A History of the World in Six Glasses
by Tom Standage · first published 2006
9mentions
3recommended by
7HN commenters
2013–2026first – last mentioned
43% recommend57% neutral
Affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
I love Tom Standage’s book, A History of the World in Six Glasses. It talks about: beer (Mesopotamia), wine (Greece/Rome), spirits (Spanish colonization), tea (British colonization), coffee (world wars), and Coca-Cola (American empire). It’s amazingly coherent.
on “Psychoactive substances helped spur Andean civilization” ↗See also: A History of the World in Six Glasses https://tomstandage.wordpress.com/books/a-history-of-the-wor... The book covers: beer, wine, spirits, coffee, tea and cola. It was a fun read.
on “Our 9000-Year Love Affair With Booze” ↗You would love "A History of the World in Six Glasses".
on “Spices Have Made, and Unmade, Empires” ↗…demands for peer-reviewed scientific process with rock-solid presentation & references, when said critic would in no way actually read such material. Gladwell's (and many other writers', ex.: 1491 and A History Of The World In Six Glasses) works are like this. The books are not weighty tomes, they are not peer-reviewed, they are not scientific papers with rigorous analysis of the material. They are lightweight overviews of interesting…
on “Should we stop believing Malcolm Gladwell?” ↗"The History of the World in Six Glasses" by Tom Standage lays out a similar time line. He breaks the world into two sections - alcohol and caffeine - and each of those into three periods: beer, wine, spirits, coffee, tea, and soda. Each period…
on ““Alcohol and caffeine created civilization”” ↗You’re in good company. Tom Standage makes the same argument in his book A History of the World in Six Glasses. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3872.A_History_of_the_Wo...
on “The Pleasures and Pains of Coffee (1830)” ↗A History of the World in Six Glasses https://smile.amazon.com/History-World-6-Glasses-ebook/dp/B0...
on “How Cheese, Wheat and Alcohol Shaped Human Evolution” ↗A History of the World in Six Glasses https://smile.amazon.com/History-World-6-Glasses/dp/08027155...
on “Were Early Modern People Perpetually Drunk? (2016)” ↗Tea and beer are pathogen-depleted and so it makes a ton of sense that they were both imbibed 'to excess'. History of the World in Six Glasses claims that tea and coffee more or less caused the enlightenment. One, it stopped day drinking by the intellectual class. And two, they were foil for socialization.
on “Too much serendipity” ↗