The Invention of Rum: Creating the Quintessential Atlantic Commodity by Jordan B. Smith
"Rum was global integration in liquid form, a distillation of the greed, ingenuity, violence, and resilience that organized the early modern Atlantic world. In The Invention of Rum, Jordan B. Smith displays the best of the historian’s craft as he ranges across multiple scholarly fields, revises familiar interpretations, recognizes the complexities of the past, and reckons with the continuities that shape our world today."—Seth Rockman, author of Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery