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The genre of the term-paper book requires an author to pick a precise subject—often an edible one, like salt or chocolate or olive oil—and dig up as many relevant anecdotes and factoids as research will allow. It's a forced, gimmicky method of viewing the world through a thimble.
But Tom Standage's bright idea really is bright: A History of the World in 6 Glasses, a book that divides world history into beer, wine, spirits, coffee, tea and Coca-Cola Ages. Far from being frivolous, the author has legitimate points to make. And his book is loaded with the kind of data that get talked about at the figurative water cooler. As the beverage of the moment, water gets an epilogue and becomes the seventh drink under discussion.
Mr. Standage moves chronologically through what he cannot resist calling "the flow of history." He begins with humanity's shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture. This transition led to the cultivation of grain, which led to storage and fermentation and, eventually, beer. Only one more major development—the creation of crockery—was necessary. By around 4000 B.C., according to a Mesopotamian pictogram included here, human beings had learned to stick straws into big, communally shared beer vessels.
Beer was a controversial substance right from the start. Mr. Standage digs up both a laudatory Egyptian proverb ("The mouth of a perfectly contented man is filled with beer.") and a warning ("Take not upon thyself to drink a jug of beer. Thou speakest, and an unintelligible utterance issueth from thy mouth."). And he points out that the workers who built Egypt's pyramids were paid in beer. Fortunately, the pyramids came out straight.
Moving on to his second substance, Mr. Standage quotes implicit praise from Aristophanes: "Quickly, bring me a beaker of wine, so that I may wet my mind and say something clever." Once the cultivation of grapes led to wine production, the new beverage took on connotations of privilege and sophistication. The book abounds in oenological exotica like this: King Scorpion I of Egypt was buried with 700 jars of wine, imported at great expense from the Levant around 3150 B.C.
The book cites assorted classical assessments of wine consumption, most notably Plutarch's: "The drunkard is insolent and rude ... On the other hand, the complete teetotaler is disagreeable and more fit for tending children than presiding over a drinking party." More seriously, it describes how wine had a strictly defined role in the Roman world, with different forms of the drink used to indicate social strata. Mr. Standage goes on to associate Islam's ban on wine consumption with the goal of separating the Muslim world from Christian influence. He links the differences between wine-drinking and beer-drinking habits of Europe (southern and northern, respectively) with the boundaries of the Roman Empire.
The history of spirits—most notably rum, whiskey and brandy—has particularly far-reaching implications. Mr. Standage traces the process of distillation back to Arab Andalusia and illustrates its influence on slavery, once sugar crops became central to alcohol-making. He then follows rum across the Atlantic, in the form of the citrus-flavored sailors' grog that warded off scurvy (and gave British sailors "limey" as a nickname). He explains why rum was more likely to be found on the coast of the American colonies, whereas whiskey flourished inland, where it bedeviled the native population.
The book's sober side is equally enveloping. "Western Europe began to emerge from an alcoholic haze that had lasted for centuries," Mr. Standage writes, by way of introducing coffee's contribution to the spirit of enlightenment. He follows the influence of coffee from Ethiopian goats (said to grow frisky after eating caffeinated berries) to London, where it had become deeply ingrained by the 17th century. "Thence to the coffee-house" was one of Samuel Pepys's favorite locutions.
The coffeehouse connection to the exchange of ideas is linked to the origins of Lloyds of London, the Stock Exchange and the French Revolution. ("It literally began at a café.") In this context, with the organizational fluidity that unifies this compendium, the conjunction of Seattle, Starbucks and innovative software becomes part of an understandable progression.
- JANET MASLIN, "The Happy Hour, Changing the Course of History," new york times may 30, 2005
posted May 30, 2005 in print. 20022000