Eating the Empire

Eating the Empire
Author: Troy Bickham
Publisher: Reaktion Books
Total Pages: 286
Release: 2020-04-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 1789142458

When students gathered in a London coffeehouse and smoked tobacco; when Yorkshire women sipped sugar-infused tea; or when a Glasgow family ate a bowl of Indian curry, were they aware of the mechanisms of imperial rule and trade that made such goods readily available? In Eating the Empire, Troy Bickham unfolds the extraordinary role that food played in shaping Britain during the long eighteenth century (circa 1660–1837), when such foreign goods as coffee, tea, and sugar went from rare luxuries to some of the most ubiquitous commodities in Britain—reaching even the poorest and remotest of households. Bickham reveals how trade in the empire’s edibles underpinned the emerging consumer economy, fomenting the rise of modern retailing, visual advertising, and consumer credit, and, via taxes, financed the military and civil bureaucracy that secured, governed, and spread the British Empire.

Cuisine and Empire

Cuisine and Empire
Author: Rachel Laudan
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 488
Release: 2015-04-03
Genre: Cooking
ISBN: 0520286316

Rachel Laudan tells the remarkable story of the rise and fall of the world’s great cuisines—from the mastery of grain cooking some twenty thousand years ago, to the present—in this superbly researched book. Probing beneath the apparent confusion of dozens of cuisines to reveal the underlying simplicity of the culinary family tree, she shows how periodic seismic shifts in “culinary philosophy”—beliefs about health, the economy, politics, society and the gods—prompted the construction of new cuisines, a handful of which, chosen as the cuisines of empires, came to dominate the globe. Cuisine and Empire shows how merchants, missionaries, and the military took cuisines over mountains, oceans, deserts, and across political frontiers. Laudan’s innovative narrative treats cuisine, like language, clothing, or architecture, as something constructed by humans. By emphasizing how cooking turns farm products into food and by taking the globe rather than the nation as the stage, she challenges the agrarian, romantic, and nationalistic myths that underlie the contemporary food movement.

The Fruits of Empire

The Fruits of Empire
Author: Shana Klein
Publisher: University of California Press
Total Pages: 259
Release: 2020-10-13
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0520296397

The Fruits of Empire is a history of American expansion through the lens of art and food. In the decades after the Civil War, Americans consumed an unprecedented amount of fruit as it grew more accessible with advancements in refrigeration and transportation technologies. This excitement for fruit manifested in an explosion of fruit imagery within still life paintings, prints, trade cards, and more. Images of fruit labor and consumption by immigrants and people of color also gained visibility, merging alongside the efforts of expansionists to assimilate land and, in some cases, people into the national body. Divided into five chapters on visual images of the grape, orange, watermelon, banana, and pineapple, this book demonstrates how representations of fruit struck the nerve of the nation’s most heated debates over land, race, and citizenship in the age of high imperialism.

Britain's Empire

Britain's Empire
Author: Richard Gott
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 577
Release: 2022-01-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 1839764228

A magisterial history of resistance to the rising of the British empire As the call for a new understanding of our national history grows louder, Britain’s Empire turns the received imperial story on its head. Richard Gott recounts the long-overlooked narrative of resisters, revolutionaries and revolters who stood up to the might of the Empire. In a story of almost continuous colonialist violence, Britain’s crimes unspool from the beginning of the eighteenth century to the Indian Mutiny, spanning the globe from Ireland to Australia. Capturing events from the perspective of the colonised, Gott unearths the all-but-forgotten stories excluded from mainstream histories.

Flavors of Empire

Flavors of Empire
Author: Mark Padoongpatt
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 270
Release: 2017-09-26
Genre: Cooking
ISBN: 0520293738

"One night in Bangkok" : food and the everyday life of empire -- "Chasing the yum" : food procurement and early Thai Los Angeles -- Too hot to handle? restaurants and Thai American identity -- "More than a place of worship" : food festivals and Thai American suburban culture -- Thailand's "77th province" : culinary tourism in Thai Town

A Revolution in Eating

A Revolution in Eating
Author: James E. McWilliams
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 414
Release: 2005
Genre: Cooking
ISBN: 9780231129923

History of food in the United States.

Sugar and Civilization

Sugar and Civilization
Author: April Merleaux
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2015-07-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 1469622521

In the weeks and months after the end of the Spanish-American War, Americans celebrated their nation's triumph by eating sugar. Each of the nation's new imperial possessions, from Puerto Rico to the Philippines, had the potential for vastly expanding sugar production. As victory parties and commemorations prominently featured candy and other sweets, Americans saw sugar as the reward for their global ambitions. April Merleaux demonstrates that trade policies and consumer cultures are as crucial to understanding U.S. empire as military or diplomatic interventions. As the nation's sweet tooth grew, people debated tariffs, immigration, and empire, all of which hastened the nation's rise as an international power. These dynamics played out in the bureaucracies of Washington, D.C., in the pages of local newspapers, and at local candy counters. Merleaux argues that ideas about race and civilization shaped sugar markets since government policies and business practices hinged on the racial characteristics of the people who worked the land and consumed its products. Connecting the history of sugar to its producers, consumers, and policy makers, Merleaux shows that the modern American sugar habit took shape in the shadow of a growing empire.

Bountiful Empire

Bountiful Empire
Author: Priscilla Mary Isin
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2025
Genre:
ISBN: 9781836390015

A Thirst for Empire

A Thirst for Empire
Author: Erika Rappaport
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 568
Release: 2019-03-05
Genre: Cooking
ISBN: 0691192707

"Tea has been one of the most popular commodities in the world. Over centuries, profits from its growth and sales funded wars and fueled colonization, and its cultivation brought about massive changes--in land use, labor systems, market practices, and social hierarchies--the effects of which are with us even today. A Thirst for Empire takes a vast and in-depth historical look at how men and women--through the tea industry in Europe, Asia, North America, and Africa--transformed global tastes and habits and in the process created our modern consumer society. As Erika Rappaport shows, between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries the boundaries of the tea industry and the British Empire overlapped but were never identical, and she highlights the economic, political, and cultural forces that enabled the British Empire to dominate--but never entirely control--the worldwide production, trade, and consumption of tea. Rappaport delves into how Europeans adopted, appropriated, and altered Chinese tea culture to build a widespread demand for tea in Britain and other global markets and a plantation-based economy in South Asia and Africa. Tea was among the earliest colonial industries in which merchants, planters, promoters, and retailers used imperial resources to pay for global advertising and political lobbying. The commercial model that tea inspired still exists and is vital for understanding how politics and publicity influence the international economy ..."--Jacket.