Between 1680 and 1730 London consumes more coffee than anywhere else on earth. Coffeehouses were clearing houses for news and gossip and used as mailing addresses.

Beer permeated the lives of Egyptians and Mesopotamians from the cradle to the grave.

While the riches Romans drank the finest wines, poorer citizens drank lesser vintages, and so on down the social ladder.

Those were the kinds of interesting detail abundant in Tom Standage’s book: A History of the World in 6 Glasses. He illustrates the journey of humanity in terms of six beverages: beer, wine, spirits, coffee, tea, and cola. Water, the pure natural resource, the first drink to steer the course of human history, is an epilogue in the book.

Tom Standage considers each drink as a kind of technology, a catalyst for advancing culture by which he illustrates human civilizations.

Asked by one of his readers Standage categorizes the time period covered in his book, from the Stone Age to the 21st century, as:

Beer 10,000 BC – 870 BC

Wine 870 BC – 1000 AD

Spirits 1000 AD – 1660

Coffee 1660 – 1789

Tea 1789 – 1886

Cola 1886 – 2005

Water 2005 –

I first learned about A World of History in 6 Glasses by Tom Standage when reviewing another book by Jodi Ettenberg: The Food Travelers Handbook.

Ettenberg suggests the book for her readers who would like to have more background on beverages. I am glad that The Kitchen Reader online book club took my suggestion to select the book for our May 2014 reading which I will also use as a review for another book club: Foodies Read 2014.

In addition to the Introduction and the Epilogue, the book has two chapters for each of the six beverages.

As early as the 6th century tea had been consumed in Japan and in the 14th century the intricate tea ceremony, with cultural and religious influence, has been all over Japan.

Coca Cola, Standage wrote, is the drink of the 20th century mirroring the rise of America, the globalization of war, politics, trade, and communications during the twentieth century.

I was hoping for an entertaining light reading, but apparently this is a serious book full of historical facts, food science and technology innovations and how social statuses shaped humanity.

As the book explains world history through beverages, some schools selected the book as a required reading for Advanced Placement (AP) history classes in some high schools.

The French Revolution literally began at a café when in 1789 Camille Desmulins, a young lawyer, hopped on a table outside a café, took a pistol out and shouted: “To arms, citizens! To Arms! Paris went into chaos and the Bastille was stormed by angry mob.

According to Standage, rumbullion, then shortened to rum, an alcoholic drink made from sugarcane byproducts was the liquid of embodiment of both the triumph and the oppression of the first era of globalization.

As an author and a journalist who works at The Economists, Standage’s specialty is the use of historical analogy in science, technology and business writing. His degree in engineering and computer science from Oxford University may have influenced his strong research and writings.

Published in 2005, A World of History in 6 Glasses is a bestseller book. It is then no wonder that the version that the version I read was already the eighteenth printing.

The spice routes that spanned the Old World led to cross-cultural fertilization in fields as diverse as architecture, science and religion. Early geographers started to take an interest in the customs and peoples of distant lands and compiled the first attempts at world maps.

These facts in Standage’s An Edible History of Humanity have certainly put this book on my wish list.

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Images:

Cover: Joe Linker. Books: Omar Niode Foundation.

Shutterstock/Beer: Igor Klimov. Wine: Mariyana M. Tea: Nik Merkulov. Coca Cola: I-Tons. Coffee: Danny E.Hooks. Spiris: Ilja Generalov