72 pages • 2 hours read
Tom StandageA History of the World in 6 Glasses
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2005A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 5-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Section 3: "Spirits in the Colonial Period"
Chapter 5 Summary
In Chapter 5, titled "High Spirits, High Seas," Standage discusses the Golden Age of the Arab world, during which the process of distillation was perfected and applied to wine. While evidence for distillation can be dated back as far as the fourth century BCE, its use had previously been limited to the production of perfumes. The process, which involved “vaporizing and then re-condensing a liquid in order to separate and purify its constituent parts” (94), made wine much stronger and allowed for the development of spirits, or hard liquor. The emergence of these drinks coincided with a period of European exploration and imperialism. Their compact nature made them ideal for transporting by ship on long voyages, they were used as a form of currency and their popularity meant that taxing spirits became a significant source of income for many countries.
Initially, distilled wine was considered a medicine, not a drink, and became known as aqua vitae, or the water of life, as it was thought to extend a person’s life. During the fifteenth century, however, aqua vitae became a recreational drink. Knowledge of how to distil spirits spread widely and quickly after the invention of the printing press in Europe in the 1430s. These new drinks proved especially popular in northern Europe, where wine was difficult to obtain and expensive. Beer, rather than wine, was distilled in these areas and the “Gaelic for aqua vitae, uisge beatha, is the origin of the modern word whiskey” (100).
At this time, the European powers, particularly Portugal, were trying to discover another route to the East Indies so that they could avoid the Arab monopoly on the spice trade. “Ironically, their eventual success was due in part to the use of technology provided by the Arabs” (102). Islands such as Madeira and the Azores, colonized during their maritime explorations, proved ideal for growing sugarcane, another Arab introduction to Europe. However, growing sugarcane required huge amounts of manpower and so the Europeans turned to slavery. Initially, the Portuguese kidnapped black slaves from the West Coast of Africa, but soon they began to buy slaves from African traders. Christian objections to slavery were overcome in a number of ways, including the argument that by enslaving African “and converting them to Christianity, Europeans were rescuing them from the false doctrines of Islam” (103). This argument was soon replaced by another: that black Africans were not fully human. In fact, by the seventeenth century, slaves were not allowed to convert to Christianity because the religious proscription of slavery would then require that the enslaved individual be manumitted, or freed.
Sugar production, and the trading of enslaved individuals that enabled it, expanded after Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the so-called New World in 1492, at which time he decided to import sugar to the Caribbean. The British, Dutch and the French all established sugar plantations in the Caribbean during the seventeenth century. As the trading of enslaved individuals expanded, spirits became the primary currency for buying slaves from African traders and a mark of distinction among them, with brandy being the most sought after. However, the “connections between sprits, slaves, and sugar were further strengthened following the invention of a powerful new drink made from the waste products of the sugar-production process itself” (105): rum.
Rum was invented on Barbados, an island controlled by the British and which eventually came to dominate the world sugar trade. While others had fermented the cane juice produced in processing sugar, on Barbados they fermented the molasses, which had no other purpose, and thus signified a larger overall profit when sold or used to trade. Initially known as “kill-devil,” it later became “rumbullion,” from which word the modern name rum is derived. Rum was used to control slaves and to reward them; it functioned as a type of currency among the slaves themselves and could be bartered for food.
Rum was also popular with sailors and, in 1655, replaced beer as the drink provided by the Royal Navy to their sailors in the Caribbean. To make sure that they were receiving the agreed amount of alcohol, the strength of every batch of rum had to be tested—by checking if it could ignite gunpowder—to see if it was the requisite 48% alcohol. The drink was so potent it had to be mixed with water and, in this way, helped to make water safe to drink on long voyages. Sailors also added sugar and lime to their rum to make it easier to drink and this mixture was called grog. This practice had the unforeseen benefit of preventing scurvy, as the lime provided sailors with vitamin C. This gave the British navy an advantage over the French, who still issued their sailors with distilled wine, which did nothing to prevent the scurvy that weakened their fleet.
As Standage notes in closing the chapter, “rum was the result of the convergence of materials, people, and technologies from around the world, and the product of several intersecting historical forces” (111). In Chapter 6, he gives an account of how spirits impacted the course of history, particularly in North America.
Chapter 6 Summary
Chapter 6, "The Drinks That Built America," opens with an account of the difficulties that British settlers had in procuring a reliable source of alcohol in the American colonies. When the Mediterranean climate they expected failed to materialize, they were unable to grow vines to produce their own wine or enough surplus grain to brew beer. Importing either alcohol or the ingredients to make alcohol from Europe proved prohibitively expensive and this was a matter of real frustration until rum became available in the second half of the seventeenth century.
