Among the volumes focused on Europe, several treat the history of beer specifically. Those looking at Europe collectively include Max Nelson’s The Barbarian’s Beverage: A History of Beer in Ancient Europe and Richard W. Unger’s Beer in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. For a more focused study, there is Barbara Smit’s The Heineken Story. In a related vein, looking not at the drink itself but at venues for drinking, The World of the Tavern from editors Beat Kümin and B. Ann Tlusty considers the history of public houses in early modern Europe.
A number of country-specific publications have also been published, several focusing on France and Russia. Among those on France, two consider drugs, including David A. Guba, Jr.’s Taming Cannabis: Drugs and Empire in Nineteenth-Century France, and Sara E. Black’s Drugging France: Mind-Altering Medicine in the Long Nineteenth Century. For volumes focused on wine, there is Kolleen M. Guy’s When Champagne Became French: Wine and the Making of a National Identity and Adam Zientek’s A Thirst for Wine and War: The Intoxication of French Soldiers on the Western Front, part of the “Intoxicating Histories” series published by McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, two volumes on the history of alcohol in Russia treat vodka specifically. These are Patricia Herlihy’s The Alcoholic Empire: Vodka and Politics in Later Imperial Russia and Mark Lawrence Schrad’s Vodka Politics: Alcohol, Autocracy, and the Secret History of the Russian State. On the other end of the spectrum, Page Herrlinger’s Holy Sobriety in Modern Russia examines sobriety. Beyond Russia, but still focused on Eastern Europe, there is Nikolay Kamenov’s Global Temperance and the Balkans.
