lizzie Collingham - The Hungry Empire: How Britains Quest for Food Shaped the Modern World

The glamorous daughter of an African chief shares a pineapple with a slave trader Surveyors in British Columbia eat tinned Australian rabbit Diamond prospectors in Guyana prepare an iguana curry

In twenty meals The Hungry Empire tells the story of how the British created a global network of commerce and trade in foodstuffs that moved people and plants from one continent to another, re-shaping landscapes and culinary tastes.

To be British was to eat the world. The Empire allowed Britain to harness the globes edible resources from cod fish and salt beef to spices, tea and sugar. By the twentieth century the wheat to make the working mans loaf of bread was supplied by Canada and his Sunday leg of lamb had been fattened on New Zealands grasslands.

Lizzie Collingham takes us on a wide-ranging culinary journey, charting the rise of sugar to its dominant position in our diets and locating the origins of the food industry in the imperial trade in provisions. Her innovative approach brings a fresh perspective to the making of the Empire, uncovering its decisive role in the shaping of the modern diet and revealing how virtually every meal we eat still contains a taste of empire.

Lizzie Collingham taught History at Warwick University and was a Research Fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge before becoming an independent historian. Her books include Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors and The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food. She is currently an Associate Fellow of Warwick University and the Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Newnham College, Cambridge. She recently completed a project researching the history of the kitchens of the Indian Presidents palace and regularly lectures on a gastronomic tour of Kerala. She works in a garden shed near Cambridge.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

For Partha Mitter and in memory of Chris Bayly

Bring food! shouted the small boy who had taken on the role of the white district officer.

In a village in north-eastern Rhodesia, a group of Bemba boys were playing at being Europeans one of their very favourite games. The main actor was lounging in a tangle of branches and bark rope, which stood in for a chair. During the course of the game he repeatedly called out for food until one of his playmates who was acting as a servant objected.

You cant ask for food again, he whispered, aghast. Weve only just brought it to you.

You know nothing about Europeans! his master immediately replied. That is just what they do all day just sit and call, Boy! Bring me food.

The Bemba, who ate only one meal at the end of the day, regarded as childish the European habit of constantly breaking off from an activity to take tea or some other refreshment. This scene, witnessed by Audrey Richards, an anthropologist who lived among the Bemba for several years in the early 1930s, stands as a metaphor for the relationship of Britain to its empire. Bring me food became a persistent demand.

This book tells the story of how Britains quest for foodstuffs gave rise to the British Empire. Each chapter opens with a particular meal and then explores the history that made it possible. Why were a Frenchman and a glamorous Afro-Portuguese woman sharing a pineapple in West Africa in 1698? How did a team of surveyors prospecting for copper in British Columbia in 1901 come to be eating Australian rabbit? What configuration of circumstances led a group of Afro-Guyanese diamond miners to be cooking an iguana curry in 1993? Every chapter tells an individual story, but they all link up in a narrative that reveals food as a driving force of empire.

From the sixteenth century, when the British started to venture out across the oceans, they went in search of food. West Country fishermen began bringing cargoes of salt cod back from Newfoundland in the 1570s, and in the next century East India Company carracks unloaded millions of pounds of pepper and spices at Londons East India docks. Before then, food imports had catered for the wealthy, who drank Burgundy wines with their heavily spiced meals and poured Italian olive oil on their salad greens. In the sixteenth century, the dried figs and currants, citrus fruits, almonds and spices that English merchants acquired in Antwerp in exchange for woollens accounted for only a tenth of all Englands imports. But over the following centuries foodstuffs went from playing a negligible role in Englands trade to centre stage. By 1775, half (by value) of all the goods Britain imported were foodstuffs, and West Indian sugar had ousted linen from first place as the most valuable of all the countrys imports. In fact, with a value of over 2.3 million, West Indian sugar was worth more than all the manufactured goods arriving on Britains shores.

By now, food imports were no longer just for the rich. In fact colonial groceries had been thoroughly integrated into the diet of the entire population. Caribbean rum was the favourite Irish tipple, and everyone from street sweepers to gentlewomen enjoyed an afternoon cup of China tea sweetened with West Indian sugar. Britain sat at the centre of an impressive trading empire, and foodstuffs helped to turn the wheels of commerce. The Atlantic slave trade relied on supplies of maize and manioc grown in West Africa; the slaves working on South Carolinas plantations grew rice that the British traded with northern Europe for the timber and pitch needed by the shipbuilding industry. Trade and sea power were mutually dependent. The merchant marine was an invaluable source of experienced seamen in time of war, and the Royal Navy protected the trade routes. The tax revenue generated by the import of commodities from around the globe in turn financed the building of warships.

The empire that grew out of this trade is often referred to as Britains First Empire. It encompassed a wide variety of types of settlement from fishing enterprises on Newfoundlands shores and agro-industrial sugar plantations on West Indian islands to neat English farms in southern Ireland and forts manned by a handful of soldiers dotted along the West African coastline. The Atlantic trade dominated, although the East India Company, with its factories in India and China, was growing in power and importance. What brought these disparate entities together in a common framework under the umbrella of Britains empire was not the manner in which they were governed but how trade with them was regulated. The Navigation Acts stipulated that only British ships could carry their goods. For most of the eighteenth century the term empire did not denote the possession of territory but the power to dominate trade. The first British Empire was an empire of the seas.

Britains Second Empire emerged in the nineteenth century after the loss in 1783 of the thirteen mainland American colonies. This dealt the Empire a blow but in 1815 Britain emerged triumphant from the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars with France as the worlds pre-eminent maritime power. British territories expanded into India, Africa and even as far afield as Australasia, and a mixture of military force and financial investment ensured that Britains economic hegemony extended the nations power into China and South America. Even the United States was reintegrated into this informal empire until the 1870s, when its own process of industrialisation allowed it to pull away from the British sphere of influence. This restless expansion allowed Britain to harness the worlds resources.