The British Isles are fortunate to have a robust bibliography of books on the social and political history of alcohol. The best comprehensive volume to have emerged since 2000 is A History of Drink and the English, 1500–2000, by Paul Jennings. Other volumes that provide useful political histories of alcohol include The Politics of Alcohol: A History of the Drink Question in England, by James Nicholls and Drink and British Politics since 1830, by John Greenaway. The Politics of Drink in England, from Gladstone to Lloyd George, by the author, is another helpful resource that looks at how the British government managed the tensions between competing demands from temperance reformers and those in the licensed drink trade from the 1870s through the 1920s. Peter Catterall’s 2014 report for the Institute of Alcohol Studies, Labour and the Politics of Alcohol, is an important endeavor to consider the politics of the drink question through the lens of the Labour Party, which other studies had not previously explored in depth.
Good social histories include the collection A Pleasing Sinne from editor Adam Smyth, which treats the link between drinking and sociability in seventeenth-century England. In Drinking in Victorian and Edwardian Britain, Thora Hands explores why people in Britain began drinking more alcohol at a time when licensing laws were growing more restrictive. For a more modern study that incorporates gender, David W. Gutzke’s Women Drinking Out in Britain since the Early Twentieth Century offers a social and cultural analysis of the factors that have influenced women’s drinking habits.
Women Drinking Out in Britain since the Early Twentieth Century by 
