9 
In which Lady Anne Barnard enjoys fine cabin dinners on a voyage to the Cape of Good Hope (February to May 1797)
How the Empire stimulated the growth of the provisions industry
Every day at two o’clock, the passengers on board the Sir Edward Hughes assembled in the ship’s cuddy to dine. According to Lady Anne Barnard, for the most part they ‘got on like lambs’. There was gentle and brave General Hartley, and the amiable Mrs Saul, an Irishwoman whom the gentlemen enjoyed teasing; the modest and well-bred Dr Paterson, and Mr Green–a collector of customs–and his wife; Colonel Lloyd, an honest Welshman, and Mr Keith, an aide-de-camp; and Mrs Patterson, who was travelling with ‘a crumb of a sister’. The only disagreeable members of the party were Captain Campbell, and his wife, who ‘might have been handsome if not so ill-tempered’.1 As the principal lady, Anne sat next to the ship’s captain. She was accompanying her husband, Andrew Barnard, who had just been appointed Colonial Secretary to the Cape of Good Hope. Lord Macartney, the new governor, was sailing alongside in another ship.2 The French revolutionary army had overrun the Netherlands in 1795, and the British were determined that the Dutch colony on the southern tip of Africa should not fall into French hands, as it was a key staging post on the sea route to India. That the Barnards were members of the new colonial administration was the cause of Mrs Campbell’s displeasure. As a Cape Dutchwoman, she was evidently unhappy about the British occupation of her home and continually made rude remarks about the ‘parcel of people’ the British were sending to the colony. Lady Anne and her companions were obliged ‘to drop common conversation with them beyond the necessities of society’.3
Lady Anne did not, however, allow the Campbells to spoil her enjoyment of the voyage. Captain James Urmuston, whom she found a most civil and pleasant dinner companion, kept a generous table. In her letter about the voyage to Henry Dundas, Secretary for the Colonies and her husband’s patron (as well as her erstwhile suitor), she included a typical menu:
Pease soup
Roast Leg of Mutton
Hogs’ puddings |
Two fowls |
Pork Pye |
Stewed Cabbage |
Two hams |
Potatoes |
Mutton Pyes |
Two ducks |
Mutton chops |
Corned Round of Beef
Removed by an enormous Plumb Pudding
Porter, Spruce Beer, Port Wine, Sherry, Gin, Rum etc.4
The captain’s table was clearly well supplied with fresh meat from the farmyard on deck. Dozens of oxen, pigs, sheep, chickens and ducks were routinely carried on sea voyages to provide the officers (and occasionally the men) with fresh meat. The sailors were allowed to bring their own goats on board and these would roam freely about the ship, indulging their unpopular habit of nibbling from any bread bags the sailors had neglected to hang out of their reach.5 Yet the hams, potatoes and (presumably pickled) cabbage on the menu, as well as the dried fruit to make the ‘plumb pudding’ and the fine selection of wines and spirits, would have been drawn from the captain’s special stores.
By the end of the eighteenth century, London had become a hub for a thriving European trade in provisions. Aristocratic families residing on their country estates sent their stewards down to the metropolis to fetch stocks of chocolate, coffee and tea. Italian warehouses in the capital specialised in Parmesan cheeses, Florence oil, vermicelli and prunes. Oil men had begun adding condiments such as olives, anchovies and pickles to their stores of animal and vegetable oils used for making lubricants, lamps, varnishes and soaps.6 Before putting to sea, ships’ captains routinely stocked up with herb-and elder-flavoured vinegars, cayenne pepper and spices, Naples biscuits and currant jelly.7 These were considered part of the furniture of a good table, and no doubt Lady Anne and her companions were able to dip their meat in ketchups and pickles from Urmuston’s store. Ordinary sailors eating their stodgy duffs (boiled puddings) and ‘scouse’ of broken biscuit mixed with bits of salt beef and ‘slush’ (the greasy mess the cook skimmed off vats of boiling meat) looked on the captain’s table with envy.8
Lady Ann Barnard described how the heavy load of great guns the Sir Edward Hughes was carrying out to Bengal made the ship rock violently in heavy seas. This must have made it difficult to avoid a similar mishap at dinner time in the ship’s cuddy.
