In a survey of alcohol cultures—which embody the ways alcohol is perceived, valued, and consumed—in many regions over hundreds and thousands of years, the one constant that appears to be present, regardless of time and place, is that alcohol was a highly contested commodity. On one hand, it was represented as good—as a beverage sometimes given by a god and often associated positively with religion, and as a beverage that had the potential to be healthy and therapeutic and support sociability and community at all levels. On the other hand, alcohol had the potential to cause individual and social calamities expressed through immorality, impiety, social disruption, poor physical and mental health, and crime.
How these various potentials were realized depended on how alcohol was consumed, and perhaps the most important dimension of the history of alcohol lies in the persistent attempts of authorities to define the point at which moderate and therefore safe drinking crossed over to the excessive and dangerous. In many cases, the point was defined only after the fact, when a drinker had passed it and become intoxicated. Excessive drinking was manifested in speech, physical coordination, and behaviors that were associated with intoxication. At other times, specific maximum volumes have been defined, as public health authorities in many countries now offer guidelines on maximum amounts of alcohol per day. In some cases, authorities have implemented prohibition policies that were universal, as in the case of Muslims and Mormons, or targeted at particular populations, such as indigenous peoples in colonized societies.
These various policies were based on prevailing assessments of the potentials of alcohol for good and bad. Prohibition policies were and are based on the assumption that the dangers presented by those who misuse alcohol outweigh any rights that other consumers might feel they have to be able to consume alcohol. Less rigorous regulatory policies seek to allow people to consume alcohol and derive personal or social benefits from it while trying to mitigate its dangers by restricting access to alcohol by age, gender, or ethnicity and by limiting the occasions on which it may be purchased or consumed.
The general anxieties about alcohol that we have seen expressed in contexts as diverse as ancient Mesopotamia and the British colonies in Africa, or in modern France and nineteenth-century America, were fundamentally broad-based anxieties about social order: if consuming alcohol could lead individuals to lose control of their speech and bodies, then the mass consumption of alcohol could result in loss of discipline in the social body more broadly. These anxieties appear in almost all cultures, but we should be attuned to the variations that exist within persistent themes.
One common anxiety is evident in male attitudes toward women’s drinking. Historically, men have been anxious about women’s drinking, generally because they believed that women were sexually less restrained or inhibited under the influence of alcohol. This is a reasonable enough assumption, as one of the effects of alcohol is to lower inhibitions of all kinds. But even though women’s bodies absorb and metabolize alcohol at a different rate from men’s, alcohol does not discriminate between genders in its effects. All things being equal, women are no more given than men to risky behavior, sexual or otherwise, under the influence of alcohol. (It could be argued that cultural influences more often militated against women taking as many sexual risks as men.) Opposition by drinking men to women’s drinking is, at base, an expression of the double standard of sexual morality.
Yet although it appears to be a historical constant, male anxiety about the consumption of alcohol by women took different forms at different times. In ancient Rome, the stress was on the consumption of wine by married women, quite likely because of fear than an intoxicated wife would commit adultery and conceive a child that her husband might unknowingly raise as his own. It is notable that the penalties for drinking by a woman—at some times death, at other times divorce—were the same as those imposed on women who committed adultery. In early eighteenth-century England, in contrast, the panic about gin consumption focused on women as mothers rather than as wives. As we have seen, gin was known as Mother Gin and Mother’s Folly, and Hogarth’s famous print Gin Lane depicted a nursing mother as its focal image. Can it be a coincidence that fertility and population growth were among the great concerns of the eighteenth century and that a number of contemporary pamphlets emphasized the harmful effects of gin on children and the birthrate?
A somewhat different emphasis can be located in the anxiety over drinking by young women during and immediately after the First World War. It was widely noted that during the war, women benefiting from new work opportunities and increased incomes began to frequent public houses. This behavior, which until that time was largely associated with men, coincided with changes in women’s clothing and hairstyles that were considered masculine. At the end of the war, there were various attempts to refeminize women, not least by firing them from many of the industrial jobs they had performed so as to make room for demobilized soldiers. Anxiety about women’s drinking in this period reflected a need to reestablish the gender boundaries that were thought to have been eroded by wartime conditions.
