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 1660–1837), when such foreign goods as coffee, tea, and sugar went from rare luxuries to some of the most ubiquitous commodities in Britain—reaching even the poorest and remotest of households. Bickham reveals how trade in the empire’s 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.

Explores how British and Japanese firms have responded to globalization from a long-term perspective. Incorporates studies from the 18th century and sheds light on the impact of the institutional setting, the influence of government and entrepreneurs, and the weight of historical contingency in conditioning firm responses to globalization.

The nineteenth-century West saw extraordinary economic growth and cultural change. This volume explores and explains the birth of the modern world through the food it produced and consumed. Food security vastly improved though malnutrition and famines persisted. Scientific research radically altered the ways in which food and its relation to the body were conceived: efficiency became the watchword, norms the measure, and standardized goods the rule. At the same time, the art of food became a luxury pursuit as interest in gastronomy soared. A Cultural History of Food in the Age of Empire presents an overview of the period with essays on food production, food systems, food security, safety and crises, food and politics, eating out, professional cooking, kitchens and service work, family and domesticity, body and soul, representations of food, and developments in food production and consumption globally.

'A wholly pleasing book, which offers a tasty side dish to anyone exploring the narrative history of the British Empire' Max Hastings, Sunday Times WINNER OF THE GUILD OF FOOD WRITERS BOOK AWARD 2018 The glamorous daughter of an African chief shares a pineapple with a slave trader... Surveyors in British Columbia eat tinned Australian rabbit... Diamond prospectors in Guyana prepare an iguana curry... In twenty meals The Hungry Empire tells the story of how the British created a global network of commerce and trade in foodstuffs that moved people and plants from one continent to another, reshaping landscapes and culinary tastes. The Empire allowed Britain to harness the globe’s edible resources from cod fish and salt beef to spices, tea and sugar. Lizzie Collingham takes us on a wide-ranging culinary journey, revealing how virtually every meal we eat still contains a taste of empire.

Elizabeth Gwillim (1763–1807) and her sister Mary Symonds (1772–1854) produced over two hundred watercolours depicting birds, fish, flowers, people, and landscapes around Madras (now Chennai). The sisters’ detailed letters fill four large volumes in the British Library; their artwork is in the Blacker Wood Natural History Collection of McGill University Library in Canada and in the South Asia Collection in Britain. The first book about their work and lives, Women, Environment, and Networks of Empire asks what these materials reveal about nature, society, and environment in early nineteenth-century South India. Gwillim and Symonds left for India in 1801, following the appointment of Elizabeth’s husband, Henry Gwillim, to the Supreme Court of Madras. Their paintings document, on one hand, the rapidly expanding colonial city of Madras and its population and, on the other, the natural environment and wildlife of the city. Gwillim’s paintings of birds are remarkable for their detail, naturalism, and accuracy. In their studies of natural history, Gwillim and Symonds relied on the expertise of Indian bird-catchers, fishermen, physicians, artists, and translators, contributing to a unique intersection of European and Asian natural knowledge. The sisters’ extensive correspondence demonstrates how women shaped networks of trade and scholarship through exchanges of plants, books, textiles, and foods. In Women, Environment, and Networks of Empire an interdisciplinary group of scholars use the paintings and writings of Elizabeth Gwillim and Mary Symonds to explore natural history, the changing environment, colonialism, and women’s lives at the turn of the nineteenth century.

When Jesus of Nazareth began proclaiming the kingdom of God early in the first century, he likely had no intention of starting a new religion, especially one that included former pagans. Yet a new religion did eventually develop—one that not only included non-Jews but was soon dominated by them. How did this happen? Jesus Followers in the Roman Empire by Paul Duff offers an accessible and informed account of Christian origins, beginning with the teaching of Jesus and moving to the end of the first century. Duff's narrative shows how the rural Jewish movement led by Jesus developed into a largely non-Jewish phenomenon permeating urban centers of the Roman Empire. Paying special attention to social, cultural, and religious contexts—as well as to early Christian ideas about idolatry, marriage, family, slavery, and ethnicity—Jesus Followers in the Roman Empire will help readers cultivate a deeper understanding of the identity, beliefs, and practices of early Christ-believers.

With groundbreaking contributions by Marshall McLuhan, Oliver Sacks, Italo Calvino and Alain Corbin, among others, Empire of the Senses overturns linguistic and textual models of interpretation and places sensory experience at the forefront of cultural analysis. The senses are gateways of knowledge, instruments of power, sources of pleasure and pain - and they are subject to dramatically different constructions in different societies and periods. Empire of the Senses charts the new terrains opened up by the sensual revolution in scholarship, as it takes the reader into the sensory worlds of the medieval witch and the postmodern mall, a Japanese tea ceremony and a Boston shelter for the homeless. This compelling revisioning of history and cultural studies sparkles with wit and insight and is destined to become a landmark in the field.

A Companion to the Roman Empire provides readers with a guide both to Roman imperial history and to the field of Roman studies, taking account of the most recent discoveries. This Companion brings together thirty original essays guiding readers through Roman imperial history and the field of Roman studies Shows that Roman imperial history is a compelling and vibrant subject Includes significant new contributions to various areas of Roman imperial history Covers the social, intellectual, economic and cultural history of the Roman Empire Contains an extensive bibliography

With a uniquely balanced combination of salty, sweet, sour, and spicy flavors, Thai food burst onto Los Angeles’s and America’s culinary scene in the 1980s. Flavors of Empire examines the rise of Thai food and the way it shaped the racial and ethnic contours of Thai American identity and community. Full of vivid oral histories and new archival material, this book explores the factors that made foodways central to the Thai American experience. Starting with American Cold War intervention in Thailand, Mark Padoongpatt traces how informal empire allowed U.S. citizens to discover Thai cuisine abroad and introduce it inside the United States. When Thais arrived in Los Angeles, they reinvented and repackaged Thai food in various ways to meet the rising popularity of the cuisine in urban and suburban spaces. Padoongpatt opens up the history and politics of Thai food for the first time, all while demonstrating how race emerges in seemingly mundane and unexpected places.

Travel writing has become central to postcolonial studies. This book provides an introduction to the genre, particularly to its dynamics of power and representation, and the degree to which it has promoted ideologies of empire.The book combines detailed evaluations of major contemporary models of analysis - new historicism, travelling theory, and post-colonial studies - with a series of specific studies detailing the complicity of the genre with a history of violent incursion from Columbus' reports from the New World through to the nomadism of postmodern travelogue.Among its particular areas of concern are* 'Othering' discourses - of cannibalism and infanticide* the production of colonial knowledge - geographic,medicinal, zoological* the role of sexual anxiety in the constructionof the gendered, travelling body* the interplay between imperial and domestic spheres* reappropration of alien discourse by indigenous cultures.Post-colonial studies has concentrated on travellers as conduits of erasure and appropriation. This book resists the temptation to think in terms of a simple monolithic Eurocentrism and offers a more complex reading of texts produced before, during and after periods of imperial ascendency. In doing so, it provides a more nuanced account of the hegemonic functions of travel-writing. As such it is necessary reading for students and academics of cultural studies, literary theory, anthropology and history.