A History of the World in 6 Glasses

by Tom Standage

sharing a drink with someone is a universal symbol of hospitality and friendship.

To Neolithic drinkers, beer’s ability to intoxicate and induce a state of altered consciousness seemed magical. So, too, did the mysterious process of fermentation, which transformed ordinary gruel into beer. The obvious conclusion was that beer was a gift from the gods;

perhaps once beer had been discovered, and its consumption had become socially and ritually important, there was a greater desire to ensure the availability of grain by deliberate farming, rather than relying on wild grains.

Tempting though it is to attribute the adoption of agriculture entirely to beer, it seems most likely that beer drinking was just one of many factors that helped to tip the balance away from hunting and gathering and toward farming and a sedentary lifestyle based on small settlements.

Officially, these goods were offerings to the gods, but in practice they were compulsory taxes that were consumed by the temple bureaucracy or traded for other goods and services.

The best way to evaluate one set of ideas, they decided, was by testing it against another set of ideas. In the political sphere, the result was democracy, in which supporters of rival policies vied for rhetorical supremacy;

As wine became more widely available—so widely available that even the slaves drank it—what mattered was no longer whether or not you drank wine, but what kind it was.

What kind of wine you drank, and its age, indicated how cultured you were.

Why should a man obey his father, or a scholar his teacher, if they were technically equals?

Power, in other words, is like wine and can intoxicate when consumed in large quantities by people who are not used to it. The result in both cases is chaos.

its height the company generated more revenue than the British government and ruled over far more people, while the duty on the tea it imported accounted for as much as 10 percent of government revenue. All this gave the company both direct and indirect influence over the policies of the most powerful nation on Earth. The company had many friends in high places, and many of its officials simply bought their way into Parliament. Supporters of the East India Company also cooperated on occasion with politicians with interests in the West Indies; the demand for West Indian sugar was driven by the consumption of tea. All this ensured that in many cases company policy became government policy.

bottled water, ounce for ounce, costs more than gasoline.

The popularity of bottled water stems from the widespread belief that it is healthier and safer than tap water. But tap water, in developed nations at least, is just as safe.

40 percent of the bottled water sold in the United States is, in fact, derived from tap water, though it is usually filtered and may have extra minerals added.

The study also noted that in both Europe and the United States, the quality of tap water is far more stringently controlled than the quality of bottled water.

In contrast, for many people in the developing world, access to water remains a matter of life or death. A quarter of the world’s population, or around 2 billion people, use a drinking-water source contaminated with feces.

According to the United Nations, one of the main reasons girls do not go to school in sub-Saharan Africa is that they have to spend so much time fetching water from distant wells and carrying it home.

In 1964 Syria had started building a canal to divert two of the main tributaries of the Jordan River away from Israel. Using a combination of artillery and air strikes, Israel brought work on the canal to a halt. “While the border disputes between Syria and ourselves were of great significance, the matter of water diversion was a stark issue of life and death,” wrote Sharon. Israel values the territories it occupied in 1967, which granted it control of the Jordan’s headwaters, as much for their water supply as for any military advantage. The Palestinians who live in the West Bank are allotted just 18 percent of the territory’s water; the rest goes to Israel.

Water was the first drink to steer the course of human history; now, after ten thousand years, it seems to be back in the driving seat.