The British occupation of the Dutch Cape colony was only the latest twist in a century and a half of conflict. For most of the time between 1650 and 1815, the British were at war with either the French, the Spanish or the Dutch. As each side sought to reduce its opponents’ commercial power within Europe, the fighting frequently spilled over into attacks on the others’ colonial commerce and overseas territories.9 Britain’s determination to defend her empire was evident on board the Sir Edward Hughes: the heavy load it was carrying of 227 great guns bound for Bengal made it rock violently in strong seas.10 With every conflict, the Royal Navy grew. Between 1650 and 1740 it doubled from around 20,000 to 40,000 men, and at the height of the 1793–1815 war with France, it mustered over 147,000 men sailing in more than 800 ships.11 In 1808, the British fleet in the Baltic alone required 960,000 lb of bread, 36,000 gallons of rum, 60,000 pieces of pork and 33,000 pieces of beef.12 At the turn of the century, between 10,000 and 20,000 extra cattle were slaughtered each year at London’s Smithfield market to supply the ships of the line with fresh beef. Pig farms proliferated around London, using the waste barley and malt from breweries to fatten the hogs.13
In the same way that the increase in the Tudor navy had stimulated the development of the Newfoundland fishery, so the expansion of the navy in the eighteenth century now stimulated the growth of the provisions industry. Local suppliers found it difficult to meet the unpredictable surges in demand, and so the victualling department set up slaughterhouses, breweries and bakehouses at the naval dockyards.14 Here intense demand promoted innovation and encouraged the rationalisation of food preparation. Just as the curing of cod on Newfoundland’s shores was organised into a set of repetitive tasks, so was the baking of ship’s biscuit in the naval bakeries. Every oven was assigned a team of bakers. A ‘kneader’ made the dough, while the ‘breakman’ was turned into a human machine, shuffling on his bottom up and down the pivoted beam that kneaded the great mass, which was too heavy to manipulate by hand. The ‘moulder’ then shaped pieces of the dough into biscuits and passed them on to a ‘stamper’, whose task was to mark them with holes on each side. A ‘thrower’ chucked the biscuits onto the peel, which a baker then placed in the oven.15 This division of labour speeded up the process to the point where each team was able to produce an impressive 1,500 lb of biscuits in an hour.16 With all 12 ovens working at full stretch, the naval bakery at Deptford could produce enough biscuit for more than 12,000 men every year.17 Nevertheless, wartime demand was sometimes so great that extra gangs had to be employed to bake biscuits through the night. On occasion, they were no sooner out of the ovens than they were packed into bags and hurried onto the warships waiting to put to sea.
The navy eventually turned to Ireland to make up its shortfall. At first, the seventeenth-century Cattle Acts, banning the import of Irish goods into England, prevented the Admiralty from taking advantage of the fact that Irish salt beef and butter were cheap. But when naval stores ran dry, the victuallers were given permission to buy meat and butter in Ireland. A series of Acts reopened trade after 1758, and from then on, Ireland became a major naval supplier. Its exports of salted beef, pork and butter doubled, and ‘Irish horse’ became sailors’ slang for salt beef.18 Anglo-Irish landlords were now in the ascendancy, and they carried on the English obsession with improving the land, building lime kilns on their estates to produce fertiliser and engaging in a flurry of hedging and ditching. The rich Munster pastureland around the busy ports was consolidated into neat fields dotted with beef and dairy cattle.19 At the same time, their Irish tenants–subsisting on the diet of potatoes that was to make them so vulnerable to famine in the nineteenth century–grew flax for the linen trade. And on the sour milk left over from butter-making they raised pigs for Newfoundland, where salt pork was the most popular meat.20 Home to an array of butchers, salters, packers, coopers, carters and porters, Cork gained such a reputation for efficient and effective packaging that herring from Gothenburg in Sweden was sent there to be repackaged before being exported to the West Indies, where it was fed to African slaves.21
In an effort to improve the sailors’ health, oatmeal, sugar, pickled cabbage, lemon juice, cocoa, dried fruit, suet and rum were added to their ration.22 In 1754, the pioneering ship’s surgeon James Lind suggested that portable soup might alleviate scurvy. It was made by simmering meat in water for hours until it was reduced to a jelly. In her popular cookery book of 1747, Hannah Glasse claimed in the section devoted to cookery for the ‘Captains of ships’ that a square of portable soup added to pease soup would improve it no end.23 By 1793, Ratcliffe’s Soup House in London was producing 897 tons a year, which it sold to both the army and the navy. Ship’s chandlers added it to their list of groceries for the merchant marine, and adverts for ‘portable soup of the best Sorts’ began appearing in London newspapers.24
Innovation in food processing was not confined to marine suppliers. In 1775, in the kitchen at the back of his shop on the Strand, John Burgess began pounding the Dutch herrings and anchovies he normally sold straight from the barrel and packing the resulting anchovy paste into small earthenware jars. His fish sauce made his shop so well known that in his poem Beppo, Byron suggested that travellers should make a trip there before venturing abroad:
And therefore humbly I would recommend
‘The curious in fish-sauce’, before they cross
The sea, to bid their cook, or wife, or friend,
Walk or ride to the Strand, and buy in gross
(Or if set out beforehand, these many send
By any means least liable to loss).
