Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Drink and Democracy: Alcohol and the Political Imaginary in Colonial Australia

Drink and Democracy: Alcohol and the Political Imaginary in Colonial Australia

Allen, Matthew

Paperback

Series: Intoxicating Histories, Book 12

Australia & Oceania

ISBN10: 0228024749
ISBN13: 9780228024743
Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
Published: May 6 2025
Pages: 306
Weight: 1.01
Height: 0.90 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

The nineteenth-century spread of democracy in Britain and its colonies coincided with an increase in alcohol consumption and in celebratory public dinners with rounds of toasts. British colonists raised their glasses to salute the Crown in rituals that asserted fraternal equality and political authority. Yet these ceremonies were reserved for gentlemen, leaving others - notably women and Indigenous people - on the political margins.

Drink and Democracy traces the development of democratic ideas in New South Wales through the history of public drinking and temperance. As the colony transformed from a convict autocracy to a liberal democracy, Matthew Allen argues, public drinking practices shaped the character of the emerging political order. The ritual of toasting was a symbolic display of restraint - drunkenness without loss of self-control - that embodied the claim to citizenship of white male settlers. Yet the performative sobriety of the temperance movement was also democratic, a display of respectability that politicized its supporters around a rival vision of responsible citizenship. Drink was a way to police the limits of the political realm. The stigma of female drunkenness worked to exclude women from the public sphere, while perceptions of heavy drinking among Aboriginal people cast them as lacking self-control and hence unworthy of political rights.

Drink and Democracy reveals that long before the introduction of the franchise, colonists in Australia imagined themselves as citizens. Yet even as democracy expanded, drink marked its limits.

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