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.
Themes
Religion
Almost all of the drinks discussed in this book have some religious significance. Ancient civilizations attributed the discovery of beer and wine to their gods, which made them fitting religious tributes. Given than beer and wine made water nutritious and safe to drink, not to mention the pleasure of gentle intoxication, it is easy to see why people from Mesopotamia to Ancient Greece thought that alcohol was a gift from the gods.
The use of beer as a religious offering played a key part in the development of civilization, as Standage explains. Storing surplus grain and beer in communal buildings provided food for the emerging priest-class, who not only oversaw the religious life of their community, but also building projects and a rudimentary tax system.
Both Greek and Roman civilizations worshipped a god of wine, Dionysus and Bacchus, respectively, who were “associated with wine-making miracles and resurrection after death” (85). Christianity continued this tradition in a somewhat different form. Jesus Christ also performed miracles with wine and was himself resurrected, while the ritual of Catholic mass uses wine as a symbol of Christ’s blood. However, as Standage points out, the Greek and Roman traditions involved wine drunk to excess, whereas Christianity made use of the potent symbolism of wine, more so than its intoxicating effects.
The significance of wine to Greek and Roman cultures, and to Christianity, might account, in part, for the Islamic proscription of alcohol. Islamic tradition has it that Muhammad prayed for guidance when two of his companions engaged in a drunken altercation and was advised by Allah to ban the consumption of alcohol. However, as Standage notes, the cultural significance of wine to the Roman Empire and to Christianity meant that such a ban also functioned to distinguish the Islamic Arab world from Europe and European values. Much like the quality of wine a person drank reflected their status in society, the Islamic proscription of alcohol worked as a tool of religious and cultural differentiation.
Both tea and coffee were used as aids to meditation or religious rituals before they became commonplace beverages. Similarly, one of the reasons spirits appealed so much to indigenous people across the Americas is that they produced a comparable effect to the hallucinogenic substances used in their religious ceremonies. It is likely that tea was first drunk by members of religious orders: Buddhist and Taoist monks, who used it to help them meditate. Similarly, by the fifteenth century, Sufis were using coffee to remain awake during their nocturnal religious ceremonies. In fact, the stimulating nature of coffee caused some debate in the Muslim world about whether coffee was intoxicating and ought, as a result, to be banned like alcohol. However, as a result of the Islamic proscription of alcohol, coffee played an important role in the Arab world as a social drink and so its consumption continued. Their origins in religious rituals granted both tea and coffee a certain respectability. Interestingly, Standage notes that coffee’s association with Islam might have made it unpopular in Europe if the pope had not authorized Christians to drink it. Thus while at that stage, coffee was more commonly a social than a religious drink, the idea of a drink being so tied to a particular religion or culture that drinking it might be somehow taboo, suggests the persistent religious significance of drinks more generally.
Culture
Standage’s discussion of these six beverages illustrates how closely cultural values are tied to the consumption of particular foods and drinks. Indeed, Section 1 suggests that, to a large degree, culture develops from ceremonies around life-sustaining substances such as bread and beer in Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. Many countries or regions today are known for their specific cuisines which form an integral part of national or regional identities. While it might seem a simple thing on its own, a society’s ideas about the proper preparation and consumption of food and drink can provide the basis for the emergence of more sophisticated cultural practices, such as art and literature.
For example, Standage notes that Mesopotamian pictograms always show two people drinking from a large vessel of beer, using straws. While there are practical reasons for this method of drinking—straws help to eliminate chaff from the beer—it also suggests the social role beer played in Mesopotamian culture. In Mesopotamian culture, drinking beer was a mark of civilization, as evinced by the passage in the Epic of Gilgamesh, wherein Enkidu is “turned into a human” (27) when he drinks beer. Thus, from these cultural artifacts, we know that Mesopotamians considered beer-drinking a necessary part of being human and that beer-drinking was a social practice. Given that writing developed out of the practice of recording people’s contributions of beer and bread to communal storehouses, it can also be argued that the production of beer enabled the emergence of literature, which then recorded the cultural significance of beer in Mesopotamia.
The practice of communal drinking is also evident in Ancient Greece, where symposia, or wine drinking parties, were highly ritualistic affairs in which men exchanged ideas and reinforced their social bonds. Significantly, these gatherings also provided a template for a popular form of philosophical writing and a potent metaphor for Greek politics, too. The proper way to drink wine was also an important way for the Greeks to distinguish themselves—and their superiority—to their neighbors, whom they labeled barbarians. Thus, wine-drinking was not merely a practical way to make water safe and enjoyable to drink for the Greeks, but was integral to their sense of identity and to their political and intellectual life. Similarly, it was the proscription of wine that allowed Muslims to differentiate themselves from Europeans.
In China and Japan, elaborate tea ceremonies were the height of sophistication and the time necessary to perform these social rituals correctly could only have been available to a select few. In The Classic of Tea, the Chinese poet, Lu Yu, drew an association between tea and art in Chinese culture that made the preparation and serving of this everyday drink into something worth celebrating.
The increased popularity of coffee during the European Enlightenment highlights the fact that social spaces—such as coffeehouses—were useful places for the exchange of ideas and political discussions. However, the exclusion of women from these establishments also exposes the particular prejudices of certain cultures. In fact the popularity of tea among upper-class English women possibly resulted, in part, from their ability to access it and to meet and exchange ideas with their friends and peers.
Imperialism and Globalization
Given that tea, coffee and spirits were all introduced to Europe from other countries, Standage’s book points to the processes of cultural exchange at work throughout history. The historical narrative created in this book focuses on history’s empires, those geo-political entities most likely to expand their political and cultural influence beyond their own geographical borders. Thus while tea was introduced to Japan by the Chinese, who took control of the neighboring country, it later became central to the British Imperial project.
Both conquest and trade were central to these kinds of cultural exchange and nowhere is this clearer than in the relationship between sugar, slaves and spirits. The triangular trade between Europe, Africa and the Caribbean, enabled success of European imperialist projects at the expense of African slaves. And while Standage is quick to point out the relationship between attempts to tax molasses and spirits and American independence, he has less to say about the persistent legacy of slavery in America. Even as he acknowledges the darker side of European imperialism in his discussion of slavery and the impact hard liquor had on indigenous populations, this is a side-note in a broader narrative that largely celebrates Western achievements. Even the multiple contributions of the Arab world—from navigational technologies to distillation to coffee—function mainly as introductory notes to the more detailed discussion of European and American history.
In his discussion of Coca-Cola, Standage notes that this beverage, much like tea in Britain, came to embody American values at a time when America was becoming a global power. Despite acknowledging the relationship between imperialism and globalization, he makes little reference to the many criticisms that have been leveled at Coca-Cola. This is particularly significant from an environmental point of view, given that, in the book’s epilogue, he points to the problems of water access in the developing world. Opposition to Coca-Cola and to America play a minor role in Standage’s account, which focuses primarily of the brand’s successful negotiation of obstacles and increasing entanglement with America’s sense of national identity. In this final section of the book, the focus on a particular brand detracts somewhat from the novelty of the book’s premise and a broader account of soft drinks around the world might have provided a more interesting and nuanced account of the period when explicit imperialism was replaced by the more subtle processes of globalization.
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