The Taste of Empire: How Britain's Quest for Food Shaped the Modern World

by Lizzie Collingham

Overview

A history of the British Empire told through twenty meals eaten around the world

In The Taste of Empire, acclaimed historian Lizzie Collingham tells the story of how the British Empire's quest for food shaped the modern world. Told through twenty meals over the course of 450 years, from the Far East to the New World, Collingham explains how Africans taught Americans how to grow rice, how the East India Company turned opium into tea, and how Americans became the best-fed people in the world. In The Taste of Empire, Collingham masterfully shows that only by examining the history of Great Britain's global food system, from sixteenth-century Newfoundland fisheries to our present-day eating habits, can we fully understand our capitalist economy and its role in making our modern diets.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780465056668
Publisher:	Basic Books
Publication date:	10/03/2017
Pages:	408
Sales rank:	880,999
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

Lizzie Collingham is an associate fellow at the University of Warwick. The author of three books, including The Taste of War and Curry, Collingham lives in Cambridge, United Kingdom.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations xi

Introduction xv

Part I

Chapter 1 In which it is fish day on the Mary Rose, anchored in Portsmouth harbour (Saturday 18 July 1545) 3

How the trade in Newfoundland salt cod laid the foundations of the Empire

Chapter 2 In which John Dunton eats oatcake and hare boiled in butter in a Connaught cabin (1698) 15

How Ireland was planted with English, became a centre of the provisions trade and fed the emerging Empire

Chapter 3 In which the Holloway family eat maize bread and salt beef succotash, Sandwich, New England (June 1647) 29

How the English chased the dream of the yeoman farmer but were forced to compromise

Chapter 4 In which Colonel James Drax holds a feast at his sugar plantation on the island of Barbados (1640s) 41

How the West Indian sugar islands drove the growth of the First British Empire

Chapter 5 In which la Belinguere entertains Sieur Michel Jajolet de la Courbe to an African-American meal on the west coast of Africa (June 1686) 57

How West Africa exchanged men for maize and manioc

Chapter 6 In which Samuel and Elizabeth Pepys dine on pigeons a l'esteuve and boeuf a la mode at a French eating house in Covent Garden (12 May 1667) 71

How pepper took the British to India, where they discovered calicoes and tea

Part II

Chapter 7 In which the Latham family eat beef and potato stew, pudding and treacle, Scarisbrick, Lancashire (22 January 1748) 85

How the impoverishment of the English rural labourer gave rise to the industrial ration

Chapter 8 In which a slam family eat maize mush and possum on Middleburg plantation, South Carolina (1730s) 97

How the American colony of South Carolina was built on African rice

Chapter 9 In which Lady Anne Barnard enjoys fine cabin dinners on a voyage to the Cape of Good Hope (February to May 1797) 113

How the Empire stimulated the growth of the provisions industry

Chapter 10 In which Sons of Liberty drink rum punch at the Golden Ball Tavern, Merchants Row, Boston (a cold evening in January 1769) 129

How rum brought the American colonies together and split Britain's First Empire apart

Part III

Chapter 11 In which Kamala prepares a meal for her family, near Patna, Bihar (February 1811) 145

How the East India Company turned opium into tea

Chapter 12 In which Sarah Harding and her family grow fat eating plenty of good food in Waipawa, Hawke's Bay, New Zealand (29 July 1874) 159

How hunger drove the explosion of European emigration in the nineteenth century

Chapter 13 In which Frank Swannell eats bean stew, bannock and prune pie in British Columbia (15 November 1901) 171

How the industrial ration fed those who pushed out the boundaries of empire and processed foods became magical symbols of home

Chapter 14 In which the Reverend Daniel Tyerman and Mr George Bennet attend a tea party in Raiatea, the Society Islands (4 December 1822) 187

How the spread of European provisions colonised taste

Part IV

Chapter 15 In which diamond miners cook up an iguana curry at a rum shop in Guyana during the rainy season (1993) 199

How non-Europeans migrated to work on plantations producing tropical foods for the British

Chapter 16 In which the Bartons entertain the Wilsons to tea in the London Road slum district of Manchester (May 1839) 213

