The Other School of Economics

On ‘Total History’ and ‘how the way we booze shaped the modern world’*

Let’s face it, apart from specific parts of the world such as Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan where alcohol consumption is banned, the world goes on a global scale piss around Christmas and New Year.

However loosely accurate they might be, the regular spikes exhibited by Google Trends on keywords ‘wine, champagne, alcohol, drinks’ are quite telling: something is definitively happening around the end of the year.

Booze research

From spotting these patterns to trying to find out a bit more on the incidence alcohol has been having in history, there is a very small step that we had to take.

Gathering empirical evidence

The research turns out to be fascinating for two reasons.

Firstly, alcohol is such an integral part of our social live. Even (especially) in societies where it does not officially exist, it is actually everywhere. A good litmus test is to observe what happens when it is removed. Your correspondent lived in the Gulf for a couple of years and observed first hand the effect of prohibition: alcohol is an absolute obsession at all levels of social life. In fact, obtaining it is one of the biggest social driver among Saudis and Western expats: on the black market, via the western Embassies, brewing at home, or even in the most extreme cases getting the ethanol from dubious substances such as surgical spirit.

The second reason researching the role of alcohol in history is fascinating is that it leads to studying the structure of every day life. A methodology introduced by French historian Fernand Braudel and the ‘Annales school of historians‘, who revolutionised Historiography in the 1950’s and 60’s.

Total History

Before Braudel the study of history was focused on events (histoire événementielle) and on relatively short periods of time. In other words, it was concerned with kings, battles and thinkers, very ‘compartmented’ between eras, without much considerations for long term trends.

Braudel introduced the concept of ‘Total History’: a longer view and the role of large-scale social, economic and cultural factors in the making and writing of history. He looked for broader “structures”: he argued that the course of human history is the result, not of events such as battles or the actions of individuals, but is the outcome of  longer-term structures political, social, economic and geographic structures. For Braudel, ‘events’, the subject matter of traditional history, were relatively insignificant in shaping the narrative, and individuals were severely limited and constrained in what they could do by broader and deeper structures beyond their control. In doing so he also emphasized the importance of the everyday lives of serfs, peasants, and commoners, demonstrating their importance in shaping civilisations. His key contribution was to reform the ‘history narrative’, often too focused on the wealthy ruling classes.

Whilst he opened up a new paradigm in historiography, he probably did not realise back in the 1960’s that he would pioneer what is now a very popular literary genre: pop-History.

L’Absinthe, Edgar Degas –  Musée d’Orsay, Paris

The History of the World in 6 Glasses

It is this popular style of writing that Tom Standage, former technology editor at The Economist, chose when he wrote his “History of the World in 6 Glasses”.

His book illustrates the power of the genre, as well as its potential pitfalls: the author picks a precise subject – often an edible one, like salt or chocolate – and digs up as many relevant anecdotes and factoids as research will allow to view the world through his chosen angle. If written with a minimum of substance, it gives good insights via accessible stories about the changing textures of human life. If artificially written, it becomes ludicrous and ends up in fads of the type of “how chicken nuggets made the modern world”(*): a continued set of random tangents about historical events and the supposedly pivotal role of the subject in the history of the world.

Standage focused on the history of beverages and how it influenced, and was influenced by, the history of economic development. Reviews tend to agree he has not done such a bad job at it.

Beer was discovered in ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt. It might have been the original motivation for domesticating cereal crops, thus switching from a nomadic to a settled lifestyle. Whilst there is debate among academics whether beer or bread was the critical motivator, the consensus on the crucial role of cereals and yeast fermentation is at least clear for both products.

Wine is possibly as old as beer but linked in Standage’s story mainly with Greek and Roman antiquity: the civilizer of Greece and Rome. It was incorporated into religious rituals, became important in hospitality, was used for medicinal purposes and it became an integral part of daily meals.

Spirits (rum, whiskey and gin) came from the most important innovation regarding alcohol discovered during the Middle Ages: distillation. An important development that enabled to reach higher levels of concentration and therefore to store alcohol content in much smaller volumes that the fermented beer of wine. This made alcohol more transportable and led to its commerce and the infamous ‘slave trade triangle’ between New England, the West Coast of Africa and the West Indies. In Britain, the diffusion of spirits led to the Gin Craze of the seventeen-twenties to the seventeen-fifties, which was among history’s epic binges and man-made medical disasters as attested by a sign on one of thousands of gin shops: “Drunk for a penny, dead drunk for tuppence, straw for nothing.”

It is in trying to explain how Europe stopped this spirits binge that Standage slightly flirts with a fallacy. He explains that following the alcohol craze, the rise of coffee in the seventeen century came as “the great soberer”. It was “the ideal beverage for the Age of Reason,” the “preferred drink of scientists, intellectuals, merchants, and clerks,” the elixir they relied on for “waking them up in the morning.”

