Liquid Pleasures: A Social History of Drinks in Modern Britain

A Short History of Ireland's Famine. Great Stink of London. The Great Irish Famine. A Very Short Introduction. Nor Shall My Sword. Tracing Your Pauper Ancestors. Atlas of Industrializing Britain, Tracing Your Rural Ancestors.

In Search of a Better Life. The Birth of Industrial Britain. Migration and Society in Britain, The Outcasts of Melbourne. Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution. A History of East London.

The Road to Independence? Industry, Trade and People in Ireland, Essays in honour of W. Our Troubles with Food. Modern Britain Third Edition. Labour in British Society, The Chimney of the World. Class, Conflict and Protest in the English Countryside, Defying the Law of the Land. The Irish Diaspora in Britain, The Path to Sustained Growth.

The Workhouse System Economy and Society in 19th Century Britain. Oxford Town and Gown. You do not currently have access to this article.

You could not be signed in. Sign In Forgot password? Don't have an account? American Historical Association members Sign in via society site. Sign in via your Institution Sign in. Purchase Subscription prices and ordering Short-term Access To purchase short term access, please sign in to your Oxford Academic account above.

This article is also available for rental through DeepDyve. He has combined an extensive knowledge of the secondary literature with much archival research, producing, in his chapter on beer drinking at least, a much needed history of a central aspect of British popular culture which has been long overdue. He combines economic, social and cultural history and stresses throughout the importance of political factors to this history as well. He thus follows a recent trend in the study of consumer society which has looked to the role of the state in influencing demand, though his previous work on adulteration and government legislation might be seen to have preceded this type of analysis.

Such intervention in consumption set important precedents for the role of the welfare state which would be followed by the establishment of the Milk Marketing Boards in and the provision of free school milk from In other chapters, too, Burnett describes the role of government in, for example, the retail licensing of tea, in the setting of high excise duties for coffee, in the regulation of drinking hours in pubs and in the municipalisation of the water supply following a series of cholera epidemics in the mid-nineteenth century.

• What is Kobo Super Points??
• Associated Data!
• Join Kobo & start eReading today.

The stated approach of Burnett is to examine the history of drinks beyond any purely realist notions of physiological need or innate desire. He claims that he wishes to give attention to economic considerations while accepting that economic historians have looked too much at supply. Instead, referring to the sociological and anthropological literature of Grant McCracken and Mary Douglas, he argues for a study of drinks that accepts that consumption is a consequence of society as well as being constitutive of it. This is hardly a novel argument within material cultural studies, but Burnett deserves considerable praise for offering a history in which a rich economic narrative of demand statistics is located within a broad social, if not always cultural, context.

Thus, in his chapter on spirits, he is able to argue that the three most important factors in understanding their role in the nineteenth century are firstly, that whisky in Scotland and gin in England were antidotes to the psychological and physical pressures of industrial life; secondly, that spirits came under moral and religious attack from the temperance campaign from as early as ; and, thirdly, that consumption was, and must always be, determined by price. Burnett's preference for the economic or materialist interpretation really comes through in his conspectus.

The vast majority of his overall explanation for the changing history of drinks is devoted to 'material reasons': These are all extremely important considerations and need to be stressed in any history of consumption, but the emphasis he places on them makes it disappointing that the 'non-material reasons' are not explored further. These cultural issues are summarised in just one paragraph:. Drinks are consumed not only, or even mainly, because they are available and affordable: Alcoholic drinks have always contributed to conviviality, celebration and festivity, and through their varying rituals confirmed membership and fellowship within groups: While alcohol in moderation liberated the drinker from mundane restraints and anxieties, the adoption of the caffeine drinks depended on a different set of social attributes.

It was initially important that they were expensive novelties, which thereby defined the social superiority of users: It was probably not so important in the first place that these drinks were immediately enjoyed as they were seen to be consumed. The reason why caffeine drinks were adopted by the bourgeoisie were somewhat different.

Social emulation was doubtless important for some people, but tea and coffee for this class carried other meanings, of sobriety and seriousness, increasing mental activity without the impairing effects of alcohol. In the Age of Enlightenment it was a rational use of time for men to drink these beverages, for women part of 'the civilising process' that was bringing more polite manners and gentler relationships into domestic life. Louis Lewin believed that caffeine could 'sterilise nature and extinguish carnal desires': As tea later moved into mass consumption it lost its original associations with novelty and luxury to become, above all, the drink of morality and respectability, firmly linked with the religious revival and the temperance movement and, more generally, with Victorian values of work, thrift and sobriety.

Account Options

While the material explanations offered in his conspectus are a summary of the excellent accounts provided in the separate chapters these non-material factors were not explored by any means as thoroughly; a cultural studies scholar would be able to conjure up a book from every one of the above sentences. Liquid Pleasures fulfils its primary task of presenting an entertaining, general, informative and authoritative history of drinks in Britain.

Where further research might be conducted is on these more cultural issues, though one might suggest that Burnett himself ought to have incorporated them more thoroughly if he really is committed to emphasising the cultural context of the economic act of consumption. One explanation for the lack of an overarching culturalist interpretation is that Burnett's subject matter is defined purely by it physical properties: They are not linked according to some psychological or cultural property such as that found in Goodman, Lovejoy and Sherrat's history of drugs, or what they crucially term, 'psychoative substances' including caffeine , which then lends itself to an analysis of the centrality of a particular type of consumption to everyday life.

Of the general interpretative frameworks that are employed, the importance of the physical environment might warrant further attention. For instance, Burnett does make use of the material collected by Mass-Observation, but much more might be made of this organisation's anthropology of behaviour in pubs, especially in regard to the preferences for particular types of beer, the social and cultural dynamics involved in the different rooms of the pub the vaults, snug, bar and saloon , and the weekly rhythms of drinking rituals according to the day of the week.

At times, Burnett stresses the importance of advertising in stimulating demand, especially with regard to soft drinks and beer, and he is particularly good at tracing the collective advertising slogans such as 'Drink More Milk' , 'Pinta Milka Day' and 'Beer is Best' The literature on advertising in Britain is by no means as comprehensive as that which has recently appeared on America, and it would have been useful for Burnett to have extended his brief analyses to respond to the problematic interpretations so far developed by Loeb and Richards.

Had the imagery of drink been studied in more depth then again issues of masculinity and femininity might have been more thoroughly explored as well as the more general issue of identity.

Burnett does deal very well with the issue of social status, but drinks have also been used to explore individual identity and to present images of the self to others within one's socio-cultural environment. Many of these issues may seem peripheral to the author's concerns and he should not be criticised too much for what he has not included, since the socio-economic approach he does offer is largely convincing and a useful corrective to the overtly culturalist turn of many recent studies.

However, his realist or material approach does detract from his analysis in a number of ways. One final point that should be mentioned here is the history of health and medicine offered in the book. While Burnett is very good in outlining the medical properties ascribed to the various drinks in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, seeing such health claims as products of their time, he does not pursue the theme, except with a brief mention of advertising. Instead, he too readily accepts the medical evidence of more recent decades and he offers the notion of addiction as an explanation for the growth in coffee consumption [p.