The history of six liquids flows in 'Glasses'

The number of books with titles that promise to explain how something changed the world has become officially tedious. For every case where the premise is plausible (cod fishery, gunpowder, glass) two or three are either highly dubious (the Fender bass guitar) or downright silly (the color mauve). Lucky for us that when The Economist magazine's technology editor, Tom Standage, decided to follow his readable study of an 18th-century chess-playing automaton, ''The Turk," with a book about six beverages that really did change the world, he had the grace to take both the title and the story in a new direction.

In ''A History of the World in Six Glasses" (Walker & Company), Standage looks at the emergence and subsequent careers of beer, wine, spirits, coffee, tea, and Coca-Cola as beverages with world historical credentials. These drinks had a profound influence on the cultures into which they were born and now, as global commodities, they continue to play an intimate role in the daily ritual of billions. What isn't lost on the slender, talkative British-born Oxford graduate, who describes himself as a foodie and wine enthusiast -- this over two glasses (one beer, one wine) in the Back Bay -- is that each of the beverages he writes about isn't just a drink but a technology in its own right. As such, they deserve to be approached the same way one would the telegraph (the subject of Standage's first book, ''The Victorian Internet") or the integrated circuit.

Fixing six fascinating and powerful beverages into their respective historical contexts within 300-odd pages requires, shall we say, an impressive bit of shoehorning. Of the temptation to tip too far in one direction or the other, the 35-year-old former technology reporter for London's Daily Telegraph and Guardian newspapers says he tends to think of himself as a man walking along a mountain ridge. ''On one side you have all the details associated with these interesting drinks, on the other is the history of the world. My task was to avoid falling off the ridge and tumbling down either side."

The dimensions of this formidable challenge are nowhere more painfully apparent than when Standage dispatches the Roman Empire within the scope of a single paragraph that begins with the death of Marcus Aurelius and ends -- three centuries and a mere 16 lines later -- with the Visigoths' sacking of Rome. Those with dim memories of their Western civilization courses needn't fear. Standage follows a strict no-reader-left-behind policy. A reference to Thucydides is followed by the helpful reminder that he was ''one of the ancient world's greatest historians."

This writer's forte is technology and the economy, and he does very well on familiar turf. His review of the role of beer in the great cereal empires of the ancient Near East is excellent. He describes how in the cities of Mesopotamia, the local unhopped beer was as much of a staple as bread and how Egyptian workers constructing the pyramids received beer as wages. He has also done an admirable job of mining the sources for color commentary: how, for example, in a bit of ancient graffito the beer-happy laborers on King Menkaure's pyramid refer to themselves as ''Menkaure's Drunkards."

Standage underestimates the role of wine in the ancient Near East, where vinifera vines were not native and wine constituted an imported luxury item. He does not emphasize the contrast between beer as an affordable staple and wine as a courtly beverage. Beer's universal consumption served as a point of commonality between otherwise unequal social groups; wine clearly marked its consumers as elites. The point is important since the dichotomy between wine as an exotic beverage and beer as a domestic, everyday drink of the people has persisted.

You might expect any treatment of the history of spirits from a Londoner such as Standage to drop you at least momentarily into Gin Lane -- the fictitious London neighborhood racked by dissipation and vice immortalized in the engravings of William Hogarth. But the so-called Gin Craze that ravaged the city's poor in the early part of the 18th century was a relatively brief and localized affair that doesn't qualify, in Standage's view, as world historical.

Instead the focus is on rum -- and with good reason. The drink was one corner of the Atlantic's notorious Triangle Trade, in which slaves from West Africa were sent to work in Caribbean sugar mills that made molasses shipped to New England distilleries.

Here, the dark syrup was turned into the rum that slavers used to purchase more human inventory.

The Molasses Act, which forced American distillers to purchase the raw material for rum-making exclusively from British-owned sugar mills, was deeply resented in New England. In retaliation, a boycott of British goods was organized in the 1760s.

In Standage's review of coffee, tea, and Coca-Cola, readers will no doubt find themselves on more familiar ground. These caffeinated drinks have fueled workers of the Information Age since long before the term was coined. After ''Six Glasses," you may be hard pressed to see much difference between Starbucks macchiato hounds and those beer-swilling pyramid builders.

From Menkaure's Drunkards to Bill Gates's Insomniacs. There's progress for you.

Stephen Meuse can be reached at onwine@comcast.net.