A Toast to 10,000 Years!

Last week I began teaching another new course in my career. New courses are, well, I guess like new friends. There are those moments of utter joy and strangeness in the new discoveries, then the wonder at how you ever might have lived before that friend came into your life; there is real work to create a groove where there had not been one before; there are ups and downs, and hopefully, exhilaration. As easy as it might seem to teach a history course (Hey! All you do is start at the beginning and keep going until the year ends!!) I obsess about how to properly introduce the students to a course. What do I do that first week that will create the kind of thoughtful, curious, reflective, challenged student I enjoy?? I wade through many ideas and sources, trying to plot and plan how best to engage them in a subject.

My challenge in AP World History is that in about 120 school days I must empower my 50-some students so that they could answer any question about anything that has ever happened in the history of humankind on the AP test. Oh my…new friends can be so taxing and consuming!!

I decided that in the first week I need to do some kind of overview that somehow provided a snapshot of 10,000 years of history. I have never done this before, but I enjoyed the thought process…hmmm…how to give them the sweep, the breadth, the drama, the purposefulness, the thrill of 10,000 years? I remembered a play I had directed back in Charlotte in the Fall of 1995, a play with the audacious title of The Compleat Wrks of Wllm Shkspear, in which my cast offered an overview of all of the bard’s plays.

I had recently read a book in which the author argued that many of the developments of world history could be traced to the primacy of six drinks. Hmmm…so I thought I would use that as my lens and do my overview of 10,000 years as

World History As Seen Through Six Drinks

The drinks are: beer, wine, distilled alcohol, coffee, tea, and coca-cola. In these six drinks we would travel 10,000 years and cover all the continents of the world. I thought I would give you a little taste of that two-day lesson in class.


Around 10,000 years ago there was a phenomenon not far from here, in Jordan, historians call the Neolithic Revolution: when humans domesticated cereal grains. At this same time was the first appearance of beer. Beer was discovered—not invented. These grains that had been made into food sat around for a while, and went through the scientific transformation of fermentation. People drank this (on a dare probably at first!) and found it pleasantly intoxicating. At first people didn’t know what to make of this process, and so thought beer was a gift from the gods. In Egypt, for example, they believed that beer was discovered by Osiris, one of the most powerful gods. Naturally, then, beer was used in religious ceremonies. Some of the very first documents in the history of writing talk about who had access to beer, and that societies paid wages in bread and beer! Beer appears in prayers, poems, and plays. In minimum wages, in government documents, it records that every person is allowed a payment of a liter of beer every day. The workers who built the pyramids were paid in beer! The payment was about 3-4 loaves of bread and 8 American pints of beer. People were buried with jars of beer. Another thing left from these ancient days is toasting: one toasted someone’s health before a drink of beer since they thought beer came from the gods and it held magical properties.


We don’t know when wine is invented, but there is a great story of a huge party by a king that reveals something about a new importance of wine. King Ashurnasirpal of Assyria, in modern Iraq, had a 10-day party in 870 BCE for himself and he wrote that he would serve wine and not beer. Beer was for poor people, and wine is for the rich! The wine came from the islands of Greece, and cost so much to transport it to Assyria. Serving wine from a distant region made his power seem even more impressive.

Of course much of the western world looks back to the ancient Greek and Roman world to explain theories of government, literature, and science, and almost anything else. It is legendarily the cornerstone of western thought. The Greeks pursued all of this thought through “adversarial discussion,” and drinking. Hmmm…The Greeks did not like the beer of the Middle East, and developed wine. Soon they were trading wine all over the Mediterranean and that helped make the Greeks rich, and also spread their ideas far and wide. Politics, poetry and drama were discussed at formal drinking parties, or symposia, in which the participants drank from a shared bowl of wine and discussed philosophy. The Romans, who came along after the Greeks, saw themselves and wanted to be like the Greeks, so much so that I call them “Greek wannabes.” And so wine became associated with wealth and civilization. Moreover, two of the world’s major religions issued opposing verdicts on wine, as well: the Christian ritual of the Mass has wine at its center, but with the rise of Islam, Muslims banned wine. Is there more to it than just alcohol? Could this be about political tension as well? According to the Bible, the first miracle Jesus Christ performed was the transformation of six jars water into wine. Jesus said, “I am the vine, you are the branches.” At the Last Supper, Jesus offered his followers wine, saying this was a symbol for his blood. Now jump ahead 600 years when the Muhammad received the visions from God that became the Koran. Among the duties of a Muslim is to abstain from alcohol. Tradition has it that this rule was made after a drunken fight between two of his followers and Muhammad sought divine guidance and received an uncompromising reply. In many ways it is meant as a rejection of many things Roman, like Christianity and their love of wine. This signal reveals one of the tensions between these competing religions.

