A History of the World in 6 Glasses

Tom Standage

4 ideas

1. Drinks as windows into historical eras

   Each dominant beverage of an age is treated as a technology that shows the forces shaping that era: agriculture for beer, Greek and Roman trade and status for wine, colonial sugar economies for spirits, Enlightenment exchange for coffee, British imperial commerce for tea, and American-led globalization for cola. Following who produced a drink, who consumed it, and under what rules shows the era's power relations, trade networks and social hierarchies more concretely than following kings or battles.

2. Beer, grain surplus and the first civilizations

   Beer is argued to be bound up with the shift to farming. Stored grain that soaked and fermented produced it, and the wish for a steady supply of this drink plausibly reinforced commitment to cultivating cereals. In Mesopotamia and Egypt beer became a staple food and a unit of payment, with workers such as the pyramid builders receiving daily beer rations, so the drink sat inside the first systems of wages and state administration.

3. London coffeehouses as penny universities

   In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century London, a penny bought entry and coffee at coffeehouses where men of any rank could read news and debate. Particular houses became hubs for specialized business: Lloyd's coffeehouse grew into the Lloyd's insurance market, and traders at Jonathan's helped form the London Stock Exchange. Coffee, a stimulant replacing the day-long drinking of weak beer, is presented as fuel for the sober, information-sharing culture of the Enlightenment and the rise of commercial finance.

4. Rum in the Atlantic triangular trade

   Distilled spirits, especially rum, worked as both product and currency in the Atlantic triangular trade. Molasses from slave-worked Caribbean sugar plantations was distilled into rum in New England, and the rum was exchanged in West Africa for enslaved people shipped back to the plantations, a closed loop in which each leg paid for the next. Taxes on molasses and sugar also became colonial grievances that fed into the American Revolution.

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