A History of the World in 6 Glasses

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2005

A 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.

Download PDF

Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Introduction-Chapter 2

Chapters 3-4

Chapters 5-6

Chapters 7-8

Chapters 9-10

Chapter 11-Epilogue

Key Figures

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Symbols & Motifs

Drinking vessels

Standage suggests that one of the reasons wine production developed later than the deliberate production of beer was that pottery was not invented until around 6000 BCE. Thus the vessels available to store particular beverages were an important factor in their development.

In Mesopotamia and Greece, drinks were served from a communal vessel, while in Rome, individual bottles of wine were used to serve people according to their status. In this way, the manner of serving a drink could reflect the broader ethos of a society.

When tea was first imported to Britain in the eighteenth century, it was accompanied by teacups made of Chinese porcelain. This suggests that it was the ritual element of the tea ceremony, as much as the beverage itself, which appealed to the British. The establishment of a crockery industry in Britain put a stop to these imports by 1791, at which point tea’s place in British society was already assured. The use of British, rather than Chinese, crockery suggests that people had come to see tea as something British, rather than something exotic.

Despite Asa Candler’s initial reluctance to bottle the finished product, the distinctive Coca-Cola bottle, introduced in 1916, helped to make the drink more widely available and more recognizable. Today, bottles of water have replaced Coca-Cola as the most fashionable drink in the Western world, despite access to clean tap water. Bottling water highlights its status as a precious commodity, for which we are willing to pay. Packaging water into bottles rather than relying on the communal supply, also suggests that the values of individual rights and freedoms, promoted by brands like Coca-Cola, have been prioritized over the desire for social good.

Medicine

Each of the drinks discussed in this book have been considered or promoted as medicine at some point in history. In part, this could be due to the fact that humans require liquid to survive. As Standage notes in his introduction, thirst will kill a person much quicker than hunger will. Any substance that helps to keep us alive and healthy is bound to be considered a necessary part of medicine. Hence, Galen, the physician to the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, sought the best wine to make the best medicine in the second century CE. At that time, Western medicine was dominated by the idea of the four humors—blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile—four liquids, whose balance was key to the balance of a person’s health. Even Coca-Cola, which has come under increasing scrutiny in recent years as contributing to obesity and bad health, began as a patent medicine.

Of course, with the exception of water, each of the drinks Standage considers is either alcoholic or caffeinated and thus had an intoxicating or stimulating effect on the body that could be interpreted as beneficial to a person’s health. The religious traditions associated with these drinks may have also contributed to the idea that they were nutritious or even supernaturally invigorating. The accounts of divided medical opinions about the advantages and disadvantages of each beverage suggest the limitations of medical knowledge at different points in history.

Drunkenness

Different cultures have different attitudes to drunkenness, as evinced by the distinction the Greeks drew between themselves and their “barbarian” neighbors. For the Greeks, civilization was equated with mixing your wine with water; drinking undiluted wine was barbaric, it might result in an undignified loss of control and could only be done safely by Dionysus, the Greek god of wine. For the Greeks, wine was a mean to access truth—whether intellectual or personal—but the quest for truth was not to be undertaken lightly.

Native Americans, on the other hand, appreciated the strongly intoxicating effects of spirits, which provided them with a similar experience to the hallucinogenic substances traditionally used in their rituals. In fact they could not understand why anyone would drink wine or beer, which was not nearly as strong as rum. Americans more generally have had a conflicted relationship to the idea of drunkenness, as evinced by the prohibition of alcohol at several times throughout the nation’s history.

The popularity of coffee was due, in part, to the fact that it seemed to be the antithesis of alcohol. It provided an alternative to alcohol in Muslim countries where intoxication had been banned. It was also popular in Europe, especially among businessmen, intellectuals and artists, for whom its stimulating effects were more appealing than those of alcoholic drinks. While concerns were raised about the effects of caffeine, both in the Arab world—where some religious leaders suggested that coffee’s stimulating effects were actually a form of intoxication—and in Europe and America, these were eventually quashed and caffeinated drinks such as Coca-Cola were even considered safe for children. However, despite different levels of tolerance for drunkenness across the world, alcohol is still a substance treated with a certain amount of caution, as shown by the implementation of minimum drinking ages in most countries around the world.