The King of Drinks: Schnapps Gin from Modernity to Tradition (review)

Early in this fascinating history of imported Dutch gin in West Africa, the author describes a Fon iron memorial staff dating from nineteenth-century Ouidah. At the top is a tableau featuring a figure of a prominent merchant, dressed in a top hat, seated at a table arrayed with a large container of rum surrounded by the distinctive square bottles that unmistakably contain Dutch gin, or schnapps. With his description of this object, van den Bersselaar reveals his deceptively simple theme: the incorporation of foreign commodities into local economic, political, and cultural systems—how “Dutch schnapps gin had become ‘African’” (228).

During the last decades of the nineteenth century, imports of Dutch and German gin into West Africa grew dramatically, dislodging American rum in much of the region and igniting an antiliquor movement in Europe and West Africa that ultimately led to severe restrictions on the trade. A number of scholars have looked at aspects of this controversy and at the history of alcohol in Africa. Van den Bersselaar shows a sophisticated mastery of that literature, but this is not really what The King of Drinks is about. Instead, the author approaches his topic as the history—or biography—of a commodity. And that commodity, schnapps, is as much those distinctive square containers as it is the liquor inside. That said, the book is oddly silent on the very mind-altering properties that define gin and other forms of alcohol as drugs.

Building on recent work on the history of African consumption, van den Bersselaar follows imported gin up and down the commodity chain, back and forth between Europe and West Africa, always maintaining the perspective of African consumers. In the process, his engaging narrative (strengthened by some fifty illustrations) illuminates, among other topics, the evolution of ritual and ritual substances in Ghana and Nigeria, the organization of wholesale and retail trade in the region, the development of industrial distillation in Holland and Germany, and the emergence of advertising. But what this important book most clearly teaches us is that the expansion of the commercial economy in West Africa during the twentieth century (and by extension in other times and places) was by no means a linear process, driven exclusively by the interests of global capitalism. Instead, this story of gin illustrates how the development of markets occurred as a kind of negotiation among producers, distributors, and consumers, and in particular how local understandings of goods shaped their place in the regional economy, complicating terms like local and authentic.

As the anti-alcohol movement forced virtual prohibition, the quantities of gin imported declined sharply; after 1920 schnapps became almost exclusively a ritual liquid. A drink that in the late nineteenth century had been associated with the modern Atlantic economy became the province of “traditional” men. Drawing on distillery records, as well as British and West African archives, court records, and oral sources, van den Bersselaar shows the interplay of consumers and commercial interests in defining and redefining a commodity demonized by temperance advocates as a “vile substance” but defended by others for its spiritual and medical powers. The distilleries struggled to distinguish their various brands, but they did not entirely grasp the degree to which their products had been captured by consumers. Following the Second World War, several of the companies attempted to expand sales by repositioning schnapps as a drink for the rising class of affluent West Africans; yet this advertising campaign failed entirely to reach a public that saw Dutch gin exclusively as a “traditional” drink—precisely the niche it continues to occupy today.

This book is both provocative and subversive. The evidence that van den Bersselaar provides for his central argument—that “imported goods are likely to be incorporated into African consumptive patterns in ways that make sense in the context of existing yet continually changing African world views, rather than according to...