How the wheat for the working-class loaf came to be grown in America and the settler colonies

Chapter 17 In which Prakash Tandon enjoys a Sunday roast with his landlady's family in a Manchester council house (1931) 225

How foreign food imports improved the working-class diet and made Britain dependent on its Empire

Chapter 18 In which the recipe for irio changes (Kenya, 1900-2016) 239

How the Empire impacted on subsistence farming in East Africa and introduced colonial malnutrition

Chapter 19 In which infantryman R. L. Crimp eats bully beef and sweet potatoes in a forward camp in the North African desert (September 1941) 249

How the Empire supported Britain during the Second World War

Chapter 20 In which Mr Oldknow dreams of making an Empire plum pudding (24 December 1850) and Bridget Jones attends Una Alconbury's New Year's Day Turkey Curry Buffet hunch (1 January 1996) 261

How Christmas fare took the Empire into British homes

Acknowledgements 277

Notes and References 279

Bibliography 321

Index 355

Editorial Reviews

…[a] joyously delicious account of Britain's gastronomic influence on the world…In [Collingham's] original and supremely captivating book, she has cleverly recreated the fine details of some 20 meals, consumed over four and a half centuries in a variety of homes and ships and tented encampments far from the motherland. Her technique…is to examine the minutiae of daily kitchen life and to extrapolate from them a greater image of historical sweep. In British terms, she is Henry Mayhew and Mass-Observation rolled into one—a stellar observer of the day-to-day and the mundane, a social historian of extraordinary talent.

The New York Times Book Review - Simon Winchester

New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice pick


Book of the Week on BBC Radio 4

"Collingham writes about the British Empire from a unique perspective.... The history of West Indian sugar, African slavery, and American colonization is an oft-told tale, but Collingham takes mere mercantilism and expands and deepens its consequences."—Booklist, starred review

"Joyously delicious.... In her original and supremely captivating book, [Collingham] has cleverly recreated the fine details of some 20 meals, consumed for four and a half centuries in a variety of homes and ships and tented encampments far from the motherland.... In British terms, she is Henry Mayhew and Mass-Observation rolled into one—a stellar observer of the day-to-day and the mundane, a social historian of extraordinary talent."—New York Times Book Review

"The entwined histories of food and British imperialism...have been strangely overlooked in the decades of research since. In The Taste of Empire, Lizzie Collingham puts that neglect to rights, showing in a tour de force of synthesis that food was one of the driving forces of empire and helped form the eating habits of the entire modern world...Collingham's great achievement is to take [the empire's] food history out of the realm of cozy nostalgia and show it for the potent economic and political force it was."
—Wall Street Journal

"The Taste of Empire...is fascinating reading, and its central point is more than clear: Britain's many hungers shrank the world in ways that are still nearly impossible to untangle.... Whether you're a foodie or a history buff, this should be a satisfying read; sometimes the best way to history's heart is through its stomach."—NPR

"Collingham...sees trade in sugar, spice, rice and tea as the reason the British were so keen to command sea routes dating from the 16th century.... The result is the stuff of lively cocktail party conversation among the geekiest of food lovers, right down to the occasional recipe for mock turtle, rum punch and (Hello, Bridget Jones!) leftover turkey curry."—Washington Post

"Lizzie Collingham's fascinating new book, The Taste of Empire, demonstrates that a cup of tea is never just a cup of tea—it is a history of trade, exchange, land-grab, agricultural innovation and economic change.... This is a marvelously wide-ranging and readable book, stuffed with engaging details and startling connections."
—Financial Times

"An original and thought-provoking book and for all the shocking accounts of the consequences of British appetites, a highly entertaining one."
—The Times (UK)

"There are many factors that drove Britain's centuries-long quest for world domination. But one of the biggest, argues historian Lizzie Collingham...was a taste for better, more exotic food, from India's pepper and tea to Barbados' sugar."—Time Magazine

"Usually it is assumed that Britain's empire appeared and then Britain's food trade-that vast tonnage of tea, flour, sugar, bully beef and Crosse & Blackwell pickle that swept across the seven seas-appeared to feed it. Ms. Collingham turns that idea neatly on its head. It was not so much the empire that began the trade, but trade that began the empire."—Economist