Let’s jump to 1000 and the city of Cordoba in Arab Spain. One of the things the Arabs invented around 1000 was distilled alcohol—boiling it and making alcohol so much stronger. It was seen as medicine in the Arab world. Now—let’s skip about 500 years and it has moved from a medicinal drink to a recreational drink. In the European world, this distilled drink emerged as an important supply on explorers’ ships as the European kings wanted to get away from Arabs who kept them from doing business, so explorers began to sail west, to the Americas, hoping to come to India and China. The Europeans also wanted the sugar that the Arabs denied them. As Columbus and others discovered the New World, they saw that this was a great place to grow sugar. And people wanted sugar, and they would pay mucho money for it!!! Europeans picked up on this method and began to make rum and whiskey. Interestingly, this rum and whiskey proved more than just popular with sailors. It became the method of exchange to buy slaves in Africa and sell the slaves in the Americas. Slaves???? Yes, starting around 1500 Europeans began to create a slave trade to make more money off of the sugar plantations. They had an argument from the Bible about enslavement: since the Pope had decreed that black people were not fully human it was okay to enslave them. It became more and more acceptable, especially since slavery was out of sight to the Europeans. It was all in the New World. Now as the Europeans went to Africa to get the human cargo, the slaves, the African slavers most wanted these strong alcoholic drinks. Soooo the Europeans perfected their drinks and used the brandy, rum, and whiskey to make a huge amount of money. They took the rum to Africa for the slaves; took the slaves to the Caribbean, where they got the sugar; took the sugar to the New England ports where they made the rum. Then the process began again…These people became the richest people, non-kings, in the world! The interesting things is that rum is cheap to make!!! It is made from the leftovers of making sugar! So cheap and profitable. Here is also something interesting: the British became the best navy in the world—how? They had the most sailors, the fewest who died. Why? They discovered that if you added lemon or lime juice to the rum, fewer sailors got sick and died, and they were healthier because of the cocktails. That is also how Britain became the most powerful empire on earth!

Coffee is a drink that is totally from the Arab world, and they loved it. It was sometimes called the “wine of Islam.” In the Arab world, beginning around 1500 it became even more popular to meet and talk about politics and science in a coffeehouse. Oh, and we know how those Europeans love to copy people: merchants from Italy found out about these Arab coffeehouses, and took the idea back to Europe. First the Europeans went mad for coffee, then the rage and fashion of the coffeehouse. By 1650 these coffeehouses had spread through the rich, trading centers of Europe. These were not like taverns where you just got drunk. People went to coffeehouses to discuss the latest ideas and theories. They had bookshelves and fancy discussions and debates. If you wanted the latest news, you went to a coffeehouse. It was like the internet of its day. And everyone could come there—not just rich people. It was seen that coffee promoted clear thinking so it became the ideal drink for scientists, poets, learned people, and people interested in changing society. Coffeehouse discussions led to the establishment of scientific societies, the founding of newspapers, financial institutions and provided fertile ground for revolutionary thought. I would argue that there would not have been an American Revolution or a French Revolution without that coffeehouse hothouse environment.

In 1773 a British navy man declared that “the sun never set on the British empire,” meaning it encompassed more land and people under it than any empire in history. How did it accomplish this? The trade in distilled alcohol, and then the trade in tea led to this pre-eminence in the world. Indeed, the desire for tea in Britain changed how they went about their trade routes and foreign policy. Britain wanted more tea, and so wanted to control India and China, from where the tea came. Westerners wanted so much to be like the civilized, stable Chinese and so they did what the Chinese did—they wanted tea.
And, well…the profit on a ton of tea was several years’ wages! So the money from the rum trade allowed them to go after India and China. And so they did…the British went after the French, got them out of their way, went after the Dutch, got them out of the way, and finally by the mid-19th century, after plying the Chinese and Indians with opium, controlled the world’s tea trade. The British made tea available to everyone, making even the poor love the government for providing them with cheap tea. Owners of factories offered free tea breaks, making workers very happy as well. The story of tea is the story of power and world domination.

The story of a certain carbonated drink from Atlanta, Georgia in 1885 almost tells itself. Is there anyone alive who does not know of this brand? This American drink is a world-wide phenomenon and has become a leading symbol of globalization and the power of the USA. How did it get there? In War World II, Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, General Eisenhower, ordered the military to purchase at least 10 million bottles of the stuff every month and send it to wherever American soldiers were stationed around the world. As he told the executives at C-C, he wanted our soldiers to know what they were fighting for. That was how Coca-cola created a world-wide market—they went where those soldiers were. During the days of the Cold War the Soviet Union secretly bought Coca-cola and colored it white and put it in different bottles so the Soviets would not know it was a product from the devil capitalist west.

But the story that I think best illustrates the reach and power of Coca-cola comes from a story I read in a magazine a few years ago. African leaders met in a summit to address the tragic situation of the spread of AIDS in Africa. They wondered how to get the necessary drugs to people in far-flung areas. Someone suggested, “why don’t we follow the Coca-cola trucks? Use their routes, and we will reach the most people.” Ahhhh…the power of the real thing.

So there—our overview of 10,000 years!!