DSN@10: Where Are We Now Conference, 12-14 November 2021

Originally designed to mark the tenth anniversary of the Drinking Studies Network’s foundation in 2010, our delayed fourth major international conference took place over three days in November 2021. The ‘Where are we Now’ theme and goal of the conference was to assess the major challenges in our field, both retrospectively and into the future. It was not connected to David Bowie’s evocative song of the same name, but you can listen to this lovely cover version if you want to:

The Dschungel bar/club is probably a good place to get a drink

The conference was also an opportunity to reflect on the development of the Network itself over this time, and as we embark on a new chapter in partnership with the Social History of Alcohol and Drugs Journal.

One striking feature of the conference was how we were discussing many of the familiar themes that had been explored through our previous conferences in 2013, 2015 and 2018 – and which are staples of drinking studies scholarship – but doing so with greater levels of nuance and complexity in the models, methodologies and frameworks we were using. Familiar themes included gender, place, time, change, work, health and sociability, amongst others. But there was, for instance, an innovative emphasis on mobility, movement and ephemerality that enhanced our understanding of drinking places, both imagined and real, physical and virtual.

Similarly, thinking about the longer-term trajectories of drinking behaviour by different individuals and groups, in relation to drinking occasions as ‘moments’ in time extended our discussion of drinking temporalities to consider deliberate ‘not-drinking’, and the complex relationship between experiences of sociability and health, both physical and mental, in shaping drinking behaviours.

Secondly, throughout the conference, constructions of ‘ideal’ drinking across different times and spaces kept recurring as subjects of analysis. Topics ranged from imagined ‘ideal drinkers’, to stereotypes about the drinking behaviours of social groups, to the idealisation of specific types of drinking place and drinking cultures. Of course, the construction of ‘ideal’ drinkers, behaviours, places and cultures also has as its flip-side: in the criticism, even demonisation, of those who lie outside the ‘ideal’, and these discussions also featured in the conference programme. Insights about the role of memory, nostalgia, families, and communities of practice in shaping alcohol production, consumption and sociability emerged from these examinations to give lots of food for thought.

There were, of course, some themes that received less attention than they might have done, reflecting areas within the field of drinking studies that still require more investigation. Whilst scholarship in our field is particularly attuned to the ways in which class and gender shape experiences and discourses around drinking, we still have much more to learn about the importance of race and ethnicity. The papers that explored the relationships between alcohol, race and ethnicity in the Americas – one of which grew out of this project on ‘Alcohol, Race and Ethnicity: the United States, Mexico and the Wider World – demonstrated what a fruitful area of research this can be. The next post will discuss that paper, ‘Alcohol, Slavery and Race in Brazil during the Long Nineteenth Century’, in more detail.

The conference also highlighted that we still have a tendency to focus on the consumers of alcohol – or of non-alcoholic drinks – to the neglect of those who work within the drinks trade. We did hear about brewers in several different contexts – from American craft brewing to tepache-makers in seventeenth-century Mexico and female brewers in contemporary Manipur – but the history of drink workers, especially retailers, is ripe for further examination.

Since we opted to hold the conference virtually due to the ongoing impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, it would have been remiss for the pandemic’s effects on drinking practices to go unexamined in the conference programme. Indeed, the pandemic featured prominently in a number of papers, particularly those examining contemporary drinking spaces. Yet it was striking how many of these explorations connected together the larger themes of ‘mobility’ and ‘the ideal’ that were prominent in many different historical contexts as well.

As to the virtuality of the conference itself, while many of us yearned for those informal chats between panels and for a post-conference trip to the actual pub, there were considerable benefits to the online experience. Nearly 90 participants were registered for this conference, where, historically, we’ve had to limit participation to around 50 people. Some participants couldn’t attend all panels, due to time differences, screen fatigue, and life in general. But we surely would not have had such an international line-up of speakers – everywhere from the US west coast to Japan – in a physical conference setting. The characteristic good humour of DSN members also meant that we enjoyed several ‘substantial meal breaks’, launched a revamped Craft & the Artisanal research cluster, and learned how to do virtual drinking (including of the alcohol-free variety) before putting that learning into practice in our virtual pub, the Dog & Salty Nun!