"An energetic and refreshing account of a little considered aspect of British history.... A remarkable achievement."—Guardian

"This is a wholly pleasing book, which offers a tasty side dish to anyone exploring the narrative history of the British Empire."
—Max Hastings, Sunday Times (UK)

"Collingham shows how the spread of different dishes shaped the modern world."—Entertainment Weekly, Best New Books

"Beyond gold and glory, an insatiable lust for foreign foods drove the juggernaut of British imperialism. So shows Lizzie Collingham in this rich economic history, drawing on annals military, mercantile and domestic to reveal the complex routes along with the fruits of the colonial fields and fisheries were shunted into Britain's dining rooms."
—Nature

"Collingham's...historical vignettes and recipes...are equal parts fascinating and horrifying, in the way only pre-germ theory food handling can be."—Reason

"Deeply researched and highly readable, [Collingham's] book takes on the sprawling subject of how 450 years of British colonialism affected foodways the world over.... Engaging."—Globe and Mail (Toronto)

"Enjoyable for historians and gastronomes alike...Collingham has built a banquet of British history and culture that shows how the world's largest empire followed food to the pinnacle of its power."—Roanoke Times

"The Taste of Empire is a fascinating history of exactly how food shaped and informed colonialism, and vice versa.... Collingham explores these connections in compelling prose, making human stories central to her investigation."—Atlantic

"Fascinating.... Although Collingham does not flinch from the cruelties and brutalities of the empire, she refrains from the self-congratulatory finger-wagging indulged in by some modern historians."—Daily Telegraph (UK)

"This ingeniously constructed history shows that what we think of as personal appetites have largely been constructed by the machinations of empire. The Taste of Empire uses vivid snapshots of meals to tell the story of how Britain's quest for food drove its imperial ambitions. Collingham takes the reader on a powerful journey ranging from the sugary tea of Great Britain to the rum punch of Boston. Like Sidney Mintz or Margaret Visser, Collingham is a historian whose writing about food informs larger stories about human existence: about conflict and culture, about economics and politics. I was dazzled by Collingham's writing and her book also left me very hungry."
—Bee Wilson, author of First Bite

"The Taste of Empire has a hidden history: the menu, and how it changed the world. Lizzie Collingham has uncovered an epic that runs from domestic comedy to horror to the startling shifts that brought rice to America, maize to Africa, and tea to India. She makes it absorbing and utterly readable, mixing the huge economic story with exact and fascinating glimpses into past lives. You'll never see a biscuit tin the same way once you know how they were used in the Zulu Wars."—Michael Pye, author of The Edge of the World

From the Publisher

10/15/2017
This historical study of how Britain charged its way across the globe is told through a culinary lens that zooms in closely at the onset of each chapter then pulls back for factual context. We are invited to 20 meals, beginning with a serving of salt cod in 1545, and ending with a curry buffet in 1996. Collingham's (Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food) scholarship is evident; the book is weighted with facts. At times, this academic approach feels overly formal, particularly after reading the chapter that starts with a sensory anecdote of what it was like to break bread—literally—in specific time periods. Readers are treated to a meal of salt cod, sugar, rice, and beef, and then sift patiently through the narrative context. There are moments when the plate feels a little too clean, particularly as it relates to how the empire exploited the enslaved, though Collingham does nod toward these atrocities. VERDICT A thorough work of scholarship with an academic slant that is strongest when told through its anecdotes.—Erin Entrada Kelly, Philadelphia

Library Journal

Jennifer Dixon’s likable British accent fits Collingham’s food history of the British Empire well, but her reading is too imperial—slow, stately, and elevated—in manner. Furthermore, her use of tone and emphasis to convey meaning is inconsistent. She is often proficient but at other times seems as if she’s not fully engaged with the text or is encountering it for the first time, reading word by word, with misplaced emphasis and even incorrect wording. And it is all too slow. Her pace and manner suggest an earlier work than the contemporary nonfiction this is; the listener’s mind has too much time to wander amid the stately procession of sentences. While Dixon’s reading is still generally adequate, this interesting book deserves better. W.M. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine

DECEMBER 2017 - AudioFile