Ketchup, Soy, Chili-vinegar, and Harvey,
Or by the Lord! a Lent will well nigh starve ye.25
The Harvey’s sauce that Byron referred to was produced by Elizabeth Lazenby, an impoverished shopkeeper who had been given a fish-sauce recipe in the 1790s by her innkeeper brother, Peter Harvey, with the idea that she might use it to generate a modest living. Within a decade it was so popular that she set up a small factory in Southwark, where a heady scent of spices mixed with sharp notes of vinegar hung in the air over a small group of food workshops and vinegar breweries.26 From the 1750s, advances in food processing and preserving methods using sugar and vinegar made it possible to conquer the limits that time and distance placed on the transportation of foodstuffs. Durham mustard, Gorgona anchovies and Yorkshire hams were now available to the prosperous, whether they were away from London on a country estate, travelling in Europe, or colonists in distant lands.
In the eighteenth century, Britain’s export trade to the colonies was the fastest-growing sector of the economy. North America absorbed about a third of its output of woollens, while West Africa exchanged slaves for English cottons and chintzes and the West Indies took abundant quantities of Scottish and Irish linen to clothe the slaves who toiled on the sugar plantations. Fledgling societies in the colonies imported British manufactures ranging from farming equipment and sugar-refining pots to watches and clocks; pewter and brass basins, pots and tankards were popular among the West African slave traders.27 The figures for exports of provisions were subsumed under miscellaneous goods and so tend to be overlooked. However, they also played an important part in this colonial trade. Americans were as eager for English cheeses, pickles and hams as they were for buttons, clocks and nails.28 North American newspapers began to advertise the arrival of parcels of pickled mushrooms and London-made jellies, sauces and pickles.29 In among Connecticut onions, Philadelphian wheat flour and Carolina rice, grocers such as Gregory Purcell in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, stocked a range of imported foods: Irish ‘May Butter’ and salt pork, Dorchester ale, Florence oil, bohea and hyson teas and West Indian rum and citrus fruits.30 By mid century, the American colonies were importing £1.3 million worth of British goods each year.31
India too was a growing market, absorbing just under 10 per cent of Britain’s exports, among them ‘preserved salmon, lobsters, oysters, herrings, and other exotic fish, hams, reindeer-tongues, liqueurs, dried fruits, and a long list of foreign dainties’.32 When a ship called into Calcutta, wholesale purchasers ‘anxious to sell the[ir wares] in their freshest and purest state, usually put forth a series of advertisements, in which the art of puffing is carried to its fullest extent’.33 Officers on East India Company ships were encouraged to take with them to eastern ports a variety of domestic commodities. On a 755-ton ship they were allotted about 90 tons of cargo space as an ‘indulgence’, which they could fill with any goods as long as they did not come under the Company’s monopoly; restricted goods were Company staples such as nankeen cloth, raw silk, tea and China ware. This system ensured that the ‘Europe shops’ in the Asian ports were well stocked with hats, haberdashery, perfumery and provisions.34 Most of the time the officers could be fairly certain of making a profit of 100 per cent on their investment. In the 1770s, the memoirist and rake William Hickey reported that cheese and ham that would have sold in London for 1s. a pound were selling in Calcutta for 12s. 6d.35 Occasionally things did not go quite to plan. In May 1769, the East India Company officers on board the fleet bound for Madras suffered the misfortune that not only did all the ships arrive within ten days of each other, but they had all brought glassware with them as there had been such demand for it the previous year. They were forced to sell their goods at a 60 per cent loss.36
Colonial demand was one of the engines driving the growth of the provisions industry in Britain. Although for most of the eighteenth century food processing was predominantly small-scale, with most pickles, hams, pastes and comfitures manufactured in back kitchens, the provisions industry gave rise to busy workshops and small-scale factories making the packaging for the foodstuffs. Artisans produced barrels, firkins, casks and kits for salt meat, butter and pickled tripe. Others wove baskets for salt, canvas to make bales for pepper and wrappings for cheeses, and hessian to make sacks for flour and biscuits. Earthenware pots and jars were needed for split peas and oils and vinegars, and glass ‘squares’ for mustard and spices.37 English customs preferred wines and spirits to be imported in barrels and casks to prevent the smuggling of easily hidden bottles. The wine then had to be bottled in England before being sold at home or shipped out to foreign climes. The result was the rapid growth of a bottle-making industry.38 Thus the provisions industry was at the heart of eighteenth-century British industriousness.
