Gin is a drink, yes. But it’s also a prism for observing the slow collapse of empire, the invention of gender roles, and the gradual withering away of the student overdraft.

 

 

It is not, contrary to your flatmate’s claims, just something to pour over artisanal ice when they’re ‘feeling something vintage.’ Gin is Britain’s most enduring post-imperial export, a liquid relic steeped in conquest, moral panic, gendered shame, and the desperate theatre of cultural reinvention.

 

 

A drink that once ruined mothers now identifies them as upwardly mobile gentrifiers. This is the story of gin: empire, distilled. Botanicals optional.

 

 

As most great tragedies do, this one begins in 18th-century London, where gin was cheaper than water and considerably more effective. Imported from the Dutch as jenever, it began life as a medicine, which naturally meant it was immediately abused in industrial quantities.

 

 

The so-called ‘Gin Craze’ saw the working classes drink themselves into cheerful oblivion. William Hogarth sketched the whole sorry scene: drunken mothers, collapsing staircases, and babies tumbling out of windows like disillusioned interns. Parliament panicked, flailed, and passed a series of Gin Acts which, in keeping with tradition, no one observed.

 

 

The real problem, of course, was that women were drinking it. Gin wasn’t just poor people’s alcohol; it was femininepoor people’s alcohol. Hence the term Mother’s Ruin, a phrase that neatly folded national anxieties about fertility, morality, and the idea that women might enjoy things. Gin was vilified for being intoxicating and unfeminine. (So was pleasure, broadly.)

 

 

When the Empire shuffled eastward, gin went too, like a loyal spaniel with a mild addiction. In British India, quinine was required to fend off malaria but proved so bitter that it had to be drowned in gin and denial. Thus, the gin and tonic was born: the colonial cocktail of choice for homesick officers fantasising about drizzle.

 

 

Here, gin became both a logistical necessity and an ideological mascot. Bombay Sapphire, still basking in its mid-century orientalist branding, was less a brand than a cartographic exercise: juniper from Italy, cassia bark from Indonesia, coriander from Morocco. The Empire may have run on tea, but it was lubricated by gin.

 

 

By the 20th century, gin had slipped into cultural irrelevance. Your nan drank it. Disillusioned dons drank it. Everyone else moved on to vodka, cider, and a kind of liquidised fruit salad called a Bacardi Breezer. Gin became the liquid equivalent of an abandoned Oxfam book: dusty, pretentious, and vaguely medicinal.

 

 

Then, inevitably, came the revival. Around 2010, gin was exhumed by East London—rebranded, repackaged, and sold back to us in bottles that looked like they belonged in a Victorian pharmacy or an expensive murder. Craft gin emerged: small-batch, smugly botanical, and priced at £9.50 a glass.

 

 

The irony was sublime. The drink of ruined mothers became the calling card of the ethically sourced, algorithmically bisexual middle classes.

 

 

Students, naturally, were priced out. Gin was now too expensive to drink in halls and we were too self-aware to drink it without irony. You’re more likely to find it on a podcast guest’s “wellness shelf” or infused with lavender at a wedding where the couple met on Hinge. From the gutters of Clerkenwell to the rooftops of Peckham, gin had completed its class migration.

 

And yet, beneath the artisanal smugness, gin remains geopolitics in a glass.

 

 

Post-Brexit, as Britain flailed around for relevance like a disorientated uncle at a rave, gin emerged as an unlikely diplomatic emissary. The UK now exports gin to over 100 countries, a small, juniper-scented consolation for the death of influence. Not oil, not music, not policy. Gin.

 

 

Bombay Sapphire isn’t just a drink, it’s the Empire’s final mirage. Bottled, filtered, and served cold in Berlin, Melbourne, or Shoreditch, depending on your time zone and tax bracket.

 

 

So what is gin now?

 

 

A liquid memoir. A gendered artefact. A soft-power relic in a twist-top bottle. A lifestyle prop for the algorithmically literate. It haunts student balls and lingers on influencer sideboards. It is both Mother’s Ruin and the empire’s heirloom.

 

 

And like Britain itself, gin is still pretending it hasn’t peaked.∎

 

Words by Ava Doherty. Image by William Hogarth via Wikimedia Commons.