAKER_02]: And so something else that was happening is the rum russian made sure to infuse money or capital into these rum producing parts of the empire even in times of warfare.

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[SPEAKER_02]: So the rum russian actually makes the British government uninvestor in rum production and all that that until.

37:18.146 --> 37:24.713
[SPEAKER_01]: And then of course sometimes they brought the rum back home and you know get more audiences

37:25.047 --> 37:25.829
[SPEAKER_02]: Absolutely.

37:25.869 --> 37:32.303
[SPEAKER_02]: And that's, there are, I read like, sailors, diaries to get at, at some of those points.

37:32.323 --> 37:41.503
[SPEAKER_02]: It's songs of kind of musicians like Charles dibden, where kind of rum becomes kind of part of, of this experience of being a sailor.

37:41.737 --> 37:45.982
[SPEAKER_02]: And it's hard sometimes to figure out why people decided to drink what they did.

37:46.002 --> 37:50.648
[SPEAKER_02]: They don't always have much of a reason to write that down, but I would agree, right?

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[SPEAKER_02]: 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.

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[SPEAKER_01]: There is a lot more in this book, it's fascinating story.

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[SPEAKER_01]: Could you tell listeners how they can get a copy?

38:11.335 --> 38:12.056
[SPEAKER_02]: Absolutely.

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[SPEAKER_02]: So the mission from should be available wherever you choose to buy your books.

38:18.046 --> 38:21.332
[SPEAKER_02]: You can buy it through the University of Pennsylvania Press website.

38:21.512 --> 38:23.736
[SPEAKER_02]: You can buy it in a local bookstore.

38:24.256 --> 38:26.761
[SPEAKER_02]: It's also available through Amazon.

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[SPEAKER_02]: As soon as it's probably 24 hours from now.

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[SPEAKER_01]: Is there anything else that you would like to make sure we talk about?

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[SPEAKER_02]: 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.

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[SPEAKER_02]: And that is an undeniable part of the history of rum.

38:57.758 --> 39:11.316
[SPEAKER_02]: The other thing that's an undeniable history, I believe, of the history of Rome and the invention of Rome, 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.

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[SPEAKER_02]: And so both for historians, but also as we kind of think about the world and intellectual trajectories of the world, I think it's important to kind of recognize the Caribbean as this cradle or birthplace of something

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[SPEAKER_02]: And I would argue that if we miss either piece of that story, we get the wrong idea about the early modern world.

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[SPEAKER_02]: 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 San Elizabeth parish, which is where I believe the largest producer of rum in Jamaica, Hamiltonist State 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.

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[SPEAKER_01]: great and I will put in the show notes some links to places where people can donate to help the people of Jamaica.

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[SPEAKER_01]: Jordan, thank you so much for speaking with me.

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[SPEAKER_01]: This was a really great conversation.

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[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you.

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