Eating the Empire FOOD AND SOCIETY IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY BRITAIN

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 16601837), when such foreign goods as coffee, tea, and sugar went from rare luxuries to some of the most ubiquitous commodities in Britainreaching even the poorest and remotest of households. Bickham reveals how trade in the empires 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.

Eating the Empire FOOD AND SOCIETY IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY BRITAIN Book