You can see the full conference programme below and details of how to join the Drinking Studies Network (for free) are on our website.

Alcohol & Empire: Dan Snow & I have a chat

In October, I was delighted to appear as a guest on Dan Snow’s History Hit podcast, discussing the relationship between alcohol and colonialism across time, which you can listen to below.

The title of the episode is a little misleading, as our discussion ranged beyond the British Empire, touching on how alcohol featured in economic, political and socio-cultural relations between Indigenous societies and different colonising powers around the world from the sixteenth century up to the twentieth century.

Some of the podcast explored different themes that are covered in more depth in my recently published book, Alcohol in the Age of Industry, Empire and War, 1850-1950, which Dan was beyond gracious to say had “blown his mind”. Wowsers, and thank you! It inspired me to put together a thread on twitter, in which I outlined the acknowledgements page that would have been in the book, if I had managed to notice that it wasn’t there through several copy-editing and proofing stages…

Book cover, black and white image of a busy bar, c. 1940s London, slightly blurred. Title Alcohol in the Age of Industry, Empire and War, edited by Deborah Toner. Bloomsbury
You can get your hands on a copy via Bloomsbury

Doing the podcast was a really fun experience; Dan is a very engaging host and asks great questions. You can catch more episodes of History Hit, which are published on a close to daily basis, over on acast.

Alcohol and Race at the International Anti-Alcohol Congresses, 1885-1939

In July 2021, Jamie Banks and I gave a joint conference presentation at the ‘Intoxicating Spaces: Global and Comparative Perspectives‘ Conference, hosted virtually by the University of Sheffield. This was based on our work-in-progress research on how international anti-alcohol congresses served as spaces for the global exchange of ideas about alcohol, race and racial difference in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. We’re delighted a little nervous to share the recorded conference presentation with you all, just because it’s still a little weird to have such things recorded, even though we’ve all been video recording ourselves a lot over the last couple of years. Anyway, here it is!

The first major international anti-alcohol conference, the Antwerp Meeting against the Abuse of Alcoholic Beverages, took place in 1885 and twenty-one further conferences took place by 1939. These meetings were attended not only by official representatives of government bodies and temperance organisations, but also by researchers from a variety of disciplines and independent delegates. Conference proceedings, including agendas, delegate lists, papers presented and minuted discussions, provide a range of contemporary perspectives on how alcohol was thought to affect individuals, social groups, and entire nations.

For this paper we concentrated on how the congresses were spaces in which attendees from around the globe came to share, consolidate, and disseminate ideas about the degenerative influence of alcohol and alcoholism on people from different ethnic groups in colonial, settler colonial and non-colonial parts of the world. In doing so, we discussed how these global discussions about alcohol contributed to the ongoing development of ideas about race and racial difference, which were in turn shaped by broader concerns about colonialism, social inequalities, and competing assertions of modern ‘nationhood.’ Finally, we raised some preliminary thoughts about how the Anti-Alcohol Congresses might allow us to trace the dissemination of ideas about race back into national contexts, as well as their entwining with trans-national debates about anti-alcohol activism, anti-slavery groups and other ostensibly humanitarian campaigns.

The ‘Intoxicating Spaces‘ Conference had an incredible range of papers on alcohol history, as well as other intoxicants such as opium, ecstasy, cannabis, coffee, and tobacco, and themes such as material culture, discourse, regulation and authority, mobility and circulation. It was part of the ongoing major research project ‘Intoxicating Spaces: The Impact of New Intoxicants on Urban Spaces in Europe, 1600-1850’, which examines how a variety of intoxicants – cocoa, coffee, opium, sugar, tea and tobacco in particular – formed part of what the researchers call a ‘psychoactive revolution’ in the modern world. The project concentrates on transformations in the cities of Amsterdam, Hamburg, London and Stockholm, and they have a fabulous website, with lots of resources. Go check it out!