The empire trade in provisions gave rise to new products. Indian pale ale was developed to cater to the market of thirsty colonists. Traditionally, in October the English landed classes brewed a well-hopped and therefore very bitter pale ale known as ‘stock’ beer. It was designed to take a few months to mature and so could be kept over the winter. For this reason it was thought the most suitable beer to ship to the colonies, as it would best survive the long journey. A small Bow brewery, just up the Thames from the East India docks at Blackwall, was popular with Company captains, as its owner, George Hodgson, extended them 18 months’ credit. In fact, the four-to five-month-long journey to India was discovered to have a beneficial impact on Hodgson’s ‘stock’ beer.39 The rocking motion of the ship combined with the gradual application of heat as it sailed first to the Atlantic wine islands and then on to Rio de Janeiro, from where the trade winds blew it back east across the southern Atlantic to Cape Town and on to India, resulted in a beer with a depth of flavour that could be achieved in England only after years in the cellar.
In the 1780s, George Hodgson’s son, Mark, perfected the brew by using pale malt and plenty of hops, both with strong preservative qualities. A final touch was to add dry hops to the barrel of finished beer; this helped stabilise the beverage so that it could withstand the pitching motion of the ship.40 The idea of drinking cold beer was alien to the British, but Company officials in India took the novel step of cooling the pale ale in saltpetre, which made it all the more refreshing.41 Hodgson’s became an icon of British life in India. The chronicler of London street life Henry Mayhew recalled that when he made his first journey to India in 1825 as a ‘midshipman in the Leadenhall-street Navy… no other malt liquor was drunk at tiffin or at dinner, in Calcutta, but this same Hodgson’s Pale Ale–for at that time there was none other to compete with it’.42 It became so much a part of Company culture that failing to omit the ‘g’ in the pronunciation of the beer’s name had the effect of instantly marking out the newcomer to India.43
Competition for the colonial market led food businesses to hone their products, sharpen their marketing tactics and introduce new distribution techniques. In the 1820s, Hodgson’s were joined in India by Bass and Samuel Allsopp & Sons, whose pale ales were popular because the hard water in Burton upon Trent was particularly suited to brewing a sharp, dry and thirst-quenching beer. Even though they failed to oust Hodgson’s from its iconic position in the public mind as the Indian pale ale, these companies eventually gained the larger market share. Bass and Allsopp also applied the lessons they had learned in India with good effect to the home market. Hodgson’s had cut out the ships’ officers who acted as middlemen in the Indian provisions trade and sold their beer directly to agency houses in the port towns. In the same way, the Burton brewers now circumvented the public house, which in Britain acted as the middleman between a brewery and its customers, and looked to the shopkeepers. They bottled their pale ale on site and distributed it by canal and rail to shops round the country. If in Britain Hodgson’s targeted their advertising at returned old-India hands, Bass and Allsopp identified as their potential customers the rising lower-middle class of shopkeepers and clerks, eager to find a beer that would set them apart from the porter-drinking labouring classes. They revolutionised the English brewing trade and transformed Burton into England’s first brewing town.44 When Mayhew visited in 1865, he picturesquely claimed that the ‘brewers’ tall chimney-shafts… now bristle almost as thickly as the minarets of some Turkish city’.45 He noted that while the Hodgson brewery had long since closed down, the Burton brewers had become ‘merchant princes’, with Bass & Co. paying ‘as much as £500 a-day in excise dues to the Government’.46
The ability to spot an opportunity and then adapt and improve a product to suit the market was displayed equally by Madeiran wine makers. Wine producers and export merchants in Madeira participated in a dialogue with colonial shopkeepers and customers around the world that eventually transformed a nondescript vin de table into a luxurious fortified wine drunk throughout the Empire. Madeira’s strategic position on the sailing routes between Britain, the Americas and the Indies meant that ships would call in there and pick up some of the local wine. As with pale ale, it was discovered that the liquor was greatly improved by the heat and agitation of a prolonged voyage. In Britain, distributors found they could sell a bottle of Madeira that had been subjected to a long journey around the West Indies for £10 or £12 more than wine shipped directly to Britain. If it was fortified with brandy, it was found to taste even better. The wine makers were responsive to the feedback they received from their various markets. Eventually they constructed special steam-powered machinery to simulate the heat and agitation of long-distance maritime travel. They made the pipes to transport the wine in various lengths according to the differing East India Company and American colonial customs requirements. Thus Madeira became a different drink in every market. Dark, sweet wines were made for the West Indian sugar barons; heavily fortified pale, dry white Madeira for the South Carolina rice planters. Every taste was catered for and no colonial meal was complete without a bottle of Madeira on the table.47
