JCB Reads: Jordan Smith's The Invention of Rum: Creating the Quintessential Atlantic Commodity

JCB Reads offers former JCB fellows the opportunity to share their recent book publications. These online events are open to anyone who is interested. The link to the Zoom meeting will be published a few days before the event takes place on the individual event page. This series was launched during the 2024-5 academic year, and our selections for the 2025-6 academic year have been made and will soon be published on our Events page.

Join us on Thursday, October 16, 2025 at noon EST for a virtual discussion of The Invention of Rum: Creating the Quintessential Atlantic Commodity by Jordan B. Smith (Widener University).

About the book

Marcy Norton writes:

"Beautifully written and deeply researched, The Invention of Rum is at once a history of a commodified beverage and of the Atlantic basin in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Jordan B. Smith evocatively explains how something that had its origins in ‘sugary wastes’ became an incredibly desirable drink and commodity. He also helps us understand the immense changes that transformed the Atlantic world through the interconnected processes of colonization, trade, and plantation slavery that together formed a brutally oppressive and ecologically disastrous system of extraction. No less this book is a history of how people—and their ideas, materials, and technologies—from the Indigenous Caribbean, West Africa, and Europe converged to invent and create rum."

Read more about Professor Smith's book here.