A History of the World in 6 Glasses

Interesting take on how the development, use, and trade in beer, wine, distilled spirits, coffee, tea, and cola drinks have impacted human history.

Standage casts a wide net here, looking at issues as disparate as health effects on drinkers and international trade policies, social status and the industrial revolution, and medical practice and Madison Avenue. Along the way, he serves up tasty aperitifs about an 870 BCE royal feast that lasted 10 days and provided wine to its 69,000 participants; one possible reason for Islam's prohibition of wine; and how to define "boiling" when referring to water for tea.

The final section of the book, which deals specifically with Coca-Cola, is probably the weakest part. While the background history of show more the development of the drink is fascinating, he doesn't even nod at how the sugar demands for soft drinks have impacted both international politics and public health. He instead takes a look at the Coke/Pepsi competition as Cold War weaponry -- an unexpected turn indeed.

When you finish this book, you may not only want to offer a toast to Standage, but you will also understand just what that gesture means. Salút! show less

"When you next raise some beer, wine, spirits, coffee, tea, or Coca Cola to your lips, think about how it reached you -- across space and time. And remember that it contains more than mere alcohol or caffeine; there is history, too, amid its swirling depths." Coffee is for geniuses, tea will cure every possible ill (but wreak havoc on international relations), and Coke is simulacra. This book's fascinating and fun (and not as cheesy as its conclusion; but mmmm, cheese). It's intriguing to consider politics, economics, technology, and social development through focus on a single (category of) artifact. I enjoyed the audio version.

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 show more 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. show less

Full disclosure: I skipped the chapters about spirits and tea because I had fairly recently read books that covered these topics, and I had no interest in rehashing those histories. Also, I skipped the chapter on soft drinks because I have zero interest in that type of beverage.

So I read about beer, wine, coffee, and of course the epilogue. And it was great! Every part was short and snappy, drawing clear lines between the beverages and the historical events; nothing seemed forced in from left field, and none of it was so detailed that I lost the narrative. It's the type of non-fiction book that you can read at the end of a long day and still find it relaxing. My favorite chapter was about coffee because the coffeehouses sound like a lot show more of fun. I'm going to try to track down "Penny Universities" to read more on these establishments, per the author's suggestion in the notes. show less

Standage uses 6 beverages to highlight major changes in history. These beverages were instrumental in affecting the way of life and, in some cases, helped drive economic and political change. These do not include water although it is covered in the introduction and the last chapter. The beverages covered are beer, wine, spirits, coffee, tea, and coca cola. This is anecdotal history. Whether these beverages had as much impact as Standage would have us believe is debatable, but the study was interesting and I learned quite a bit about the history of each beverage.

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.

I've generally avoided books in the "history of things" category, but this wasn't a bad read. It's well organized: Standage consistently reminds the reader how humanity's needs (for clean water, and later, for pep and energy) shaped its drink preferences. As might be expected from a guy who writes for "The Economist," he also keeps an eye on the implications of these preferences on the global economy. What is perhaps most impressive about the book is the commentary that the author digs up from some very obscure sources, particularly since he's writing about the sort of everyday items that usually get passed over by most commentators. I imagine that it took someone hours of research for someone to glean a few passing sentences about show more coffee, tea, or beer from some long-forgotten Victorian-era newspaper or diary. "A History of the World in Six Glasses" reads like the product of a truly heroic research process. Also of interest: the close association between the American Army and Coca-Cola, particularly during the Second World War, the economics of the tea trade in the British Empire, and the effect of coffee on anti-royalist sentiment in France. This probably would be dismissed as "light" by most serious historians, but casual readers like myself may have a very good time with it. show less