Pubs and Wine Bars

Pubs and wine bars are businesses that sell alcoholic drinks for consumption on and off the premises. It is not always easy to distinguish them from places offering accommodation (hotels or inns), food and nonalcoholic drinks (restaurants and coffeehouses), or entertainment (dancehalls and clubs), but pubs and wine bars are fundamentally dependent on the sale of alcoholic drinks. This is significant because alcohol has a place in one of the classic accounts of consumption, in Thorstein Veblen's suggestion that drunkenness demonstrated the pecuniary strength of the drinker. The Temperance movement also represents an early example of a modern consumer campaign.

This entry therefore focuses on drinking places and particularly those of Europe and North America, though there are parallels around the alcohol-drinking world (such as the Japanese izakaya). It concentrates on the consumer culture of these places rather than on the wider place of alcohol within society or questions of production and systems of provision.

Drinking places evolved out of two sorts of early modern European institution. The first type (the inn, auberge, or Tafern) was devoted to the succor of the traveler. The second (the alehouse, cabaret, or Wirtshaus) covered private houses, which sold ale or wine for consumption by friends and neighbors, and it is with these that this entry deals. (The vocabulary [Page 1182]of drinking places is complex and confusing; taverns were wine shops for the urban elite in Britain and inns in Germany. Beat Kümin provides a useful glossary.) However, the differences between the two types grew over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as authorities began to distinguish houses that provided food or accommodation from those that didn't. Drinking places became increasingly specialist enterprises: rural alehouses and urban taphouses began to purchase ale and beer from a declining number of brewers in sixteenth-century Britain rather than brewing their own. The bar counter became increasingly important as private homes became retail institutions, domestic hospitality giving way to more formal relations.

Public drinking has been considered in two main ways. The most obvious (but perhaps least interesting) is as a problematic form of consumption, injurious to health, morality, and social order. The alternative approach rejects this pathologizing attitude to alcohol and seeks to establish its place and meaning within society. Mary Douglas suggested that we should consider drinking to be constructive, constitutive of social relations, creating feelings of commensality, or fellowship at table, as well as divisions and hierarchies. The first approach concentrates on questions of supply and sale, as some other ways of thinking about consumption; the second is more interested in demand and consumer practice. Taking these in turn illustrates the different ways in which they conceptualize drink, drinkers, and drinking places.

Studies of pubs and bars that consider them as sources of problem drinking tend to frame it as a question of oversupply. British examples of this include the Gin Craze (1720–1751) and peaks in alcohol consumption in the 1830s and 1870s. Paul Chatterton and Ray Hollands hold contemporary binge drinking to be a consequence of the strength of the nighttime economy, particularly when it is enlisted to redevelop rundown city centers. In Britain, for example, government strategy is seen as a neoliberal policy, relaxing controls on the sale of alcohol (the 2003 Licensing Act) while strengthening controls on drinkers (the 2004 Alcohol Harm Reduction Strategy for England). While there is little evidence for a uniquely British drinking culture—there is too much historical change and local variation for that—it is still routinely compared with a more civilized “Continental” attitude toward alcohol, which favors drinking with meals. At present, there is some concern that European drinking cultures and policies are converging, which might suggest that binge drinking and the neoliberal strategy are both spreading, but the evidence remains contradictory.

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