Six drinks of destiny: Here’s mud in your eye

Tom STANDAGE’s highly enjoyable chronicle of six beverages that have shaped human destiny is as refreshing as a cool glass of beer on a hot day and as stimulating as that first cup of coffee in the morning. Few readers will agree with every point Standage makes, but there aren’t many books this entertaining that also provide a cogent crash course in ancient, classical and modern history. If the author ever decides to give up his day job as technology editor of the Economist, he could be a wildly popular university lecturer. I certainly wish my college professors had been this much fun.

In breezy but unfailingly intelligent prose, “A History of the World in 6 Glasses” links each drink to a major social or technological development. Beer, for example, “helped humanity along the path to the modern world,” accompanying the epochal change after 10,000 BC from a nomadic existence to the more settled life necessary to cultivate crops. The fizzy liquid that resulted from wet grains left lying around for a few days was soon used so generally that it became a form of currency in the earliest urban societies. The workers who built the pyramids were paid in beer; “bread and beer” was an everyday Egyptian greeting signifying its central place in the common people’s diet.

Wine, by contrast, spread through ancient Greece as the drink of the elite, “synonymous with civilization and refinement.” Standage quotes the 5th century BC Greek writer Thucydides: “The peoples of the Mediterranean began to emerge from barbarism when they learnt to cultivate the olive and the vine.” In Imperial Rome, everyone drank wine, but status came from knowing the finest vintages and being rich enough to pay for them.

Distilled spirits were perfected as a medicine by Arab scholars whose religion forbade alcoholic beverages, but in the hands of Europeans rum became a key component of the slave trade. Rum was so popular in colonial America that the Molasses Act, a 1733 British effort to tax rum’s raw material, prompted widespread smuggling and resentment that ultimately helped lead to the American Revolution. The drink that sustained an oppressive industry was also the drink of rebellion.

Coffee originated in the Arab world too, but in Standage’s view, its iconic status as “the ideal beverage ... for the Age of Reason” grew in European coffeehouses, hotbeds of gossip and debate that stimulated commercial and scientific innovation. Lloyd’s of London was founded by a group of insurance underwriters renting booths in a coffeehouse frequented by shipowners; a coffeehouse argument among members of the Royal Society sparked Isaac Newton’s “Principia.” The author’s lively portrait of caffeine-fueled intellectual life, however, gains nothing from his specious declaration that 17th century coffeehouses were, “[l]ike modern Web sites ... vibrant and often unreliable sources of information.” Straining to provide contemporary parallels is his one besetting sin -- unsurprising, perhaps, in someone whose book about the telegraph was titled “The Victorian Internet.”

Standage is on firmer ground when delineating a beverage’s historic effect. The tea trade’s powerful role in establishing English imperialism is a familiar story, but he retells it well and adds some intriguing details. (As tea became cheaper and more popular in Britain, he notes, its antibacterial properties improved public health by reducing the instance of waterborne diseases, such as dysentery.)

His sharp depiction of Coca-Cola’s origins in the shady world of 19th century patent medicines adds some interest to the inevitable final section showcasing the soft drink as a symbol of U.S. global dominance -- true, but so frequently invoked that it has become a cliche. The real surprise here is Standage’s relatively benevolent view of Coke: There’s nary a mention of how it rots teeth and packs on pounds, nor will everyone will be convinced that “Coca-Cola ... shows how strong global brands can work in consumers’ interests, not against them.”

Overstatement and oversimplification may be forgivable flaws in a short text written for a general audience. Standage’s strengths as a popular historian are all on view in an epilogue that brings us “Back to the Source”: water, humanity’s first drink and, in the form of pricey bottled products, currently among its trendiest. As he has done throughout, the author underpins provocative cultural commentary with solid economic and political information. In developed nations, he writes, “the sort of water one drinks has become a lifestyle choice,” but in the Third World “access to water remains a matter of life or death.” *