Ever since humans began to consume alcohol, they have had a difficult relationship with it. Alcohol is a colorless liquid that has, in itself, no material, cultural, or moral value. But like many other commodities, it has been ascribed complicated and often contradictory sets of values that have varied over time and place, and that are interwoven with the complexities of power, gender, class, ethnicity, and age in the societies in which it is consumed.
All these values derive fundamentally from the action of alcohol on the human nervous system. Readers who have consumed alcohol will recognize one or more of the stages of intoxication that begin with the first sip of alcohol, whether it is beer, whiskey, wine, a cocktail, or a beverage made from the myriad commodities used to produce alcohol. A small volume of alcohol generally gives the drinker a sense of well-being, and further drinking can lead, in turn, to feelings of euphoria, relaxation of social inhibitions, loss of balance and coordination, slurred speech, vomiting, and loss of consciousness. Severe cases of alcoholic poisoning can be fatal.
Needless to say, not all consumers of alcohol drink so much that that they experience anything more than a pleasant and uplifting sense of well-being. Not only did that sense became highly valued and much sought-after, but the state of euphoric otherworldliness that came with further drinking has been, in some cultures, thought of as spiritual and as bringing the consumer closer to the gods. In other cultures, the potential of alcohol to harm its consumer produced dire warnings about excessive consumption and various punishments for becoming perceptibly intoxicated.
The result was a polarity of views toward alcohol. On one hand, alcoholic beverages have been widely employed as a social lubricant and adhesive in daily interactions, as varied as Russian workers drinking in their factories in the nineteenth century to women gathering at an all-female dramshop in London to drink gin in the early 1700s. Alcohol has historically played a role at marriages and funerals, and it has commonly marked commercial, political, and other events. Madeira was used to launch one of the U.S. Navy’s first frigates in 1797, while some East African peoples celebrated marriages with banana beer. Alcohol has often been provided to pay for work, and it was widely used as currency when Europeans extended their economic activities to the wider world; whiskey, gin, and rum bought slaves and commodities as varied as beaver pelts and copra, influence, and land.
Alcohol helps people relax and sometimes to forget their cares. Alcoholic beverages, especially beer and wine, have often been associated with divinity, and they have historically been credited with having medicinal or therapeutic properties; it is hard to think of an illness, disease, or physical pathology that has not, at some time, been treated by some form of alcohol. It has been credited with ridding the body of worms and cancer, aiding digestion, fighting heart disease, and turning back old age and extending life itself.
On the other hand, alcohol has been described as a menace, not only to the individual consumer but to the society in which it is consumed. It has been described as evil, as the gift of a devil rather than of any god. Some nineteenth-century Christian theologians were so horrified at the thought that their god might have approved of alcohol that they reinterpreted the Bible to show that Jesus’s first miracle was to turn water into grape juice, not wine. Islam and some other religions banned the consumption of alcohol and other intoxicants. Alcohol has been blamed for illnesses, insanity, accidents, immorality, impiety, social disorder, catastrophes, crime, and death. From the Middle Ages to the present, it has been a convention for some commentators to see alcohol as the core problem from which all other problems flow.
Many critics of alcohol have acknowledged that, consumed in moderation, alcohol need not have dire consequences. Reflecting this position, most authorities have historically tried to mitigate the worst effects of alcohol by surrounding its production, distribution, and consumption by regulations. They have included controlling the alcohol content of beverages, forbidding drinking by children, and limiting the hours of taverns and bars. Other authorities have shown little confidence that men and women can voluntarily limit their intake of alcohol and have deemed it better for everyone to abstain from alcohol completely. Such prohibition rules have been implemented at various times among small Jewish and Christian sects, over vast stretches of the Muslim world, in countries as varied as the United States, Belgium, India, and Russia, and among numerically significant denominations such as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons).
A key theme in the history of alcohol, then, is its regulation, for there are few societies where alcohol has not been restricted in some way. These regulations have taken many forms, such as banning the consumption of alcohol for sections of populations defined by age (children), gender (women), or ethnicity/race (such as Native Americans). In some cases, patterns of alcohol consumption have been regulated informally by social pressure that might be reinforced by social ostracism. In other cases, regulation has taken the form of legislation backed by punishments for disobedience. Drinking by children was for thousands of years discouraged by physicians who warned of the dangers of alcohol on children’s bodies. Only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were minimum legal drinking ages defined by law and enforced by the courts.
