Sugarcane was first cultivated in Papua New Guinea around 4000 BCE. Over thousands of years it travelled west through Asia, into the Mediterranean by the 11th century, and eventually into the hands of five colonial powers — Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, France, and Britain — each of whom shaped rum into something distinct.
Sugar Moves West
By the 1300s the Genoese controlled sugar plantations in southern Spain. Portugal and Spain colonised Madeira and the Canary Islands in the 1400s; a century later the Genoese controlled two-thirds of Madeira's output. The entire apparatus — plantations, stills, enslaved workforce — then moved west to the Caribbean as the transatlantic slave trade took hold. This was one of history's most profitable industries, built entirely on human suffering.
Portuguese Rum
Madeira was the world's biggest sugar exporter by 1500. In 1532 Portugal colonised Brazil with the same ambition — Cachaça emerged from that lineage by the 1620s. Madeira was producing agricultural rum by 1649, one of the earliest recorded examples outside the Caribbean.
Dutch Rum
The Dutch absorbed sugar and rum-making during a 30-year hold on northern Brazil, then carried it into a colonial reach spanning Indonesia, Brazil, New York, and the Dutch West Indies. Amsterdam remains the world's largest supplier of bulk rum to blenders today.
British Rum & the Royal Navy
The Royal Navy issued a daily rum ration for over 300 years, creating consistent Caribbean demand at home and in every port it touched. British colonists were distilling in Barbados from molasses by the 1640s — the oldest continually operating rum distillery in the world traces to 1703. London and Glasgow both became distilling hubs; by the late 1700s, Scots owned roughly a third of Jamaica's plantations.
French Rum & Rhum Agricole
Martinique began distilling from molasses in the 1600s. A ban on rum production in Metropolitan France (protecting wine and cognac) forced Caribbean producers to look elsewhere for markets. The 1902 Mont Pelée eruption destroyed most of Martinique's molasses distilleries overnight — Rhum Agricole, made from fresh cane juice, only consolidated into the style recognised today after World War II.
Spanish Rum
Columbus carried Canary Island cane to the Caribbean in 1493. The Spanish crown banned distilled spirits across its colonies from the 1600s until 1796 — nearly two centuries of restriction while Britain and France pushed ahead. Spanish distilling families, including the Bacardis, migrated to Cuba in the 1800s.
Cuban Rum & the Column Still
Bacardi began distilling in Santiago de Cuba in 1862, pioneering column-still production and charcoal filtering — a lighter, cleaner style much of the industry still follows. US Prohibition sent Americans to Havana's bartender culture; the 1960 Revolution nationalised rum and sent Bacardi into exile in Puerto Rico.
American Rum
By 1770 over 150 rum distilleries operated across New England — briefly the global centre of rum production, until British trade embargoes cut off molasses and America turned to whiskey instead. Prohibition-era liquor law and the bourbon industry's ex-cask supply reshaped rum production worldwide. The US craft distilling boom of the 2010s built the scene as it stands today: the largest rum market in the world.
Rum's past is too diverse to cover in one sitting, and its future is being written by distillers who founded their operations in the last decade. The next chapter is already underway.