Through a Tipped Glass: Alcohol in History

Humans have a complicated relationship with alcohol. At different times and places, specific forms of alcohol and alcohol consumption practices have become closely linked to ethnic, class, and gender identities. Religions and governments have proscribed its use. Alcohol has served as a social lubricant replete with its own set of customs and cultural practices, and it has also been deemed a threat to peace, destructive of personal health, and a threat to the social order. Opinions on its use have sparked the passions of both the imbiber and the teetotaller. These new works by Rod Phillips and Ericka Hannickel are both concerned with the cultural meanings societies have engrafted onto alcohol, but each examines the subject through very different lenses. Alcohol: A History, takes a wide-angle approach and presents an expansive, global history of the role of alcohol in all its forms in human societies from the earliest experiments with fermented beverages to its use in the present day. In contrast, Empire of Vines: Wine Culture in America, focuses in on a single form of alcoholic beverage in one nation in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and it is primarily focused on production, not consumption of that beverage. Each approach yields unique insights.

While Alcohol: A History is global in its approach, much of the narrative is centered on European and Euro-American societies’ use of alcohol. Phillips defends this choice by noting that “Europeans integrated alcohol more extensively, and in greater volumes, into their cultures than people of any other region” (pp. 4–5). Phillips notes that a constant in the history of alcohol is “a polarity of views” on its use. On one hand, alcohol has often been embraced as a valuable “social lubricant”; on the other hand, it has been viewed as a “menace” (pp. 1–2). Because of this ever-present disagreement, it is not surprising that one of the central themes in the history of alcohol is the effort to regulate its production and consumption.

The earliest evidence of human consumption of fermented beverages goes back about nine millennia, but it is likely that prehistoric societies also made use of alcohol. Beverages fermented from fruits and grains prevailed until relatively recently. As human societies grew and contaminated their own water supplies, beverages with bacteria-killing alcohol became safer to drink than water; but it was Greece and Rome, Phillips argues, “that developed cultures of alcohol consumption that were more extensive and elaborate than any before them” (p. 44). Classical societies also had a profound impact on the cultural history of drink by privileging the grape- over grain-based alcohols such as beer, helping to cement wine’s reputation as a more refined and healthful drink. It would not be until after 1500 that distilled beverages with higher alcohol content were commonly available. The rise of Christianity and Islam with their diverging views on alcohol consumption—Islam moving towards strict prohibition, Christianity maintaining a more ambivalent attitude toward alcohol—was another defining moment in the history of alcohol use.

Phillips identifies several other key hinge points that bring us to our current global patterns of alcohol use. Among these are the role of Christian religious orders in alcohol production in the medieval period; technical innovations resulting in the widespread availability of much more potent distilled spirits after 1500; the role alcohol played in imperial encounters between Europeans and colonized peoples; the development of safe alternatives to alcohol for hydration in the nineteenth century; the emergence of an urban middle class and its efforts to control the behaviors of the working class; early twentieth-century experiments in prohibition; and the changes in drinking culture that emerged in the wake of prohibition’s failure. Phillips concludes by noting the downward trends in alcohol consumption around the world, suggesting that we may be entering a post-alcohol age.

In two chapters...