During the 17th century, England saw foreign foods made increasingly available to consumers and featured in recipe books, medical manuals, treatises, travel narratives, and even in plays. Yet the public's fascination with these foods went beyond just eating them. Through exotic presentations in popular culture, they were able to mentally partake of products for which they may not have had access. This book examines the "body and mind" consumerism of the early British Empire.
"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
Presenting a social history of colonial food practices in India, Malaysia and Singapore, this book discusses the contribution that Asian domestic servants made towards the development of this cuisine between 1858 and 1963. Domestic cookbooks, household management manuals, memoirs, diaries and travelogues are used to investigate the culinary practices in the colonial household, as well as in clubs, hill stations, hotels and restaurants. Challenging accepted ideas about colonial cuisine, the book argues that a distinctive cuisine emerged as a result of negotiation and collaboration between the expatriate British and local people, and included dishes such as curries, mulligatawny, kedgeree, country captain and pish pash. The cuisine evolved over time, with the indigenous servants preparing both local and European foods. The book highlights both the role and representation of domestic servants in the colonies. It is an important contribution for students and scholars of food history and colonial history, as well as Asian Studies.
For centuries, the food and culinary delights of the Byzantine empire - centred on Constantinople - have captivated the west, although it appeared that very little information had been passed down to us. Andrew Dalby's "Tastes of Byzantium" now reveals in astonishing detail, for the first time, what was eaten in the court of the Eastern Roman Empire - and how it was cooked. Fusing the spices of the Romans with the seafood and simple local food of the Aegean and Greek world, the cuisine of the Byzantines was unique and a precursor to much of the food of modern Turkey and Greece. Bringing this vanished cuisine to life in vivid and sensual detail, Dalby describes the sights and smells of Constantinople and its marketplaces, relates travellers' tales and paints a comprehensive picture of the recipes and customs of the empire and their relationship to health and the seasons, love and medicine. For food-lovers and historians alike, "Tastes of Byzantium" is both essential and riveting - an extraordinary illumination of everyday life in the Byzantine world.
How the global tea industry influenced the international economy and the rise of mass consumerism 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. An expansive and original global history of imperial tea, A Thirst for Empire demonstrates the ways that this fluid and powerful enterprise helped shape the contemporary world.
Food stood at the centre of Mussolini's attempt to occupy Ethiopia and build an Italian Empire in East Africa. Seeking to redirect the surplus of Italian rural labor from migration overseas to its own Empire, the fascist regime envisioned transforming Ethiopia into Italy's granary to establish self-sufficiency, demographic expansion and strengthen Italy's international political position. While these plans failed, the extensive food exchanges and culinary hybridizations between Ethiopian and Italian food cultures thrived, and resulted in the creation of an Ethiopian-Italian cuisine, a taste of Empire at the margins. In studying food in short-lived Italian East Africa, Gastrofascism and Empire breaks significant new ground in our understanding of the workings of empire in the circulation of bodies, foodways, and global practices of dependence and colonialism, as well as the decolonizing practices of indigenous food and African anticolonial resistance. In East Africa, Fascist Italy brought older imperial models of global food to a hypermodern level in all its political, technoscientific, environmental, and nutritional aspects. This larger story of food sovereignty-entered in racist, mass settler colonialism-is dramatically different from the plantation and trade colonialisms of other empires and has never been comprehensively told. Using an original decolonizing food studies approach and an unprecedented variety of unexplored Ethiopian and Italian sources, Cinotto describes the different meanings of different foods for different people at different points of the imperial food chain. Exploring the subjectivities, agencies and emotions of Ethiopian and Italian men and women, it goes beyond simple colonizer/colonized binaries and offers a nuanced picture of lived, multisensorial experiences with food and empire.
Purifying Empire explores the material, cultural and moral fragmentation of the boundaries of imperial and colonial rule in the British Empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It charts how a particular bio-political project, namely the drive to regulate the obscene in late nineteenth-century Britain, was transformed from a national into a global and imperial venture and then re-localized in two different colonial contexts, India and Australia, to serve decidedly different ends. While a considerable body of work has demonstrated both the role of empire in shaping moral regulatory projects in Britain and their adaptation, transformation and, at times, rejection in colonial contexts, this book illustrates that it is in fact only through a comparative and transnational framework that it is possible to elucidate both the temporalist nature of colonialism and the political, racial and moral contradictions that sustained imperial and colonial regimes.
It would be easy to assume that, in the eighteenth century, slavery and the culture of taste--the world of politeness, manners, and aesthetics--existed as separate and unequal domains, unrelated in the spheres of social life. But to the contrary, Slavery and the Culture of Taste demonstrates that these two areas of modernity were surprisingly entwined. Ranging across Britain, the antebellum South, and the West Indies, and examining vast archives, including portraits, period paintings, personal narratives, and diaries, Simon Gikandi illustrates how the violence and ugliness of enslavement actually shaped theories of taste, notions of beauty, and practices of high culture, and how slavery's impurity informed and haunted the rarified customs of the time. Gikandi focuses on the ways that the enslavement of Africans and the profits derived from this exploitation enabled the moment of taste in European--mainly British--life, leading to a transformation of bourgeois ideas regarding freedom and selfhood. He explores how these connections played out in the immense fortunes made in the West Indies sugar colonies, supporting the lavish lives of English barons and altering the ideals that defined middle-class subjects. Discussing how the ownership of slaves turned the American planter class into a new aristocracy, Gikandi engages with the slaves' own response to the strange interplay of modern notions of freedom and the realities of bondage, and he emphasizes the aesthetic and cultural processes developed by slaves to create spaces of freedom outside the regimen of enforced labor and truncated leisure. Through a close look at the eighteenth century's many remarkable documents and artworks, Slavery and the Culture of Taste sets forth the tensions and contradictions entangling a brutal practice and the distinctions of civility.
