Thirst is deadlier than hunger. Deprived of food,you might survive for a few weeks, but deprived ofliquid refreshment, you would be lucky to last morethan a few days. Only breathing matters more. Tens of thousandsof years ago, early humans foraging in small bands hadto remain near rivers, springs, and lakes to ensure an adequatesupply of freshwater, since storing or carrying it was impractical.The availability of water constrained and guided humankind?sprogress. Drinks have continued to shape human historyever since.Only in the past ten thousand years or so have other beveragesemerged to challenge the preeminence of water. Thesedrinks do not occur naturally in any quantity but must bemade deliberately. As well as offering safer alternatives to contaminated, disease-ridden water supplies in human settlements,these new beverages have taken on a variety of roles. Many ofthem have been used as currencies, in religious rites, as politicalsymbols, or as sources of philosophical and artistic inspiration.Some have served to highlight the power and status of theelite, and others to subjugate or appease the downtrodden.Drinks have been used to celebrate births, commemoratedeaths, and forge and strengthen social bonds; to seal businesstransactions and treaties; to sharpen the senses or dull themind; to convey lifesaving medicines and deadly poisons.As the tides of history have ebbed and flowed, differentdrinks have come to prominence in different times, places, andcultures, from stone-age villages to ancient Greek dining roomsor Enlightenment coffeehouses. Each one became popular whenit met a particular need or aligned with a historical trend; insome cases, it then went on to influence the course of historyin unexpected ways. Just as archaeologists divide history intodifferent periods based on the use of different materials?thestone age, the bronze age, the iron age, and so on?it is alsopossible to divide world history into periods dominated bydifferent drinks. Six beverages in particular?beer, wine, spirits,coffee, tea, and cola?chart the flow of world history. Threecontain alcohol, and three contain caffeine, but what they allhave in common is that each one was the defining drink duringa pivotal historical period, from antiquity to the presentday.

The event that set humankind on the path toward modernitywas the adoption of farming, beginning with the domesticationof cereal grains, which first took place in the Near East aroundten thousand years ago and was accompanied by the appearanceof a rudimentary form of beer. The first civilizations arosearound five thousand years later in Mesopotamia and Egypt,two parallel cultures founded on a surplus of cereal grains producedby organized agriculture on a massive scale. This freed asmall fraction of the population from the need to work in thefields and made possible the emergence of specialist priests,administrators, scribes, and craftsmen. Not only did beer nourishthe inhabitants of the first cities and the authors of the firstwritten documents, but their wages and rations were paid inbread and beer, as cereal grains were the basis of the economy.The flourishing culture that developed within the city-states ofancient Greece in the first millennium BCE spawned advances inphilosophy, politics, science, and literature that still underpinmodern Western thought. Wine was the lifeblood of this Mediterraneancivilization, and the basis of vast seaborne trade thathelped to spread Greek ideas far and wide. Politics, poetry, andphilosophy were discussed at formal drinking parties, or symposia,in which the participants drank from a shared bowl ofdiluted wine. The spread of wine drinking continued under theRomans, the structure of whose hierarchical society was reflectedin a minutely calibrated pecking order of wines and wine styles.Two of the world?s major religions issued opposing verdicts onthe drink: The Christian ritual of the Eucharist has wine at itscenter, but following the collapse of the Roman Empire and therise of Islam, wine was banned in the very region of its birth.The rebirth of Western thought a millennium after the fall of Rome was sparked by the rediscovery of Greek and Romanknowledge, much of which had been safeguarded and extendedby scholars in the Arab world. At the same time, Europeanexplorers, driven by the desire to circumvent the Arab monopolyon trade with the East, sailed west to the Americas and east toIndia and China. Global sea routes were established, and Europeannations vied with one another to carve up the globe. Duringthis Age of Exploration a new range of beverages came to thefore, made possible by distillation, an alchemical process knownin the ancient world but much improved by Arab scholars. Distilleddrinks provided alcohol in a compact, durable form idealfor sea transport. Such drinks as brandy, rum, and whiskey wereused as currency to buy slaves and became particularly popularin the North American colonies, where they became so politicallycontentious that they played a key role in the establishmentof the United States.