There's no particular theoretical reason why the Burnley Miner's Social Club should be the world's largest consumer of the Benedictine liquer. There's also no theoretical reason why it shouldn't be: which is good for the fact is that it is. It's a useful reminder of two things, the first being path dependence:

A working men's club in the north of England is the world's biggest consumer of French Benedictine liqueur, downing 1,000 bottles a year of the alcoholic beverage.

The golden tipple has been a favourite at the Burnley miners' working men's social club for more than a century after being popular among soldiers who developed a taste for it during the First World War and drank it to keep warm.

Since then the drink has become a best seller at the 600-member club – which has even introduced a 'Bene Bomb' in a bid to keep it popular among the younger members.

There really isn't going to be any other 600 member club that gets through a 1,000 bottles a year of the stuff. The fist of our wider points being to point once again to the idea of path dependence. Things that happen today are often as they are because of some other thing that happened in the past. Perhaps the Dvorjak keyboard is better than he qwerty, perhaps it isn't, but the reason we don't use it today is because it definitely wasn't better with mechanical typewriters. Qwerty was deliberately designed, for purely mechanical reasons, to stop people typing too quickly. How we do things today is dependent upon things long irrelevant but important at the time we started the activity.

The second of course being that sometimes things just happen. You can see how the Benedictine story started: someone in one of those regiments got ahold of a bottle and told his mates how good it was. A century later it's still going on. The habit survives just because of that original happenstance and the social reinforcement of it over time. As with driving on the left or the right. Unlike Dvorjak there's no particular merit to either system, no basic reason to choose one or the other: and different places have chosen differently over the years (Sweden changed over from one to the other in, umm, the 1950s. Sadly, the story about the buses changing sides a week before the cars isn't true).

The world can make a lot more sense if we keep in mind that stuff really does just happen sometimes and the effects can be with us centuries later.