In these and other cases, the fundamental objection was to the consumption of alcohol by women. But the precise formulation of the objection in each period reflected broader cultural anxieties about some aspect of the gendered order that was perceived as threatened by alcohol consumption by women. Although the evidence is patchy and often poor for much of the period covered by this book, it seems that where women were permitted to consume alcohol, they generally consumed less than their male counterparts, no matter which period, region, or class we look at. That is certainly true today, when many more women than men describe themselves as abstainers: 40 percent of women vs. 30 percent of men in the United States; 25 percent vs. 10 percent in Italy; and 45 percent vs. 13 percent in China.1 Abstention was even more true of children in the past, although we must be aware that definitions of childhood have changed over time. When young people started apprenticeships and full-time work in their early teens in early modern Europe, they might well have started drinking alcohol.
Thus generalizations about historical trends in alcohol consumption are hazardous. But that said, a close reading of materials from many regions and periods might lead us to the conclusion that some important regions of the world have entered what might be thought of as a “post-alcohol” era, in the sense that alcohol consumption has reached historic lows.
For hundreds of years, alcoholic beverages have been part of the daily diet for substantial proportions of the adult populations of Europe, Asia, and the Americas, as well as in Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. In Europe and North America, as we have seen, regular access to clean drinking water was a challenge that was not addressed until major public water projects were completed in the nineteenth century. Until then, beer and wine were accepted as safer alternatives to the water that was available, and distilled spirits could be added to water to kill some of the bacteria that rendered it harmful to human health. To this extent, alcohol and water have histories that flow together in significant ways.
But although historians have insisted on the importance of alcoholic beverages as safer alternatives to polluted water, we have to recognize that cultural and material considerations seem often to have overridden the imperatives of health. In most of the cultures in most of the periods we are able to study, there was no question that adult men should have access to moderate volumes of alcohol on a regular basis, but as we have seen, there were often acute anxieties about women’s drinking and opposition to the consumption of alcohol by children. This raises the question of the priorities in play. It was widely recognized that alcoholic beverages were safer than the water that was available; we should recall the trepidation with which the Puritans faced the prospect of drinking water in America when their supplies of beer and water began to run out. But the males who formulated alcohol policy seemed quite at ease recommending that women and children (boys up to their teens, at any rate) should abstain from alcohol and, by implication, risk sickness and even death.
Alcohol was thought unsuitable for children because, according to the theory that dominated Western medical thinking through the eighteenth century, its warming qualities would act adversely on their already warm bodies. But as we have seen, the argument most commonly advanced against adult women drinking was that alcohol caused them to lose their sexual inhibitions. Men might also become sexually indiscriminate after drinking, but for the most part, they did not consider that nearly as problematic, if problematic at all. It seems that there was a moral calculation that it was better to put women at risk of the illnesses and worse that were believed to ensue from water-drinking than to put them (or their husbands) at moral risk of committing a sexual transgression. From the point of view of a married man, it was preferable to be a widower than a cuckold.
Although women and children were often forbidden to drink alcohol or were rigorously limited in the volumes they could consume, substantial sections of historic populations must have abstained from alcohol because they had no choice. All alcohol—even the poorest quality, such as the watery, sour wine consumed by workers and soldiers in ancient Rome and the adulterated gin fabricated in England in the early 1700s—cost money, whereas water, whether from a public well or a natural source such as a river or lake, was free. Except on rare occasions when wine or beer might have been dispensed gratis at a celebration, the poor did not have access to alcoholic beverages on a regular basis. The absence of alcohol from the diets of the poor and the recourse to low-quality water that followed from it must be added to the generally deficient diets and conditions of life that contributed to their low life expectancy.
