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Summary
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in A History of the World in Six Glasses, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Innovation and Competition
Imperialism
Freedom and Self-Control
Equality and Elitism
Drinking Spaces and Community
Summary
Analysis
Standage begins his book by noting that thirst is one of the most important parts of the human experience—without liquid, humans can’t survive more than a few days. As civilization has become more advanced, he says, humans have begun brewing more complicated, idiosyncratic drinks, instead of simply drinking water.
Standage gets to his point right away: drinks are extremely important for human existence. He will then go on to emphasize this importance, and to use this one aspect of human life to comment on all the rest of it.
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Standage maintains that by studying the history of beverages, we can understand important things about human culture. He singles out six drinks: beer, wine, spirits, coffee, tea, and Coca-Cola. Each one was “the defining drink during a pivotal historical period.”
Standage briefly goes over the outline of his book. He begins with the dawn of the Agricultural Revolution, the time when humans first began converting wheat into beer—a drink so popular and important that often, workers were paid in beer. Later on, in the Mediterranean, humans began making wine from grapes. Wine became a symbol of Greek intellectual culture.
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Another milestone beverage was coffee. Coffee became popular throughout Europe in the late Middle Ages, when Europeans began trading and communicating with the Arabic world. Another drink that became popular as a result of these trading practices was distilled alcohol—“spirits”—such as brandy, whiskey, and rum. Spirits were an important drink during the Enlightenment, and gave rise to many important historical events of the time.
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In the 18th and 19th century, tea became the defining drink of the British Empire. As the British Empire colonize the world, it adopted Chinese tea as its own favorite beverage, and in turn distributed this beverage to its other colonies in North America, Africa, and Asia. In the 20th century, perhaps the defining drink has been Coca Cola. Coke has become a symbol of America: American optimism, capitalism, and commercialism.
Standage concludes by reiterating that by studying beverages, we can gain a better understanding of history, in particular the histories of agriculture, philosophy, medicine, religion, technology, and commerce.
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