I am grateful for the help I have received from the librarians at Cambridge University Library and for the library’s policy of allowing past post-graduate students unfettered access to its collections. I would like to thank the archivists at Reading University Special Collections; Rachel Rowe of the Imperial and Commonwealth Collections, Cambridge; Jenni Skinner at the African Studies Library, Cambridge; and Christopher Dobbs at the Mary Rose museum, Portsmouth. And an extra hurrah for Kevin Greenbank at the Centre for South Asian Studies, Cambridge for his friendship and consistently good-humoured assistance. I am grateful to the History Department at Warwick University for making me an Associate Fellow and the Royal Literary Fund for providing me with a congenial means to earn a living when the number of years it took to write this book stretched into too many.
I am indebted to the many scholars whose work this book rests on, and in particular to Martin Jones whose book Feast inspired me to structure the book around meals. A number of people provided me with references, information and suggestions: thank you Yashaswini Chandra, Rebecca Earle, Vic Gatrell, David Nally, Kaori O’Connor, Emma Spary, Lesley Steinitz and David Zylberberg. I would like to thank Maxine Berg for not only providing me with helpful references but also lending me her lovely home; Peter and Irmgard Seidel for the regular ‘Care Pakete’; Ruth and Philip Goodall for their encouragement, gin and tonics and cosy evenings by the fire; Sophie Gilmartin for her spirit-raising companionship at parallel desks and on windy beach walks on our writing holidays; Terry Roopnaraine for telling me stories about life with gold diggers and diamond miners and answering all my questions about Guyana as well as taking my photograph; John Hay and Sarah Burwood for giving my daughter Sophie a lovely holiday while I was busy writing.
In the final stages of revising the manuscript I sorely missed the late Mike O’Brien’s propensity to catch my grammatical mistakes. I thank Tricia O’Brien for making me temporary custodian of his rug as it not only brightens my writing shed but acts as a salutary reminder of Mike and his high standards. I am also grateful to Tricia and Sue Belfrage for reading chapters and making helpful comments; Hiram Morgan for a friendly response to requests for help from a perfect stranger and for thereafter reading and commenting on the chapter on Ireland; Peter Garnsey for reading the entire manuscript and cheering me on and Lara Heimert for her careful reading and useful commentary. My sister Sarah I thank for finding Frank Swannell, reading and helping me revise numerous drafts and all her big-sisterly support. Jim and Anne Secord were both fantastically helpful and I thank them for their careful reading of the entire manuscript, constructive criticism, the loan of Punch and their boundless enthusiasm for the book. I am especially grateful to Jörg Hensgen who understood what I was trying to do and whose painstaking and skilful editing helped me turn a messy manuscript into a more readable book.
Indeed, I have been fortunate to have two lovely publishing teams and I am also grateful to Stuart Williams, Anna-Sophia Watts, Matt Broughton and Ceri Maxwell-Hughes at The Bodley Head; and to Alia Massoud, Nicole Capute and Betsy DeJesu at Basic Books. I am very fortunate to have Clare Alexander as my agent and I thank her for her continued encouragement and support and for chivvying me to hurry up when I needed a push.
I don’t have the words to express how grateful I am to my neurosurgeon Mr Rikin Trivedi without whose skill I might not have been able to carry on writing. Thomas Seidel I thank for building me a beautiful writing shed and then not minding too much when I spent a lot of time there, reading and then re-reading drafts and always being willing to engage with my latest knotty problem and make helpful suggestions, ask difficult questions and challenge my arguments, and for bringing me endless cups of tea. To Sophie I promise to make more time for doing fun things from now on.
As an undergraduate I had the good fortune to be taught by the eminent art historian Partha Mitter who sparked my interest in the British Empire. Without Partha’s encouragement I would never have applied to Cambridge where I had the privilege to be supervised by the late Chris Bayly, one of the leading historians of empire and a pioneering scholar of global history. It is to these two inspirational teachers and friends that this book is dedicated.