This process of exchange and adaptability marked the imperial commercial world. While organising the transport or sale of cargoes of provisions, letter-writers swapped news about world events as well as domestic occurrences. Trust was built up across immense distances. Family ties, marital alliances and contracts created security, as did the shared sense of what constituted financial and moral probity that arose out the process of communication and negotiation. The trade in provisions made up an important strand in this ‘dense, integrated, inter-imperial’ commercial world.48
The exchange of provisions was two-way. While barrels of Bristol tripe, jars of preserves and Harvey’s sauce, bottles of vinegar and pipes of Madeira made their way to the colonies, colonials had assorted exotic goods sent home for their own use or as gifts for relatives and friends. In 1679, Henry Drax wrote a detailed document for his overseer on how, in his absence, to run the sugar plantation he had inherited from his father James (whose beef extravaganza Richard Ligon described in Chapter Four). In an appendix, he instructed his overseer:
I would have every year 200 weight of green ginger well preserved with the best sugar sent home in… good Cask. Let all the citron peels you can get be put into good brandy and sent to me in England, also two barrels of the best and largest Yams, 2 Barrels of the Largest and best Eddoes and 2 barrels of the largest and driest potatoes… all the orange blossoms that you can get be stilled in alembic and the water sent me. Send four times every year a ten gallon runlet of Jamaica pepper well pickled in good vinegar and about 50 pounds of Okra stilled and well dried and a chest of china oranges, a chest of sweet lemons and some shaddocks yearly.49
Drax clearly intended to replicate in England the mongrel cuisine of the West Indies, heavily influenced by the cookery of the African slaves. The slaves had introduced yams to the sugar islands from Africa, while eddoes were of Asian origin and had probably been brought to the Caribbean by the Portuguese from China or Japan. The slaves used salt fish, capsicums and eddoes, which were ‘not unlike a rough irregular potato’, to make ‘an excellent pot of soup’ enjoyed by black and white alike.50 No doubt Drax intended to have a similar dish made with his ‘largest and best eddoes’.
In 1765, Simon Taylor, one of the most important landowners in Jamaica, took over the running of the Golden Grove plantation for its absentee proprietor, Chaloner Arcedekne, who lived in Suffolk. Taylor regularly sent Arcedekne turtles and pipes of Madeira in the care of various ships’ captains.51 Traditionally when a host wanted to impress his dinner guests he served venison. Venison celebrated the established social order: power and status was derived from land, which gave the aristocracy exclusive access to deer. In the second half of the eighteenth century, commercial men began to celebrate their links to the world of trade with turtle dinners.52
These were hearty affairs, as some of the animals weighed as much as 500 lb, and consisted of five different dishes. One was made from the fins; another from the calipash, the green gelatinous substance that adhered to the shell; the third from the yellow gelatinous belly known as the calipee; while the rest of the meat was made into a fricassee and a soup. Despite the meat’s slightly musky smell, epicures raved that it had the consistency of butter and that the calipash and calipee tasted like bone marrow.53 It was only when she visited the West Indies in the 1770s that Janet Schaw came to appreciate turtle. In her account of her journey she wrote, ‘here is the green fat, not the slobbery thing my stomach used to stand at, but firm and more delicate than it is possible to describe. Could an Alderman of true taste conceive the difference between it here and in the city, he would make the Voyage on purpose, and I fancy he would make a voyage into the other world before he left the table.’54
Schaw was referring to the fact that turtle was routinely served at the Lord Mayor of London’s banquet for the aldermen of London’s city council. Indeed, turtle dinners became so popular with scientific, gambling and male dining clubs that some feared the meat might displace roast beef as the symbol of whole-hearted Englishness.55 It is an indication of how embedded the Empire was within British culture that a feast based on an exotic foreign creature could be seen as symbolic of Englishness.56
The growing pride in the Empire within Britain can be traced through contemporary cookbooks. From the mid eighteenth century, recipes for ‘oatmeal pudding after the New England manner’, ‘Carolina Rice pudding’ and ‘China Chilo’ began to appear often in sections devoted to ‘oriental’ and ‘colonial’ recipes.57 Luxury cookbooks began including recipes for turtle. Turtle meat was best eaten fresh, and so the poor creatures were transported live in barrels of water. In The Lady’s Complete Guide; or Cookery in all its Branches, Mary Cole gave the grisly instruction to remove the animal from the barrel of water and chop off its head and then bleed the carcass before butchering it into the separate cuts. She gave a recipe for dressing the meat ‘the West India Way’ with Madeira, cloves, nutmeg, mace and cayenne pepper. For those who could not run to the expense of the real thing, she included a mock-turtle soup recipe using a calf’s head as a substitute.58 Thus an exotic dish was incorporated into the British culinary repertoire transformed into an elaborate offal soup.
