A History Of The World In 6 Glasses Summary

Tom Standage is a British journalist and author for numerous newspapers such as The Economist, Wired, The New York Times, and The Daily Telegraph..Born 1969, he has been able to publish five books, most popular one being The Victorian Internet. This work was about the development of the telegraph and how it should be allowed worldwide to connect 100 years before the birth of the internet. “A History of The World in 6 Glasses” is a book about the history of the world told in different perspectives of six distinguished drinks.The drinks he mentions are beer, wine, spirits, tea ,coffee, and coca cola; these drinks detail key time periods in human history ranging from Mesopotamia to the Cold War. Each drink is associated with each time period

After tribes began settling into a settled, agricultural lifestyle, they cultivated barley and wheat for bread. They later discovered that, if left exposed for a long period of time the grains began to have a strong and hard taste. Civilizations such as Mesopotamia and Egypt started experimented with this “happy accident” fermentation process, developing many types of beer and ale. Much of which were drunk in social settings, some used for religious rituals. At the time to be able to drink beer was to be civilized man. But the Sumerians time period, beer was no longer a drink for the high class, commoners were even able to obtain it. Beer was also used as a form of currency in both empires and both believed beer was a gift from the gods. In this passage Standage establishes alcohol’s key importance in the forming of new, settled communities, showing how beer held social, religious, and economic significance in the beginning of civilization. Wine has been around since the Neolithic time period, but became more available to the common people after vineyards made wine easier to produce which caused it to be lower in cost. In Greece, wine was seen as the drink of the civilized. Leaders such

Coffee was discovered and popularized in the Muslim world for hundreds of years, in part because Islam forbade the drinking of alcohol. It later arrived in Europe due to Muslim trades.Enlightenment europeans consumed coffee because it helped its consumers focus and filled them with energy, causing it to be the drink of the intellect, widely popular to philosophers, politicians, businessmen, and scholars.Because of this coffeehouses were established.The earliest “coffeehouses” were established in England. Coffeehouses were public places where men could drink coffee and discuss business, politics, and philosophy. Many of the key discoveries occurred in coffeehouses, from Newton’s laws of physics to the beginning of the French Revolution. Like coffee, tea was a drink for the intellect. The Chinese were the first to consume tea. Tea is mentioned in Chinese scriptures for its intellectual and medicinal powers.Tea reached Europe in the 1500s but 200 years later Europe developed a craving for tea, especially Britain which came to love the drink and popularize it. Because of this the British Empire depended heavily on China, and this eventually led to the Opium Wars in the 1830s. This was designed to ensure that Britain would be able to continue to buy huge amounts of tea without falling into debt. Standage later argues that Coca-Cola was the drink of the