‘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 can’t ask for food again,’ he whispered, aghast. ‘We’ve 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.”’1
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 Britain’s 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 London’s 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 England’s imports. But over the following centuries foodstuffs went from playing a negligible role in England’s 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 country’s imports. In fact, with a value of over £2.3 million, West Indian sugar was worth more than all the manufactured goods arriving on Britain’s shores.2
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 Carolina’s 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.3 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 Britain’s First Empire. It encompassed a wide variety of types of settlement – from fishing enterprises on Newfoundland’s 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 Britain’s 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’.4
Britain’s 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 world’s pre-eminent maritime power.5 The old closed mercantilist system was swept away by a fervent belief in the benefits of free trade.6 British territories expanded into India, Africa and even as far afield as Australasia, and a mixture of military force and financial investment ensured that Britain’s economic hegemony extended the nation’s 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 world’s resources.
The steamship and the railway moved unprecedented numbers of both people and goods across vast distances. Food was only one among the many commodities – textiles, dyestuffs, tin, rubber and timber – that flowed into Britain. But food imports from the commercial empire played an extremely important role as they became vital to the diet of the working classes upon whose labour the Industrial Revolution depended. By the 1930s, the wheat to make the working man’s loaf was supplied by Canada and his Sunday leg of lamb had been fattened on New Zealand’s grasslands.
In the tropics adventurers established plantation agriculture and imported slaves from West Africa and indentured labourers from India to provide a workforce. British migrants settled in the temperate zones and grew European foodstuffs on the land they appropriated from the indigenous inhabitants. In the process, the British eradicated entire native populations; they changed landscapes and agricultural systems, often destabilising other people’s access to food; they facilitated the exchange of crops between the Old and New World, reshaping their own and other people’s tastes in the process.7 The food web that was woven by these developments created a truly global system that connected all five inhabited continents, drawing in even the most isolated and far-flung corners of the planet. The Hungry Empire reveals the intricate interdependence of the Empire and its role in shaping the eating habits of the modern world.