Tom Standage - A History of the World in 6 Glasses

Copyright 2005 by Tom Standage

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address Walker & Company, 104 Fifth Avenue, New York. New York 10011.

Published in 2006 by Walker Publishing Company Inc.

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Art credits: the University of Pennsylvania Museum; the original object is in the Iraq Museum (IM # 25048). Created by the author. the Trustees of The British Museum. (Engraving based on bust in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence), (engraving after Sir Peter Lely), (engraving by W. Holl after a picture by Gilbert Stewart), the Mary Evans Picture Library. North Wind Picture Archives. Courtesy of The Coca-Cola Company. Vice President Nixon in Russia and Poland 1959 (photos); Series 1959 U.S.S.R. Trip Photographs; Pre-Presidential Papers of Richard M. Nixon; courtesy of the National ArchivesPacific Region (Taguna Niguel).

The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition of this book under LCCN: 2004061209

eISBN: 978-0-802-71859-4

First published in the United States in 2005 by Walker & Company This paperback edition published in 2006

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8 10 9 7

To my parents

Contents

Vital Fluids

There is no history of mankind, there are only many histories of all kinds of aspects of human life.
Karl Popper, philosopher of science (1902-94)

T HIRST is DEADLIER than hunger. Deprived of food, you might survive for a few weeks, but deprived of liquid refreshment, you would be lucky to last more than a few days. Only breathing matters more. Tens of thousands of years ago, early humans foraging in small bands had to remain near rivers, springs, and lakes to ensure an adequate supply of freshwater, since storing or carrying it was impractical. The availability of water constrained and guided humankind's progress. Drinks have continued to shape human history ever since.

Only in the past ten thousand years or so have other beverages emerged to challenge the preeminence of water. These drinks do not occur naturally in any quantity but must be made deliberately. As well as offering safer alternatives to con taminated, disease-ridden water supplies in human settlements, these new beverages have taken on a variety of roles. Many of them have been used as currencies, in religious rites, as political symbols, or as sources of philosophical and artistic inspiration. Some have served to highlight the power and status of the elite, and others to subjugate or appease the downtrodden. Drinks have been used to celebrate births, commemorate deaths, and forge and strengthen social bonds; to seal business transactions and treaties; to sharpen the senses or dull the mind; to convey lifesaving medicines and deadly poisons.

As the tides of history have ebbed and flowed, different drinks have come to prominence in different times, places, and cultures, from stone-age villages to ancient Greek dining rooms or Enlightenment coffeehouses. Each one became popular when it met a particular need or aligned with a historical trend; in some cases, it then went on to influence the course of history in unexpected ways. Just as archaeologists divide history into different periods based on the use of different materialsthe stone age, the bronze age, the iron age, and so onit is also possible to divide world history into periods dominated by different drinks. Six beverages in particularbeer, wine, spirits, coffee, tea, and colachart the flow of world history. Three contain alcohol, and three contain caffeine, but what they all have in common is that each one was the defining drink during a pivotal historical period, from antiquity to the present day.

The event that set humankind on the path toward modernity was the adoption of farming, beginning with the domestication of cereal grains, which first took place in the Near East around ten thousand years ago and was accompanied by the appearance of a rudimentary form of beer. The first civilizations arose around five thousand years later in Mesopotamia and Egypt, two parallel cultures founded on a surplus of cereal grains produced by organized agriculture on a massive scale. This freed a small fraction of the population from the need to work in the fields and made possible the emergence of specialist priests, administrators, scribes, and craftsmen. Not only did beer nourish the inhabitants of the first cities and the authors of the first written documents, but their wages and rations were paid in bread and beer, as cereal grains were the basis of the economy.

The flourishing culture that developed within the city-states of ancient Greece in the first millennium BCE spawned advances in philosophy, politics, science, and literature that still underpin modern Western thought. Wine was the lifeblood of this Mediterranean civilization, and the basis of vast seaborne trade that helped to spread Greek ideas far and wide. Politics, poetry, and philosophy were discussed at formal drinking parties, or symposia, in which the participants drank from a shared bowl of diluted wine. The spread of wine drinking continued under the Romans, the structure of whose hierarchical society was reflected in a minutely calibrated pecking order of wines and wine styles. Two of the world's major religions issued opposing verdicts on the drink: The Christian ritual of the Eucharist has wine at its center, but following the collapse of the Roman Empire and the rise of Islam, wine was banned in the very region of its birth.