The other attributes ascribed to alcohol form other themes in its history. Alcohol was positively associated with gods in ancient cultures, and wine was embraced by mainstream Christianity, which incorporated wine into its most important rituals. But religious organizations have also been prominent critics of the personal and social effects of immoderate alcohol consumption. Similarly, while physicians have for thousands of years considered some alcoholic beverages as having medicinal value (during prohibition in the 1920s, half of American doctors thought whiskey was therapeutic, and a quarter thought the same of beer), they have also warned of the dangers to health of excessive consumption.
An important dimension of the history of alcohol, then, is its contested status and the struggle to find a way to realize its benefits while minimizing its dangers. It might be argued that prohibitionists simply gave up and advocated the position that it was better to deprive moderate drinkers of their alcohol than to allow irresponsible drinkers to misuse it and to place themselves and social order at risk. On the other hand, few people, even the most ardent opponents of prohibition, have ever adopted the opposite position, that all restrictions ought to be removed from alcohol.
These debates on alcohol did not take place in a material or cultural vacuum. Alcohol was a potent signifier of status and power in almost all societies. In many early societies, such as ancient Egypt, beer was consumed by all classes, but wine was also consumed only by the elites. In Greece, only wine was consumed, but it varied hugely in quality; the wine consumed by the elites bore little resemblance, in flavor, texture, and alcohol content, to that consumed by the lower classes. In some cases, alcohol was (in theory, at least) reserved for dominant, colonizing populations: some British administrations in Africa imposed prohibition policies on the indigenous peoples while themselves drinking alcohol, and white governments did the same to native populations in the United States and Canada.
At the material level, until the nineteenth century, alcohol (mainly beer and wine) was widely consumed by Europeans and North Americans for hydration because so many sources of water were unsafe to drink. Within centuries of being founded, Rome had to be supplied with potable water from aqueducts because the River Tiber was polluted. Major waterways and wells in urban centers in Europe (from the Middle Ages) and the Americas (from the eighteenth century) were too contaminated to be sources of safe drinking water. Fermented alcoholic beverages were safer to drink because the process of fermentation killed many harmful bacteria, as did distilled alcohol when it was added to water. Alcohol seems to have become a default beverage to the point that “alcohol” and “drink” became synonymous: the debate on alcohol was called “the drink question,” and “heavy drinking” did not refer to water or tea.
The usefulness of alcohol as a safe form of hydration was a compelling argument for its availability, and no government could adopt prohibition policies unless there was an alternative in the form of reliable supplies of potable water or other nonalcoholic beverages. It is no coincidence that the temperance and prohibition movements arose at the same time that municipal governments in Europe and North America began massive projects to provide urban populations with supplies of safe drinking water, and as coffee, tea, and other nonalcoholic beverages became widely consumed.
At the same time, even though “drinking” generally refers to drinking alcohol, we must be careful not to assume that, before safe water was available, everybody drank alcohol for hydration purposes. Water, potable or not, was free, but alcohol was not. The poor must have consumed any water that was available, a practice that undoubtedly contributed to their low life expectancy. Nor did children often drink alcohol, and in many societies, women were either forbidden or strongly discouraged from doing so. The commonly accepted generalization that everyone in earlier societies consumed alcoholic beverages must surely be wrong, and that is one of the issues addressed in this book.
This is a survey of the ways that alcohol was situated in the various cultures within which it was consumed, and a description and explanation of how alcohol related to structures and processes of power and to issues of gender, class, race/ethnicity, and generation. The focus of the book is Europe, and there is extensive treatment of North America, too. The justification is that, even though alcoholic beverages might have originated elsewhere, and were certainly consumed throughout most of the world, Europeans integrated alcohol more extensively, and in greater volumes, into their cultures than people of any other region. In time, they extended their alcoholic beverages and, to some extent, their alcohol cultures to the wider world. Alcohol became one of the fields of contact, cooperation, and conflict that engaged Europeans and others in the processes of imperialism, colonization, and eventually, decolonization. I have tried for a global perspective in this book, but in doing so I have given priority to the story of the expansion of European alcohol, rather than to analyzing drinking cultures in regions such as Asia and the Pacific, in their own right. I think that approach makes the book thematically more coherent.
I wish to acknowledge the authors of all the material I have used and to thank the staffs of the various libraries and archives I have used. They include the British Library and the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, London, and a number of Archives Départementales in France. My colleagues Matthew McKean and Michel Hogue gave useful advice, Dr. Rob El-Maraghi helped with some medical issues, and I am very grateful to David Fahey and Thomas Brennan, who made innumerable helpful comments and suggestions on the text. Of course, any errors and omissions are all my own work. Finally, it was a great pleasure to work with the helpful, friendly, and efficient people at the University of North Carolina Press. Chuck Grench, who signed me on for this book many years ago, deserves a medal for his patience.