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. “The extensive archival research that underpins Drink and Democracy is interwoven into the historical narrative with a fluency that makes this book excellent to read. Allen’s analysis provides new and refreshing ways of approaching the study of public drinking practices.” Henry Yeomans, University of Leeds "Allen’s exhaustive archival research, mining of the colonial press, and a diverse scholarship bring us much closer to the perspectives of the drinker and the settings in which they drank. These are nuanced arguments delivered with unrelenting clarity." Australian Historical Studies Tracing the history of democracy in the nineteenth century through toasting and temperance. Series Editors: Virginia Berridge, Erika Dyck Whether on the street, off the shelf, or over the pharmacy counter, interactions with drugs and alcohol are shaped by contested ideas about addiction, healing, pleasure, and vice and their social dimensions. Books in this series explore how people around the world have consumed, created, traded, and regulated psychoactive substances throughout history. The series connects research on legal and illegal drugs and alcohol with diverse areas of historical inquiry, including the histories of medicine, pharmacy, consumption, trade, law, social policy, and popular culture. Its reach is global and includes scholarship on all periods. Intoxicating Histories aims to link these different pasts as well as to inform the present by providing a firmer grasp on contemporary debates and policy issues. We welcome books, whether scholarly monographs or shorter texts for a broad audience focusing on a particular phenomenon or substance, that alter the state of knowledge. Matthew Allen is senior lecturer in historical criminology at the University of New England in Australia.