It takes a while for my crew to appear in the pages of “And a Bottle of Rum: A History of the New World in 10 Cocktails” (Crown, 294 pages, $24) by Wayne Curtis. Although we are nameless when we do show up, we are there, with our “faux primitive statues, the blowfish lamps, the netting, the thatch over the home tiki bar, the Martin Denny albums.”

Indeed, that was the scene at a friend’s house in the 1990s. He was a fine bartender — he did it professionally on the weekends as a second job, even though he made perfectly reasonable money at his first one — and he loved standing behind a bar.I believe he’d take a fair amount of offense at Mr. Curtis’s claim that “Few seem to have embraced the demanding craft of the tiki cocktail.” But when I read Mr. Curtis’s recipes for said cocktails, I realized our daiquiris made from Barbancourt, sugar, and half a lime weren’t exactly in the same league.

Mr. Curtis introduces some major-league rum players. Stephen Remsberg built a thatched roof tiki bar into his New Orleans home in which he has attached “to the walls many linear feet of narrow but tall shelves about the height [and] width of, say, a rum bottle.” Mr. Remsberg told Mr. Curtis that “he had in excess of seven hundred different rums, although he hadn’t taken inventory in some time. And that didn’t include the little airline-sized bottles, of which he had maybe twice as many.”

Owning a set of miniature Easter Island statue cups and a luau cocktail shaker doesn’t put one into contest with people like Mr. Remsberg any more than a quickly broken up shoving match at the local Chili’s puts one in league with Blackbeard, who was said to enjoy a glass of flaming rum mixed with gunpowder. Captain Morgan, Mr. Curtis writes, was not exactly that jaunty pirate smiling so ridiculously from the label of a bottle of bad rum. The namesake of happy hour shenanigans once loosened lips by hoisting recalcitrants, “by their wrists with weights tied to neck and feet while being burned with flaming branches.”

But the dread pirate Ned Low takes the prize, forcing one captive to “eat his own ears freshly sliced from his head and another to eat the freshplucked heart of a fellow sailor.”

The islands, in other words, where the story of rum begins, were a rough place. In Jamaica, “Port Royal had one legal tavern for every ten male residents. In one month — July 1661 — the local council granted forty licenses for new taverns and punch houses,” Mr. Curtis writes. “With its abundance of captured gold, Jamaica was an inviting target for French or Spanish marauders. But a harbor teeming with heavily armed pirate ships manned by predatory seamen greatly reduced the odds of such an attack.”

These islands produced sugar, and sugar was big business. “The population of Barbados swelled from just 80 in 1627 to more than 75,000 in 1650.” This was a boomtown, and also a seriously drunk town. “One visitor marveled that the planters, who spent afternoons indoors drinking spirits and smoking pipes, did not spontaneously combust.”

Wealthy drunkards they may have been, but the planters were clever enough to notice that the byproduct of sugar processing — molasses — was more than just an industrial waste. The planter cum distiller “would turn industrial waste into cash. He began by mixing in a large cistern a liquid mess composed of three ingredients: a blackish scum that rose to the surface during the sugar-boiling process; the dregs remaining in the still after a previous batch (called lees or dunder); and water used to clean out the sugar-boiling pots between batches.” Fermenting in the tropical heat too slow? “Carcasses of dead animals or dung could be tossed in the vats to kick-start a batch.” Yum.

Soon enough rum became a byproduct profitable enough to pay for the entire operation of a plantation, leaving the main product of the plantation, sugar, at 100% profit.

Mr. Curtis follows rum northward, along the trade routes, to the where it helped to foment the American Revolution. He travels with rum along the slave-trade routes, recounts its demonization at the hands of teetotalers, and, all along, colorful anecdotes abound. Consider the Massachusetts liquor dealer who circumnavigated a ban on the sale of liquor in quantities smaller than 15 gallons by painting stripes on a pig: six cents to see the pig, with a complimentary glass of whiskey to aid in your enjoyment.

Through barrooms and boats, via pirates and Trader Vic, we follow. Rum’s popularity flagged around the turn of the century, oddly enough during the heyday of the cocktail, with the invention and exportation of the American bar, which focused on other liquors. During prohibition, with Havana operating more or less as America’s barroom, it made a comeback. And finally the apotheosis: “At heart, the daiquiri is simply a variation of the ageless recipe: one of sour, two of sweet, three of strong, four of weak.” The brilliance of the drink is that the weak is ice.

Single topic histories are to be approached warily. No matter how badly we wish a fish, a liquor, or a woman could provide thread to order the bumblings composing our history, the narrative rarely threads its way much past the dustjacket. Promised a “history of the new world in ten cocktails” a reader should be skeptical — just as he should harbor suspicion of the “enterprising reporter” who in 1962 “tallied the jigger count at a bar near Grand Central Station over the course of a twelve-hour bartending day.” Not a bad beat at all, but self-serving.

Mr. Curtis immersed himself in rum. “Not quite literally, but not far from it.” He awoke “on more than one morning to a dull and distant sort of pain … finding in my pockets unintelligible notes in what appeared to be my own handwriting — ‘Tolstoy/war and peace, window scene rum’ was one.” Sounds like exactly the kind of stretch that foils the single item history. Mr. Curtis had the sense to keep such leaps out of the book. “And a Bottle of Rum” is a history of rum, and it leaves a reader thirsty. Luckily, there are 15 pages of cocktail recipes at the end of the book.

Mr. Watman last wrote for these pages about the American lawn.