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Summary
Summary
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.
Author Notes
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.
Reviews (4)
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* That storied empire on which the sun never set depended on keeping itself well fed. Historian Collingham writes about the British Empire from a unique perspective, tracing how food provoked imperial expansion and transformed both conquerors and subjected peoples. 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. As the empire grew, keeping the nation's troops fed was a major industry in itself. Administrators, soldiers, and sailors returned with hungers for the foods and spices they enjoyed abroad, and homeland importers and suppliers had to adapt to these novel tastes. Even opium entered into the trade equation. As Collingham discovers, William Blake's dark satanic mills were quite likely a smoke-belching Thameside food-processing plant. This unique approach to British history holds appeal for both professional historians and everyday buffs and includes a comprehensive bibliography and a few historical recipes.--Knoblauch, Mark Copyright 2017 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
ALI: A Life, by Jonathan Eig. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $30.) The first full biography of Ali since his death last year, Eig's richly researched, sympathetic yet unsparing portrait of a controversial figure for whom the personal and the political dramatically fused could not come at a more appropriate time. FRANCE IS A FEAST: The Photographic Journey of Paul and Julia Child, by Alex Prud'homme and Katie Pratt. (Thames & Hudson, $35.) Paul Child was an accomplished photographer, as this handsome selection of images from the Childs' life in post-World War II France makes plain. RUTHLESS RIVER: Love and Survival by Raft on the Amazon's Relentless Madre de Dios, by Holly FitzGerald. (Vintage, paper, $16.) A riveting account of a "dream honeymoon" in South America gone very wrong, starting with a plane crash and ending with a near-death experience deep in the jungle. Stranded 26 days, the author and her husband somehow retain hope and affection. THE TASTE OF EMPIRE: How Britain's Quest for Food Shaped the Modern World, by Lizzie Collingham. (Basic Books, $32.) Through the clever re-creation of 20 meals, consumed over the centuries and in various locales, a social historian illuminates the influence of apparently mundane habits. STICKY FINGERS: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine, by Joe Hagan. (Knopf, $29.95.) Hagan paints the rogue's life of the Rolling Stone co-founder with a brush made of stinging nettles, making excellent use of the extensive interviews and archival materials Wenner gave him. IMPROVEMENT, by Joan Silber. (Counterpoint, $26.) Disparate lives in disparate places intersect in this novel, which revolves around a single mother whose boyfriend enlists her in a scheme to smuggle cigarettes across state lines. With consummate skill, Silber reveals surprising connections between characters in contemporary New York and 1970s Turkey. LEONARDO DA VINCI, by Walter Isaacson. (Simon & Schuster, $35.) Isaacson, the biographer of innovators and inventors, turns to the original genius, the Renaissance man whose artistic and mechanical talents still invoke awe, in a book tracing the connections between Leonardo's art and his contemplation of nature. AMERICAN WOLF: A True Story of Survival and Obsession in the West, by Nate Blakeslee. (Crown, $28.) The story of one wolf's struggle to survive in the majestic Yellowstone National Park offers an ambitious look through the eyes of an endangered animal. THE GIRL WHO SAVED CHRISTMAS, by Matt Haig. Illustrated by Chris Mould. (Knopf, $17.99. Ages 7 and up.) If Roald Dahl and Charles Dickens cooked up a Christmas tale, it might resemble this spry story of Victorian London (with cameos by Dickens himself). The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books
Choice Review
The 19th century saw Great Britain become an immense political and economic power, urged on by the Anglican Church as it tried to take the Christian message to everyone, whether it was wanted or not. Collingham (fellow, Warwick, Univ., UK) notes that "from the sixteenth century, when the British started to venture out across the oceans, they went in search of food." She follows the enabling events that allowed the British to gain a foothold around the world, usually in competition with the Dutch and French, not only over land, but in matters such as newly discovered commodities like rice and tea. With the loss of the American colonies and the tremendous growth of the steamship and railroad industries, Britain began to occupy more and more land to protect its growing and developing commercial empire. Collingham's crisply written work supplements the basic historical study with actual examples of those who were participants in these adventures. Readers learn of families, slave and free, the lives they had, and some of the exotic recipes they devised with what was at hand. Iguana curry, anyone? A welcome book for those with culinary interests, as well as readers who might discover some little-known, foundational facts about the British Empire. Summing Up: Recommended. All public and academic levels/libraries. --Samuel A. Syme, Coastal Carolina University
Library Journal Review
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 © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| List of Illustrations | p. xi |
| Introduction | p. xv |
| Part I | |
| Chapter 1 In which it is fish day on the Mary Rose, anchored in Portsmouth harbour (Saturday 18 July 1545) | p. 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) | p. 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) | p. 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) | p. 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) | p. 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) | p. 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) | p. 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) | p. 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) | p. 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) | p. 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) | p. 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) | p. 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) | p. 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) | p. 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) | p. 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) | p. 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) | p. 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) | p. 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) | p. 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) | p. 261 |
| How Christmas fare took the Empire into British homes | |
| Acknowledgements | p. 277 |
| Notes and References | p. 279 |
| Bibliography | p. 321 |
| Index | p. 355 |