By Kal Raustiala
This stuff really is medicine.
Photo by Brian Jones/iStockphoto/Thinkstock
The gin and tonic is having a moment. From Spain—where gin and tonics
are practically the national drink—to our summer shores, the venerable
G-and-T is everywhere. House-made tonic is on the menu in restaurants
from coast to coast, and in many fine bars gin and tonics come in dozens
of varieties, with special tonics and fruit garnishes matched to
distinctive artisanal gins.
Of course, a lot of classic cocktails are enjoying a resurgence—part
Mad Men,
part the boom in distinctive small-batch spirits, and part the waning
fad of faux speakeasies with handcrafted bitters and bartenders in arm
garters chipping away at blocks of ice.
But the gin and tonic is different. For one, it requires no unusual
ingredients, and it’s very simple to make. More interestingly, the gin
and tonic has a storied history that places it at the heart of the
largest empire the world has ever known. Indeed, it is not too much of a
stretch to say that the gin and tonic was as essential a weapon for the
British Empire as the Gatling gun. No less an authority on imperial
power than Winston Churchill once declared, “The gin and tonic has saved
more Englishmen’s lives, and minds, than all the doctors in the
Empire.”
What was the source of the gin and tonic’s great power? As is
sometimes said of tequila, the gin and tonic is not just a drink; it’s a
drug.
The story begins with the jewel of the British Empire: India. British
India comprised both more and less than modern-day India. More, in that
it included large parts of what are today Pakistan and Bangladesh.
Less, in that much of India under the British Raj was quasi-independent,
in so-called princely states that were nominally sovereign but largely
under England’s thumb. India was so important to the empire that in 1876
Queen Victoria added the moniker “Empress of India” to her title. Her
successors continued that practice right up till 1948, under George VI
(he of
The King’s Speech fame).
Controlling India, in short, was central to the British Empire and to
Britain’s sense of itself as the world’s leading power. What allowed
Britain, a small island far off in the northern reaches of Europe, to
rule over the vast semi-continent of India for so long is a subject of
some debate. But in
Jared Diamond’s famous words, Europe’s military superiority was built on a mix of “guns, germs, and steel.”
Guns and steel clearly favored powers like Britain. These innovations
allowed Britain (and other European countries) to deploy weapons such
as machine guns at a time when many societies around the world still
used swords and spears. But germs were more equivocal. Malaria in
particular was a virulent killer of colonized and colonizer alike. While
malaria has a long history in Europe, it began to be eradicated in the
19th century, and even earlier it was never as deadly as it
was in tropical locations. So as Europeans established colonies in the
tropics, they faced a serious and often mortal threat from the
mosquito-borne disease. Soldiers and civilian officials alike succumbed
to it.
In the 17th century, the Spanish had discovered that
indigenous peoples in what is now Peru used a kind of bark to address
various “fevers.” Stripped from the cinchona tree, the bark seemed to
work well for malaria. The “Jesuit’s bark,” as it was known, quickly
became a favored treatment for malaria in Europe. (Before the discovery
of the cinchona tree, European malaria remedies included throwing the
patient head-first into a bush in the hope he would get out quickly
enough to leave his fever behind.)
Eventually it became clear that cinchona bark could be used not only
to treat malaria, but also to prevent it. The bark—and its active
ingredient, quinine powder—was a powerful medicine. But it was also a
powerful new weapon in the European quest to conquer and rule distant
lands.
Quinine powder quickly became critical to the health of the empire.
By the 1840s British citizens and soldiers in India were using 700 tons
of cinchona bark annually for their protective doses of quinine. Quinine
powder kept the troops alive, allowed officials to survive in low-lying
and wet regions of India, and ultimately permitted a stable (though
surprisingly small) British population to prosper in Britain’s tropical
colonies. Quinine was so bitter, though, that British officials
stationed in India and other tropical posts took to mixing the powder
with soda and sugar. “Tonic water,” of a sort, was born.
Still, tonic water was basically a home brew until an enterprising
Brit named Erasmus Bond introduced the first commercial tonic water in
1858—perhaps not coincidentally, the very same year the British
government ousted the East India Co. and took over direct control of
India, following the so-called
Sepoy Mutiny, a violent rebellion and counterattack.
Bond’s new tonic was soon followed by Schweppes’ introduction, in
1870, of “Indian Quinine Tonic,” a product specifically aimed at the
growing market of overseas British who, every day, had to take a
preventative dose of quinine. Schweppes and other commercial tonics
proliferated both in the colonies and, eventually, back in Britain
itself.
Gin, which in earlier days had been associated with vice and social decay among the lower classes in Britain—
take a look at William Hogarth’s famous print Gin Lane for a taste—was by the 19
th
century making its long march toward respectability. It was only
natural that at some point during this time an enterprising colonial
official combined his (or her) daily dose of protective quinine tonic
with a shot (or two) of gin. Rather than knock back a bitter glass of
tonic in the morning, why not enjoy it in the afternoon with a healthy
gin ration?
The gin and tonic was born—and the cool, crisp concoction could, as Churchill observed, start saving all those English lives.
And American lives. Quinine proved as critical to the battle over the
Pacific in the second world war as it had to the struggle over India.
As Amy Stewart notes in her new book,
The Drunken Botanist,
Japan seized Java, the home of huge cinchona plantations, from the
Dutch in 1942, cutting off nearly all of the Allied supply of quinine.
The last American plane to fly out of the Philippines before it fell to
the Japanese carried some 4 million quinine seeds. Unfortunately, the
effort was largely in vain: The trees grew too slowly to provide
sufficient quinine to the Allied war effort.
The gin and tonic, of course, was not enough to keep the British
Empire alive either. Churchill, and many other British leaders,
fervently believed that imperialism was essential if Britain was to
remain a truly great power. But the strength and appeal of independence
and self-determination was overwhelming, and India could no longer be
held down by a small coterie of foreign officials, even with their
quinine-based cocktails. By 1947 India—and Pakistan—were independent
nations. Kenya, Jamaica, Malaya, and other tropical colonies soon
followed.
Today, “empire” is a dirty word. But the gin and tonic lives on. The
drink went from a bitter medicinal tipple in tropical outposts to a
mainstay of British clubs and bars by the first world war. In postwar
America, the gin and tonic became synonymous with WASP summer retreats
and country club lounges. Then, in the ’70s and ’80s, gin was almost
forgotten as first classic cocktails went out of fashion and then vodka
began to explode in popularity. Now the gin and tonic is back,
especially at the very high end, where artisanal gins from Brooklyn, San
Francisco, and all parts in between can be mixed with special tonics
like Fever-Tree (get it?) or Fentimans.
But the gin and tonic certainly did the British Empire a lot of good.
So as you mix your next one, remember the curious history of the
drink—or is it a drug?—in your hand.
People of three villages of Nagaland have made a pledge to protect and conserve the migratory Amur falcons. 
Siberia.
