It began with pepper and other spices, like cinnamon and nutmeg, some eight hundred years ago. Then came coffee, tea, and chocolate, followed by alcohol and opium--all articles of pleasure people in the Western world craved in order to escape from their humdrum lives and heighten their daily enjoyment. How humanity transformed its history in the course of finding the rare condiments, stimulants, intoxicants, and narcotics that helped to make life more tolerable is the story of this rich and captivating book. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, in his engrossing journey through the centuries, documents with a wealth of startling information (and 125 illustrations) how our drive for the pleasure substances we can eat, drink, or inhale fueled the energies of the Old World with an explosive power that propelled mankind across the oceans and into a new age. The urge to please the palate and stimulate, benumb, or pleasure the senses arose at the dawn of the modern age to dovetail with the needs of the rising merchant class and the capitalism it spawned. How the hunger for spices mobilized the Occident's energies with an intensity matched only by today's greed for oil; how coffee became the drink of the bourgeois age as the beverage which, unlike alcohol, promotes clear thinking and hard work; how tobacco became coffee's ally in fine-tuning the fast-paced nervous sensibilities of the modern era--here is a rich human array, an anecdotal history of ideas and beliefs, of fashions, fads, and rituals that orders a treasury of unknown facts in a new way to give us a fresh perspective on our own past and on our present.
Spices in the fifteenth century
Venice became the chief transfer point in Europe. Its heyday closely coincided with the period when Europe consumed the greatest amount of pepper, from the twelth century to the sixteenth.
In the fifteenth century the combination of these three factors - increased demand, stagnant transportation technology, and spiraling custom duties - led to a thirtyfold rise in the price of pepper coming from India to Venice.
The answer was a sea route to India, which was perhaps "the" grand obsession of the fifteenth century.
The New World, discovered in the process, proved too vast, with a dynamic too much its own: "indigestible" for the Middle Ages.
On coffee
As a nonalcoholic, noninoxicating, indeed even a sobering and mentally stimulating drink, it seemed to be tailored-made for a culture that forbade alcohol consumption and gave birth to modern mathematics. Arabic culture is dominated by abstraction more than any other culture in human history. Coffe has rightly been called the wine of Islam.
(...) up until the introduction of the new warm beverages, beer was the basic source of nourishment in the diet (at least in England and Holland, the first middle-class nations).
Coffee is he great drying agent at the threshold of the modern age.
The coffeehouse of the seventeenth and eighteenth century:
its clientele, far from ebing elderly ladies eating cake, were businessmen. In England women were denied access, though on the Continent they were tolerated. In other words, coffeehouses were primarily places to do business. (...) In London, where the form first flourished, it also disappeared first, eclipsed in the eighteenth century by its successor, the club.
It was "the" site for the public life of the eighteenth-century middle class, a place where the bourgeoisie developed new forms of commerce and culture.
When coffee reached Europe, the middle class drank it only in the coffehouses. It took half a century (...) for coffee to enter the domestic sphere, as breakfast and afternoon drink.
Mercantilism and state interference
After 1750(...) coffee, together with a whole set of other imported items, came under the scrutiny of mercantile economic policies. Measure by he state to retrict coffee consumption followed: higher duties on coffee, state monopolies on its sale and roasting, and even outright prohibition of coffee.
Smuggling, though, was an important econmomic factor in the eighteenth century, and the smuggler was a siginificant social type: a socioeconomic renegade, challenging the power of the bureaucratic, absolutist state.
Substitution products
At the turn of the eighteenth century Great Britain was one of the major coffee consumers of Europe. Half a century later coffee played only a subordinate role. Tea has suplanted it.
Tea at the start of the century was actually cheaper to use, even though more expensive to buy by absolute weight.
Chocolate
If we label coffeea Protestant, northern drink, then chocolate must be designated as its Catholic, southern counterpart.
Whreas the middle-class family sat erect at the breakfast table, with a sense of disciplined propiriety, the essence of the chocolate ritual was fluid, lazy, languid motion. If coffee virtually sook drinkers awake for the workday that lay ahead, chocolate was meant to create an intermiedary state between lying down and sitting up.
By an irony of history it was the two arch-Protestant countries that put an end to the Spanic, Catholic chocolate traditions. Holland became the first major producer of cocoa and solid chocolate in bar form, Switzerland following its lead with the innovation of milk chocolate.
Liquor
Liquor and the mechanical loom worked hand in hand, as it were, in eighteenth-century England, to destroy traditinal ways of life and labor.
So began solitary drinking, a form of drinking limited to industrialized Europe and America. In every other age and civilization drinking had been collective.
Rituals
What makes drinking more important than eating is the fact that here the individual life or "soul" of a thing is being directly assimilated. (...) As he drinks, man assimilitates the soul of something else and he loses his soul in proportion to his drinking.
Drinking rituals are communal so that all will feel safe and be able to keep a watchful eye on one another.
Communal drinking is (...) characterized by a remarkable ambivalence. On the one hand, it creates fraternity among drinkers, on the other this relationship is marked by mutual caution, obligation, and competitiveness, which mak it seem far less than friendly.
The rules and rituals that accompany drinking in a bar or pub survive in our modern civilization as relics from a long-forgotten age.
The modern hot beverages offer nothing comparable to the communal rites of alcohol consumption. (...) Coffe and tea drinkers form no internally united community; theay are only an assemblage of lone individuals.
Opium and Colonialism
In the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, when the Middle Empire was still an equal partner of the European powers, these articles (from China) were regularly paid for incash, because the Chinese had no use for anything the Europeans could offer them in exchange.
Instead o continuing to pay for Chinese products in cash, the company now offered a special trade item, opium. It was a cheap commodity for the company, produced on a large scale on its plantations in India.