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A History of the World in Six Glasses Review Critique

A History of the World in Six Glasses is simply a bright idea from the author Tom Standage who divides the history of the world into six drinks which define respective ages or were pivotal to their respective historical periods. Standage arranges his drinks chronologically beginning with beer, wine, spirits, coffee, tea, and Coca-Cola and goes on to emphasize their importance, particularly for the age they were invented and were most popular. He uses the emphasis and this single aspect to discuss all other issues of life. The author maintains that by reviewing the history of beverages, the human culture can be well understood. Here the thesis statement is presented or can be derived. The author examines six pivotal drinks through the perspective of their history and development, infer conclusions about world history and culture.

The author goes on to clarify what he intends when he says studying drinks can educate people about history. Making drinks entail a complicated process that requires having the right resources, the right tools and technology, and the perfect environment. Thus by studying which drinks were available at what time in history, one is unknowingly learning an era’s culture and anthropology. Standage goes from drink to drink in what appears to be a chronological manner, underpinning the connection between these beverages and history. Each piece is a highly compressed form of history, with a deep focus on European history as the author focuses on his strengths as a British economics writer and attempts to make it enjoyable and easily palatable.

In a way, Standage implies that each drink is a symbol of a certain historical process or era. For instance, Tea was a trendy beverage in Britain alone, which is attributed to the strength of the British Empire at the time, and its ability to extract tea from colonies and countries such as China. So by studying tea, one considers all these factors.

Standage moves by time through what he brilliantly describes as “the flow of history.” The author begins with human beings shifting from hunting and gathering to cultivation of crops. The transition resulted in the farming of grain whose consequence is stowing and fermentation and in the end, beer. At this point, humanity only required the invention of crockery. He includes a Mesopotamian pictogram, which shows man had developed a culture of sharing beer from large vessels using stick straws. He states that beer was a scandalous beverage right from the beginning. The author draws both a praising Egyptian proverb “The mouth of a perfectly contented man is filled with beer” and a cautioning one “Take not upon thyself to drink a jug of beer. Thou speakest, and an unintelligible utterance issueth from thy mouth” (40).

The author then moves on to his second beverage, wine. The farming of grapes led to production of wine, a beverage that ushered in meanings of refinement and privilege. Standage cites various traditional valuations of wine consumption, particularly Aristophanes’ assessment “Quickly, bring me a beaker of wine, so that I may wet my mind and say something clever” (104). He goes on to cite other assessments that suggest the role of wine in the Roman world. In the Roman era, the different forms of wine were an indication of social strata. He provides a link to the variation between wine and beer-drinking customs of Europe within the borders of the Roman Territory.

The author then moves on to the history of spirits and their extensive repercussions. Standage follows the course of refinement to Arab Andalusia and shows how it influenced slavery, once sugar canes were used in making alcohol. He then monitors the journey of rum abroad, traversing the Atlantic, as sailors’ grog that had a citrus flavor that warded off scurvy, which informed the nickname of “limey” for British sailors. He gives an explanation as to why rum was mostly located on the shores of the American colonies, when whiskey thrived inland, where its effect on the natives was “devilish”.

The sober side of Standage’s work is as enveloping. In his introduction of coffee’s input to the idea of enlightenment Standage says “Western Europe began to emerge from an alcoholic haze that had lasted for centuries” (206). He traces the effect of coffee from Ethiopian goats back to England, where it had become profoundly deep-seated by the 17th Century. Coffee led to the so-called coffeehouse connection where people exchanged ideas, which led to the rise of the stock exchange, Lloyds of London, and the French Revolution. All these ideas were created in a coffee house.

The account of tea is the most obvious in Standage’s work as an embodiment of the British Empire and the fate of the economies like China and India that were based on tea.

The author arrives at Coca-Cola, where he theorizes two sides of its history. He suggests that the beverage is an embodiment of the American can-do attitude, or it signifies the ruthless nature of capitalism, the domination of multinationals, and brands and the erosion of native cultures into a common American ordinariness.

In general, the author does well to portray the themes of imperialism, making it clear from the beginning that the history of beverages is the history of human advancement. He relates the history of drinks to the history of imperialism, where a civilization uses its strength to control another. Tom Standage uses the aspect of charm and authority, which augments the persuasive influence of the beverages on the course of human events. To sum it up, Standage presents a distilled account of civilization based on the drinking habits of the human population from the days of hunter-gatherers to today’s designer thirst-quencher.

Works Cited

Standage, Tom. “A History of the World in Six Glasses (London.” Atlantic (2007).