336Chapter 18
much of their calories and carbohydrates from them,
partly because few nonalcoholic choices were available.
The consumption of milk depended upon the local
economy. Beverages infused in water (coffee, tea, co-
coa) became popular in European cities when global
trading made them affordable. The Spanish introduced
the drinking of chocolate (which was only a beverage
until the nineteenth century) but it long remained a
costly drink. Coffee drinking was brought to Europe
from the Middle East, and it became a great vogue after
1650, producing numerous urban coffeehouses. But in-
fused beverages never replaced wine and beer in the
diet. Some governments feared that coffeehouses were
centers of subversion and restricted them more than the
taverns. Others worried about the mercantilist implica-
tions of coffee and tea imports. English coffee imports,
for example, sextupled between 1700 and 1785, leading
the government to tax tea and coffee. The king of Swe-
den issued an edict denouncing coffee in 1746, and
when that failed to control the national addiction, he
decreed total prohibition in 1756. Coffee smuggling
produced such criminal problems, however, that the
king legalized the drink again in 1766 and collected a
heavy excise tax on it. Even with such popularity, in-
fused beverages did not curtail the remarkable rate of
alcohol consumption (see illustration 18.3). In addition
to wines and beer, eighteenth-century England drank
an enormous amount of gin. Only a steep gin tax in
1736 and vigorous enforcement of a Tippling Act of
1751 reduced consumption from 8.5 million gallons of
gin per year to 2.1 million gallons during the 1750s.
The Columbian Exchange and the European Diet
The most important changes in the European diet of
the Old Regime resulted from the gradual adoption of
foods found in the Americas. In a reciprocal Columbian
exchange of plants and animals unknown on the other
continent, Europe and America both acquired new
foods. No Italian tomato sauce or French fried potato
existed before the Columbian exchange because the
tomato and potato were plants native to the Americas
and unknown in Europe. Similarly, the Columbian ex-
change introduced maize (American corn), peanuts,
many peppers and beans, and cacao to Europe. The
Americas had no wheat fields, grapevines, or melon
patches; no horses, sheep, cattle, pigs, goats, or burros.
In the second stage of this exchange, European plants
established in the Americas began to flourish and yield
exportation to Europe. The most historic example of
this was the establishment of the sugarcane plantations
in the Caribbean, where slave labor made sugar com-
monly available in Europe for the first time, but at a
horrific human price (see map 18.1).
Europe’s first benefit from the Columbian exchange
came from the potato, which changed diets in the eigh-
teenth century. The Spanish imported the potato in the
sixteenth century after finding the Incas cultivating it in
Peru, but Europeans initially refused to eat it because
folk wisdom considered tubers dangerous. Churches
opposed the potato because the Bible did not mention
it. Potatoes, however, offer the tremendous advantage
of yielding more calories per acre than grains do. In
much of northern Europe, especially in western IrelandIllustration 18.3
Alcohol.Alcohol consumption rates
during the eighteenth century were
higher than they are today. Drinking to
excess was one behavior pattern that cut
across social classes, from the taverns in
poor districts advertising “dead drunk for
a penny” to the falling down drunks of
the upper class depicted in Hogarth’s “A
Midnight Modern Conversation” here.
Note that smoking pipes is nearly uni-
versal and that women are excluded
from this event. See also the chamber
pot in the lower right corner.