The line that caught my attention is the claim that with the coffeehouse era,

“Europe began to emerge from an alcoholic haze that had lasted for centuries”.

A very loaded statement which deserves attention.

Taken literally, Standage implies that Europe was on the perpetual piss, smashed from dawn to dusk for centuries, which hampered progress. The angle he followed is that the decrease in alcohol consumption came from the rise of coffeehouses, and fostered a development never seen before.

A closer examination reveals the danger of such a black and white claim coming out of the pop-history approach, but also gives fascinating insight on people’s relation to alcohol at the time.

Alcohol was a necessary part of people diet: “People drank a significant proportion of their daily intake of calories.” (Braudel). It was also a necessary substitute to water. For instance, in seventeenth-century London water was so foul that Londoners drank little or none of it. Beer and ale were scarcely thought of as intoxicants compare to the potential dangers of water contamination.

Available data such as Londoner Samuel Pepys’ diary shows that coffee actually did not replace alcoholic beverages. From the “morning draft” to the wine taken with dinner, alcohol kept pouring even as the consumption of coffee spread across Europe. In the sixteenth century, alcohol beverage consumption reached 100 liters per person per year in Valladolid, Spain, and Polish peasants consumed up to three liters of beer per day (Braudel, 1974). In Coventry, the average amount of beer and ale consumed was about 17 pints per person per week, compared to about three pints today (Monckton, 1966); nationwide, consumption was about one pint per day per capita. Swedish beer consumption may have been 40 times higher than in modem Sweden. Those levels did not diminish overnight.

So myth busted. Coffee did not replace alcohol.

New Lloyds Coffeehouse, later in the 18th century

What did happen however, is that the popularity of coffeehouses as places to socialize favoured the spread of ideas in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Slight nuance.

Drinking of coffee contributed to the development of new forms of sociability. As public spaces they promoted a strong form of egalitarianism mixing aristocrats, merchants, and artisans at the same table. Drinking was not the primary motive of the visit: talking and doing business was. A platform for a social network…. A social network so threatening to the established authorities Charles II tried to ban them in 1675. But the popular outcry was so strong that he was forced to rescind the order shortly thereafter. Coffeehouses provided an extremely rich environment for large range of social and business activities: philosophical or scientific lectures, the foundation of the English insurance industry at Lloyd’s coffeehouse, the spread of journalism at a time where the dissemination of news actually did not occur via heavily state-controlled printed newspapers but orally at the coffee shop (1). This is how the modern ideas of the public sphere and public opinion developed.

The punch line of this anecdote is that the social and economic changes that followed this period, the progress in sanitation and medicine eventually changed the way alcohol consumption was socially accepted. The modern negative notion of alcoholism replaced the commonly tolerated drunkenness. Alcohol ceased to be a dietary supplement to become exclusively a social lubricant.

Conclusion

Academics have frown upon modern pop-historians as using broad brush-strokes to fill in their argument, and often confusing an explanation of causes with a justification of the results.

Braudel himself has also been criticized at another academic conceptual level:. The flip side of the approach promoted by the Annales school is that looking at political, social, economic and geographic structures in history can lead to the view that the environment becomes unresponsive to human control;  that humans are ‘prisoners’ of their physical environment and mental framework.
It is well illustrated by his line flagged by UCLA Scholar Brad Fidler “Capitalism has been potentially visible since the dawn of history, and (…) it has developed and perpetuated itself down the ages”. A fairly chilling statement for any progressive thinker wishing to reform ‘the system’.

My personal read of this entertaining research on the way we booze, is that despite the risk of a few shortcuts and pitfalls inherent to this genre, looking at trends, patterns and the structure of everyday life in an informed manner is an enlightening way to consider history. As blogger @rossencraft noted tongue in cheek: “Epistemology debates are for the unemployed, but a young mind needs a foundation, a point of reference, before you deconstruct or you do whatever it is they do in academia these days.” Total History provides such a point of reference.

Moreover, contrary to Braudel’s determinism, an important insight from those “structures” is the understanding of “why the things we have, are the way they are”, equipping us with the best possible arguments to refute that for a given system, “there is no other alternative”.

{ leLaissezFaire }

Fernand Braudel

References:

(*):  Obviously a deliberately WTF title. pop-Historians love sensationalised ‘cutain raisers’.’

(1): “the spread of journalism at a time where the dissemination of news actually did not occur via heavily state-controlled printed newspapers but orally at the coffee shop”: Journalism: a critical history By Martin Conboy

New Yorker review of ‘A History of the World in 6 Glasses’: LIQUID ASSETS, The social life of beverages.