Book Review: A History of the World in 6 Glasses, by Tom Standage (New York: Walker & Co., 2005)

A History of the World in 6 Glasses is a good overview of world history as seen through the lens of six beverages that have been widely consumed through history.  In looking at each beverage Standage focuses on a particular time and place, and the book is organized mostly chronologically (although there’s quite a bit of overlap among three of the drinks).  The beverages examined are:

• -beer in Mesopotamia and Egypt up through about 1500 BC
• -wine in the heydays of Greece and Rome
• -hard liquor among American colonists (yes, there’s a fairly large jump in time before this section)
• -coffee among the English and French in the 1600s and 1700s
• -tea in the British Empire during the 1600s through the 1800s
• -Coca-Cola’s rise to prominence in the late 19th and 20th centuries.

Standage is the digital editor of the Economist and a longtime journalist, and as a result the book is quite readable.  From what I can tell the history side of the book is solid, although the only section I know much about is the hard liquor section, since I teach American history.  Hard liquor was pretty important to the colonists, as rum was a major export product from New England, and further inland whiskey was important enough that western farmers rebelled because of a tax on whiskey meant to pay for the Revolutionary War.  Standage covers these topics and many more, on a fairly solid historical footing.

A good example of how Standage “gets it” as a historian is in the section about Coca-Cola.  He starts by outlining the company’s own story about how Coca-Cola was invented, which was that pharmacist John Pemberton “stumbled on the right combination of ingredients by accident, while trying to devise a cure for headaches.” (page 233)  Standage goes on to outline the real story: Pemberton was “an experienced maker of patent medicines, the quack remedies that were hugely popular” at that time, and was, in fact, trying to make cola-infused wine but local authorities outlawed alcohol, so he switched over to making a soda instead.  Throughout this part of the book Standage provides lots of context and background information about the popularity of patent medicines, how pharmacies had soda fountains, the legal battles Coke went through (it was forced to reduce its caffeine content in the early 20th century), etc.

Another part of the Coke story Standage does a good job of covering is the effect World War II had on the popularity of the drink.  While many industries suffered because of rationing, Coke was able to convince government authorities that, since Coke was vital to American morale, not only should it not have to suffer from sugar rationing (as virtually all other sugar-using companies did), but the military should set up bottling machines at military bases around the world so that Coke could be delivered directly to service people.  Coke succeeded wildly on both counts and came out of the conflict stronger than ever.

I did find a couple of problems with the section on hard liquor in colonial times, though.  First, a factual problem: he writes that the Whiskey Tax affected all liquors, which is incorrect.  The tax was only on whiskey, not rum, partially because the colonial leaders who made the law drank rum rather than whiskey.  The second problem is one which almost all authors who write histories that look at a particular thing have: that thing becomes more important in the book than it did in reality.  In discussing the disputes between British leaders and American colonists over tea that led, for example, to the Boston Tea Party, Standage writes that “the dispute over tea proved a decisive step toward Britain’s loss of its American colonies.” (page 206)  Sure, the colonists were mad about the tea tax, but they were mad about a lot of things: the Stamp Act, which put a tax on all printed materials; the Sugar Act, which assumed that anyone arrested was guilty; and the fact that Parliament was passing laws without the colonists having any say in what those laws were.  The Tea Act was just one step on a long road towards independence.

A History of the World in 6 Glasses is recommended if you like food history, and also if you’re interested in history in general.  Standage provides enough background and context in the book that by the end you’ll have read not only about a few different drinks but also about how the British Empire functioned, how American colonists exported goods, how different Chinese rulers viewed China and the rest of the world, and many other things.