Liquid History ... mmm, boozy!

A History of the World in Six Glasses by Tom Standage
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I'm usually a little leery when journalists write history books (the obvious counter-example being Bob Woodward, who writes about contemporary history and is a whole other bag of nails), and this one bears out why. Starting with the dubious and much commented-upon inclusion of a numeral in the title, the main thrust of Six Glasses is consistently toward accessibility rather than depth. I found it worked best when discussing areas I was less familiar with, which only serves to illustrate my point.

The six beverages in question, in chronological order, are beer, wine, coffee, spirits, tea, and Coca-Cola. Water is left to an appendix at the end, in sort of a looking-toward the future epilogue that will surprise no one who’s stood around a Starbucks reading the Ethos water promo materials.

While some observations are interesting, such as the theory that “clinking” during a toast symbolically transforms the glasses into a single communal vessel and so reinforces the sense of community, were interesting, I’m not sure that the author’s thesis – that all these beverages directly influenced and shaped world events – holds up, at least not universally. The spread of coffee and coffee houses, for example, certainly provided a venue and for the fledgling scientific revolution, but I find the idea that it was a necessary element far fetched. Surely Robert Hooke or Samuel Pepys would have been just as comfortable having a discussion over a small glass of wine? They may have fallen asleep sooner, but so what?

On the other side is tea, which is one of the areas where my prior knowledge is hazier. In the case of the English tea-trade and the East India Company’s rather nefarious machinations thereabout, Mr. Standage’s arguments are fairly well made, and the fall of China seems to have certainly been hastened by the English obsession with that horrible beverage. However, it’s never really convincingly established where that obsession came from in the first place.

The chapter on Coca-Cola was fascinating, but like the rest of the book, depended more on interesting factoids than on grand historical visions. For instance, I enjoyed the summary of the various Coke related protests around the world, from France to Iran, but surely that only indicates that Coke is established as an American brand symbol, not that it’s influenced American policy directly. The chapter, in fact encapsulates the general problem with the book. Coke follows America, and is left behind as a kind of commercial residue, it is not the reason Americans were in wherever in the first place.

This book really should have been titled A History of Six Glasses in History. It’s an interesting summary of commerce and cultural history, with several amusing anecdotes, and is fairly tightly written, but it fails to make its ultimate case.


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