New England merchants soon began importing molasses from the Caribbean and distilling the rum themselves. This was more cost efficient and they were able to sell the final product to traders of enslaved individuals as well as to local people. This practice caused friction between the settlers and the British government, however, as the settlers were importing molasses from French sugar plantations. In 1733, the British passed the deeply resented Molasses Act, which taxed the importation of “foreign”—that is, French—molasses, in an attempt to encourage the settlers to buy molasses from British colonies. Unfortunately, the British did not produce enough molasses to supply the New England rum industry and French molasses was considered superior in any case. Rather than pay the tax imposed by the British, the New Englanders took to smuggling French molasses into the country, undermining the power of British rule in the process.
Similarly unpopular was the Sugar Act of 1764, which sought to raise revenue for Britain after the French and Indian War. This legislation, among others, led to the slogan: “no taxation without representation”, expressing the American colonists’ dissatisfaction with being taxed by a parliament they could not participate in. This growing unrest culminated in the Boston Tea Party of 1773, and it was rum, rather than tea, which played an important part in the Revolutionary war which broke out in 1775, as it was the preferred drink of the American soldiers.
As settlers in America moved westwards, rum gave way to whiskey, distilled from fermented cereal grains, including corn, which was used to make bourbon. Despite the difference in composition and taste, whiskey played much the same role that rum had done: It was both a recreational drink and a form of currency used to pay wages and to seal contracts. In 1791, the American government imposed a tax on spirits to raise money to cover their post-war debt, and to reduce the amount that people drank. Standage argues that this was a decisive moment for the new nation, as it exposed the tension that existed between federal and state law.
Much as they had done with British legislation in previous decades, many farmers refused to pay the new tax and revenue collectors were often assaulted. The government reduced the tax twice, in 1792 and 1794, but it was not enough. When Federal Marshalls were sent to Pennsylvania to collect taxes, violence broke out and a local lawyer, David Bradford, assumed leadership of the “Whiskey Boys” to stage a rebellion. However, when George Washington responded by sending thirteen thousand troops to Pennsylvania, the rebellion collapsed. Ironically, the arrival of these troops resolved the matter in more ways than one: The soldiers bought whiskey from local farmers with cash, which the farmers then used to pay the taxes they owed.
Standage also notes that hard liquor was used by Europeans in North America and Mexico in much the same manner as in the Caribbean, to subdue and control slaves and indigenous people. Native Americans considered liquor to be similar to the hallucinogenic drugs they used as part of their cultural rituals. Thus, spirits “played a role in the enslavement and displacement of millions of people, the establishment of new nations, and the subjugation of indigenous cultures” (129).
Chapters 5-6 Analysis
In Section 3, Standage discusses the Age of Exploration, which marked the beginning of European Imperialism, and which ultimately established the United States of America. However, in doing so, he is careful to note the debt that European explorers owe to the Arab world, both in terms of the technologies—such as the astrolabe, a navigational tool—that enabled their journeys, and the distilled alcohol that sustained their sailors. Furthermore, he acknowledges the interconnection of “sprits, slaves, and sugar” (105) during this period, a darker dimension of this history that can easily be overlooked in the celebration of European achievements. The use of spirits to buy and subdue slaves, as well as their role in subjugating indigenous peoples throughout the Americas has left a long shadow, with high rates of alcoholism among indigenous peoples worldwide often a consequence of colonial disenfranchisement.
As with the other drinks discussed so far, beer and wine, spirits functioned as a form of currency. Their value was economic as much as recreational and this meant that the trade in alcohol and its constituent parts provided an arena for international rivalries. Britain’s attempt to force New Englanders to use molasses produced on British plantations was significant both in terms of its competition with France to control the sugar trade and in terms of maintaining control over its American colonies. While the unrest caused by British taxation ultimately led to American Independence, independence did not do away with taxation. The American government was just as keen to exploit the popularity of liquor for revenue purposes as the British had been. By enforcing taxes on distilled drinks, which were central to local economies, it cemented the authority of the federal government. As Standage notes in closing Chapter 6, many of these issues can still be observed today in a different form. He argues that “in their desire to avoid excise duties, purchasers of duty-free spirits are maintaining the antiestablishment tradition of rum runners and whiskey boys” (129).
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