Focusing on the lived experiences of British colonists, Indigenous people, and enslaved Africans, The Invention of Rum shows how people engaged in making and consuming this commodity created a new means of profit that transformed the Atlantic world.

Austerity Measures explores how early modern writers used poetry to fight food insecurity. Taking writers’ material conditions into account, Anders M. Greene-Crow recovers the role of one of our most basic needs—the need to eat—within literary criticism, shedding new light on modern-day food ethics and activism’s place in literature.