This was typical of the way the British integrated foreign foods into the cuisine and is illustrated in their treatment of the exotic dish they really made their own–curry. Early cooks remained faithful to Indian practices when cooking curries and added specific freshly ground spices at different stages in the cooking process. J. Skeat even appeared to be attempting to re-create a particular garnish when he suggested drying long pieces of cucumber over a slow fire before strewing them over a finished curry.61 But over time British cooks began to take short cuts using pre-prepared spice mixtures and eventually the variety and multiplicity of Indian cookery was lost. British curries tended to be made according to a standardised method which involved first frying the onions in butter, then adding a spice mix, followed by the meat which was simmered in stock to produce a spicy casserole. British cooks also had an unfortunate tendency to regard curry as a way of using up leftovers. Charlotte Mason informed the readers of her cookbook that a pre-prepared spice mix could transform cold meats and introduce ‘a very acceptable variety at table in place of toujours hash’.62 As he contemplated one such ‘hash flavoured with turmeric and cayenne’ an Indian visitor to England lamented, ‘where are our chutneys, and our sweet pickles–the far-famed compositions of Lucknow!’ 63
As with turtle, the British transformed curry into an economical and convenient dish that according to one cookery writer was ‘now so completely naturalized, that few dinners are thought complete unless one is on the table’.64 They had appropriated Indian food and made it their own. British cookery was at its most adventurous, interesting and innovative when it incorporated colonial dishes. In the notebooks that Wilhelmina and Stephana Malcolm used to collect recipes, the exotic ones like ‘mulgatawy soup’ and Indian pickle sent to the girls in Dumfriesshire by their brothers from various locations in the Empire stand out among the more pedestrian instructions for making Brown Windsor soup.65
The lively contribution the Empire made to British cookery mirrored the wider contribution it made to the British economy. By the end of the eighteenth century, it seemed perfectly normal to transport potentially perishable food and drink over immense distances.66 Flexible and ingenious manufacturers who listened carefully to their customers and adapted their goods to their tastes had produced a wide range of ready-made foods and sophisticated drinks that meant the moneyed traveller and colonist could replace hardtack with crackers, salt meat with hams, and beer with refined pale ales and fortified wine. The branding of food products had begun with the association of foods with particular places–ham with Yorkshire, tripe with Bristol and oil with Florence–to give them an air of authenticity and quality.67 It had been discovered that intensive marketing and advertising reaped rewards, and producers and distributors had taken to the practice with enthusiasm.68 In all these ways the colonial trade in provisions laid the groundwork for the rise of the industrialised food industry.
The roots of Britain’s Industrial Revolution can be traced back to the rapid technological change the textile industry underwent over the eighteenth century, beginning with the spinning jenny and culminating in the introduction of the mechanised loom. But the growing provisions industry also made a significant contribution to the industriousness that was the precursor to the Industrial Revolution. In fact, it was probably a food-processing factory rather than a textile mill that inspired William Blake’s phrase ‘dark satanic mills’ in his poem ‘Jerusalem’. On the south-eastern bank of the Thames near Blackfriars Bridge, close to where Blake lived, stood the Albion flour mill. Built in 1786, this was the first steam-powered flour mill in Britain, equipped with machinery designed by Matthew Boulton and James Watt, two of the architects of the Industrial Revolution. The small independent millers that the mill put out of business denounced it as ‘satanic’.69