The Hungry Empire
The thesis of this “fascinating” and “impressively scholarly” examination of the British Empire, said Lewis Jones in The Daily Telegraph, is that from the outset, Britain’s imperial ambitions were driven by the “quest for food”. It began in the mid-16th century, argues its author, the historian Lizzie Collingham, when Henry VIII needed a cheap, durable foodstuff to feed his rapidly expanding navy – and found it in the cod-filled waters of the northwest Atlantic. “Poor John”, as salt cod was known, became standard fare – along with a daily gallon of beer – for British sailors. As Collingham puts it: “The British Empire was born on Newfoundland’s stony beaches.” Then, in the 17th and 18th centuries, sugar replaces cod as the engine of imperial might, said Lucy Lethbridge in the Financial Times. The profits generated by Caribbean sugar plantations provide the catalyst for Britain’s industrial revolution; and Britain’s urban workforce subsisted on “vast quantities of sweetened tea”. These are just some of the “engaging details and startling connections” thrown up by this “marvellously wide-ranging and readable book”. “Colourful” as The Hungry Empire is, it’s marred by Collingham’s prettification of Britain’s past, said Joanna Blythman in The Observer. Many of the euphemisms – adventurers, appropriated – skate over the brutalities of colonialism; her “prevailing tone is one of awe at the achievements of the great imperial project”. Nonsense, said Daisy Goodwin in The Times: it’s hard to read this revelatory book without concluding that the consequences of British rule for native populations were “almost without exception negative”. In Australia, the nomadic lifestyle of the Aborigines was destroyed by European settlers “raising sheep for the British market”; in west Africa, the depletion in manpower from slavery left a legacy of disease and malnutrition. The list goes on and on.
Previous historians of the British Empire have focused “overwhelmingly on political and social narratives” and ignored issues such as health and food, said Max Hastings in The Sunday Times. Collingham should be congratulated for “exploring largely virgin territory”. It is fascinating to learn that by the late 19th century, Britain’s export trade was boosted by pioneering advances in food processing: every year Crosse & Blackwell shipped to India, Australia and China “30,000 tins of Oxford sausages; 34,000 half-pint cans of oysters; more than 3,000 dried ox tongues and 17,000 cans of cheddar cheese”. This book is “a tasty side dish” for anyone interested in the history of the British Empire.