A History of the World in 6 Glasses (2005)

Tom Standage has been performing yeoman's work for a long time in terms of illuminating history's continuous connections with the present day. Both this book and The Victorian Internet have good focuses on their respective subjects, but this book, since it's concentrated on beverages, might be of more interest to the generalist, since so much history, as he shows, has revolved around what people have chosen to drink and why.

It's broken up into six main sections:
- Beer in Mesopotamia and Egypt
- Wine in Greece and Rome
- Spirits in the Colonial Period
- Coffee in the Age of Reason
- Tea and the British Empire
- Coca-Cola and the Rise of America

Each is filled with a lot of good historical information on the societies of the era, what they drank, and what that said about them. While I'm far from being a hydraulic determinist, Standage makes good cases for why a drink made a difference in each time period, whether he's talking about how social status determined which wine you got to drink at a Roman drinking party, how the choices of American farmers to distill their grains into whiskey helped Hamilton's plans to empower the federal government, how the greater durability of rum compared to raw sugar helped encourage the slave trade, or how Britain's desperation to improve its terms of trade when buying Chinese tea led to the Opium Wars.

I thought it was very interesting how he brought up that there's still a difference to this day between northern and southern Europe when it comes to national preferences between beer and wine (with a nod to linguistics, maybe we could call this an isoglass?), despite the dramatically lower trading costs inside the EU today compared to the past. Also, he brings up the fact that while all six of the drinks boast of being an alternative to frequently-polluted water, the most important distinction between the first three and the last three is that the former are all alcoholic whereas the latter contain caffeine - perhaps it isn't a coincidence that modern society treats inebriation as a luxury and caffeination as a necessity. What do a society's choices of drinks say about its inhabitants?

I was all set to guess that the drink of the future would be something like an energy drink or a protein shake, something that tried to "improve" people, but Standage makes a good case that it's going to be plain old water, the one liquid that's truly irreplaceable. I can see his point - a huge percentage of humanity lives in areas afflicted by drought, over-irrigation, and continual water scarcity, and though the first world likes to think that the good times will last forever, we can't escape our biological need for the original fluid. We always try to augment or escape ourselves with other drinks, but we always have to come back to water. Perhaps the upward trajectory of humanity as told through our drinks is an illusion, but it's certainly fascinating to read how ancient customs like raising a glass to our drinking companions have endured through the ages. Gilgamesh learned what it meant to be a human through drinking, and many people certainly still feel like they do to this day. This book sheds a lot of light on what's changed and what's stayed the same throughout human history. ( )

Tom Standage takes a walk through history sampling six beverages that helped shape our world. Standage takes on the history of beer, wine, spirits, coffee, tea and soda - Coca Cola in particular. This is both a history of the drinks themselves, and also the social conventions and institutions that grew up around them. He relates the impacts they had on broader events from the adoption of agriculture to the present day. A good light read for history buffs by the digital editor of the Economist. ( )

See my blog post on it:

http://gypsylibrarian.blogspot.com/2006/05/booknote-history-of-world-in-6-glasse... ( )

A History as promised but without any real spark, for me anyway. I have read other not dissimilar analyses - as to how the cultivation of various food and drink stuffs was a strategic element in the expansion of British influence, which made more of an impact. ( )

Breezy read, very fast and enjoyable, offers insight into the broader scope of the beverages we preferred during turning points in civilization. It might attribute too much casual power to those drinks, but they are a good scaffold and lens to look at human history. A lot of neat little tidbits, too.

The only downside is the lack of references, though that's common in this kind of book. I'd like to see a Gleick-like bibliography at the end, as I know some of the information is rounded or overly-summarized. But it works. ( )