Book Review
Title: A History of the World in Six Glasses by Tom Standage
Genre: Non-Fiction, History, Society
Rating: 4.5 Stars
As the title suggests this book aims to tell the history of the world through the way drinks have developed over time. This combined archaeology with societal evolution. The first drink we look at is beer, surprisingly water doesn’t appear at all in this book, which originated in Mesopotamia and Egypt which was a little disappointing since us, British, have a love of the stuff. Beer was seemingly created by accident and circumstance. Circumstance due to an overabundance of the cereal grains required and the storage process led to fermentation by accident.
People soon realised that this fermentation grain could be drunk and produced a pleasant sensation. It also had the upside of being more difficult to contaminate than water making the primary drink of choice. However, this doesn’t mean these people were drunk all the time because they fermented the beer for less time making it weaker than current beer due to problems with storing the beer for longer periods of time. There are several depictions of Egyptians drinking beer through long straws and this is because the drink couldn’t be filtered well and sediment from the grains floated on the top so straws provided a way to drink without swallowing this. It also has a cultural reason since drinking from the same vessel as someone else showed trust because it made it clear that drink wasn’t poisoned. Our modern cheers or clinking glasses comes from this traditional of showing respect as originally people would bring their vessels together with more force mixing the drinks of two people together showing to each other that their drinks were safe to consume.
Beer was also the reason for writing being created to track the trade of beer since it was also the first form of currency, specifically wages. Since both bread and beer were made from the same grains many people in Egypt and Mesopotamia were paid in rations of bread and beer as well as women and children being given a daily ration. Writing was linked to this to keep track of who was owed what since there was no physical money like today and the entire societies relied on a barter system. Beer also had the side effect of creating some of the first permanent settlements to be there for the grain harvest and to prevent the beer being stolen or tampered with.
The second drink we look at is wine which many people primarily associate with the Greeks and Romans. While the Greeks weren’t the investors/creators of wine, they are the ones that made wine a social drink. Greeks used wine drinking session to discuss politics and many other relevant topics of the time. These sessions were academic in nature and the wine itself was watered down, since undiluted wine drinking was seen as barbaric. The Romans took this even further turned wine into a status symbol as they made sure that the best wines and vintages were reserved for the elite class with the quality of the wine decreasing with social class. This way of consuming wine still exists today with some wines being seen as more upper class than others and being reserved for special events. Following the fall of Rome, wine continued to be a social status since the distribution was affected prompting many countries to return to beer or mead as the drink of choice.
The next drink we look at is spirits, specifically those like rum favoured by sailors and pirates. The drinks we look at are primarily rum, whiskey and brandy and all of these drinks were used in the sugar and slave trades of the time. While the process of distilling was known around the world at the time, it had only been applied to medicines and perfumes rather than consumable drinks. With wine and beer prone to soiling over long journeys and most water being contaminated; distilling was used on wines to preserve them but in the process, brandy was created. This drink was used as a form of currency like beer, to buy slaves as well as other goods. These fortified drinks also became the drink of choice for sailors. These drinks were often mixed with water and lime juice, which prevented scurvy meaning the sailors were healthier than their counterparts that still preferred wine or beer. The way these drinks were used in not only the development of the sugar and slave trades as well as the journey to American Independence was fascinating.
The next drink is one of my favourites and that is coffee. Coffee has become synonymous with the Age of Reason where scientific thought and influence exploded around the globe. This was primarily due to the fact it had the opposite effect to alcohol on the body and became the drink of free thinkers and revolutionists. Coffee originally comes from Arabia where it was the drink of choice since the consumption of alcohol was prohibited. While these countries did try to keep coffee growing a secret because the demand was high and it was good trade for them, it ultimately feel into the hands of others. Many realised that coffee needed a similar environment to sugar to thrive and they already owned or controlled many of these lands. This led to a rise in the production and availability of coffee which transformed coffee houses into social places for intellectual discussions. Even people like Christopher Wren were frequent visitors to the coffeehouses in Oxford. Cafes played an even bigger role in Paris, since one of these cafes was the setting for the beginning of the French Revolution.
The next drink was touched upon in the spirits chapter with the Boston Tea Party, but we are diving deeper into tea now. Tea is something closely tied with the British identity, but it has a far darker past than I had expected. Tea was solely shipped out of China for the longest time because it was the only known region where tea could grow in large quantities. As the drink became popular in Britian, the East India Trading Company created a monopoly on the tea trade into the country, but it was an expensive job, since the Chinese would only accept gold or silver as payment because there wasn’t anything else they needed outside trade for. However, as tea’s popularity continued to rise, it was becoming difficult to get the amount of gold or silver required to purchase the tea. The Company used the production of opium in India as another form of payment, meaning the British were solely responsible for the opium epidemic that led to the fall of China. Along these lines, it was also around the time that China was crumbling under opium that tea was found growing in the Assam region of India which was already under British colonial rule meaning we no longer had a need to trade with China.
The final chapter focuses on cola, specifically Coca-Cola, which is the most iconic drink of this century in my opinion. It is true that Coca-Cola is one of the most iconic drinks of all time, but many might not know it began its life as a quack medicine sold to mainly adult market. However, when taxes were going to be brought in on these medicines, coke rebranded itself as a drink to avoid them and found its true market potential. Rather than selling bottled drinks, coke sold the syrup to places that had soda fountains to offer their drink to the public. Coke had a monopoly on this market for a while until PepsiCola was taken over and followed Coke’s example but sold larger drinks for the same price. This rivalry between the company held Coke accountable when many other companies were not since global brands are seen differently. In the early day, Coke was solely in America but with the outbreak of the WW1 and WW2, coke sent itself overseas where it found an even greater market but itself battle with Pepsi continued even today it can still be seen.
Overall, these drinks are something we take for granted without thinking about the history behind these drinks that are still carried today. Things like beer and spirits are associated with certain times in history, alongside this wine and tea are associated with specific regions in the world but we don’t think about the blood, sweat and tears that went into creating a lot of these like coke. The book itself was an interesting read and presented some information that people might be familiar with like the Boston Tea Party, but most of this information is not well known in my opinion.
Buy it here:
Paperback/Hardcover: amazon.co.uk amazon.com
Kindle Edition: amazon.co.uk amazon.com
Comments