Review of Hopped Up: How Travel, Trade, and Taste Made Beer a Global Commodity

Abstract

Jeffrey M. Pilcher’s Hopped Up serves up a finely crafted global history of beer, uncovering how transnational flows of people, knowledge, and technology have continually shaped and re-shaped beer’s meanings and material forms. With a keen eye for invented tradition, the book uncovers contemporary beer styles as ever-evolving products of capitalist development. Pilcher weaves a remarkable narrative spanning centuries and continents, allowing his historical account to avoid several pitfalls of previous synchronic and national-level analyses. This book will appeal to a wide audience across the social sciences and humanities, and will be especially valuable to those interested in cultural and political economy, imperialism and nation-building, and social distinction. In providing an expansive yet concise history of a ubiquitous commodity, Hopped Up serves as a shining reminder of how everyday articles of food and drink have participated in the making of the modern world.