These are massive qualifications to the common historical generalization that populations in the past drank alcoholic beverages because they were safer than water. Many of these populations, like those in Europe from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century, were weighted toward the young, unlike many modern populations where older generations predominate. If we subtract females and poor males from these populations, we are left with only a minority who could drink alcohol on a regular and substantial basis. While it might be true that beer and wine were healthier and safer than existing water supplies, prevailing cultural and financial conditions made it likely that only a minority of the population could avail themselves of the safer options. The notion that alcohol was the common alternative to poor-quality water begins to look very shaky.
Although this scenario reflects what we know of likely practices, we have few reliable statistics on the patterns of consumption to support it. For the most part, we have estimates of per capita consumption in some town for certain years or among specific groups (including nuns, printers, and lawyers) at particular times. Such estimates of historic per capita consumption are almost always based on two statistics that are approximate at best: population numbers, which tend to be unreliable before the mid-nineteenth century, and estimates of alcohol production or distribution, which are also often unreliable and which never account for alcohol that was produced, distributed, or consumed clandestinely or in some manner that escaped the official record. Beyond those weaknesses, figures of per capita consumption conceal what must have been vast variations in consumption by gender, class, age, or region. In cultures where alcohol consumption by women was forbidden or strongly discouraged and where practice might well have followed prescription, it makes more sense to calculate male-only per capita consumption.
In short, there are large gaps in our knowledge of historic patterns of alcohol consumption, and if we are to draw any conclusions about long-term trends, we must speculate to a lesser or greater degree. Doing so suggests that some important regions of the world have entered a post-alcohol era. During the early modern period, from about 1500 to 1800, alcohol consumption in Europe and North America seems to have been robust. We cannot estimate general levels of consumption with any confidence, and we should be wary of taking at face value the many contemporary commentaries that deplored heavy drinking. But the weight of the evidence suggests that alcohol was widely consumed by men and by women (although in greater volumes by men), and that it was consumed throughout the day.
Everything changed in the mid-nineteenth century, when municipal authorities began to provide the inhabitants of cities with reliable supplies of potable water. This was a hinge in the long-term history of alcohol. It initiated a transformation in the cultural meaning of alcohol by removing any need to drink alcohol as an alternative to water. The transformation was buttressed by the increased consumption of other nonalcoholic beverages (such as tea and coffee) by the masses and by the erosion (but not the disappearance) of the positive religious and medicinal associations that alcohol had carried for thousands of years. Alcohol became a discretionary beverage, not one that any person with access to fresh water needed to drink.
But because alcohol consumption was embedded in diets and in cultures—from downing a beer or glass of spirits at the pub or tavern on the way home from work to sipping and toasting with wine at occasions as diverse as weddings and state banquets—alcohol did not disappear, even when it was legislated off the table by prohibition policies. Beyond their value for hydration, alcoholic beverages were popular simply because they were alcoholic, a point we often forget when we talk about the various reasons why consumers historically drank alcohol. Alcohol imparts a pleasant feeling, and it helps many people socialize, unwind, and lose their inhibitions—effects of alcohol that historically have been highly valued and often sought.
Even so, and despite the fact that our knowledge of historic consumption rates is shaky, it seems that alcohol consumption today is lower than ever in many economically developed countries and that it might drop further. There has certainly been a decline in alcohol consumption in a number of Western countries since the early twentieth century, a period when statistical evidence is far more reliable. Despite concerns about youth drinking, the highest alcohol consumption rates in these countries today are generally in the older age groups. That could be a function of financial resources, but it is possible that younger generations have adopted means other than alcohol to achieve the states that alcohol provides. Drugs of many kinds, especially marijuana, are widely popular, and young people also commonly consume beverages fortified with caffeine (sometimes both caffeine and alcohol). Young people also tend to be more respectful of laws regarding drinking and driving than earlier generations were. The overall result is that, unless younger generations start drinking substantially more alcohol as they get older, per capita consumption can be expected to decline even more once the higher-consuming generations die off.
These patterns are most evident in some of the most economically developed societies, but there are societies where there is no evidence of a decline in alcohol consumption. From the global perspective, alcohol is not on the verge of extinction, but its importance as a social issue in many societies might well diminish significantly in the decades to come.