Emigrants led by their stomachs

In September 1872, a 31-year-old Gloucestershire farm labourer named George Smith sailed with his family on an emigrant ship to New Zealand. A year later, an almost euphoric letter that he wrote from his new home was published in the Labourers’ Union Chronicle: ‘‘I have no anxiety now about how I am to get food and clothing for myself and children.’’

Millions of people left Britain between 1815 and 1930 and most of them were impelled by a quest for more to eat.

Whereas at home pig’s cheek or a bit of bacon was the finest dish the Smiths could aspire to – and many farmhands like himself were perpetually halfstarved – suddenly at Hawke’s Bay they could gorge on lamb and beef. Back home, the ability to afford a roast was among the highest aspirations of most working-class families, and only when vast supplies of chilled meat began to arrive from North America in the lateVictorian era was this yearning widely fulfilled.

The East India Company’s profitable export trade of opium to China is well known, but in The Hungry Empire – How Britain’s Quest for Food Shaped the Modern World, author Lizzie Collingham offers the unexpected reflection that the poppy was not that bad for you, except that it induced constipation.

Helpfully, she offers a recipe for laudanum: a quart of sack, half a pint of wine, 4oz opium, 2oz saffron. Slice the opium and pull the saffron, place in a bottle with 1oz salt of tartar, a drachm each of mace, cinnamon, cloves; leave by the fireside or in the sun for 20 days, then use as the mood takes you, though counting drops.

You won’t find that in any of Nigella Lawson’s great works.

The author is exploring largely virgin territory. For centuries historical studies focused overwhelmingly on political and social narratives. Until relatively recently, economics did not receive anything like its proper attention. And although they are dominant preoccupations of all societies at all times, health and food remain comparatively neglected by mainstream historians.

Collingham seeks to redress the latter omission. She wrote an excellent book on the influence of food, or rather lack of it, on World War II, and has now turned her attention to the growth of the British Empire. This is an account rich in personal case studies: each of her chapters has a title, such as ‘‘In which Lady Anne Barnard enjoys fine cabin dinners on a voyage to the Cape (February to May 1797)’’.

The British mania for sugar caused a German traveller in late-Elizabethan England to recoil from the hideously decayed teeth of aristocratic women, the queen included. They sucked on comfits, mixed sugar with their wine and even glazed their meat with it. The yearning for sugar fostered both the slave trade and the British enthusiasm for West Indian colonies in which to grow it.

The Caribbean sugar plantations, says the author, ‘‘were the world’s first agro-industrial factories where the human needs of the workforce were subordinated to the demands of production’’. The boiling houses where the juice from the cane was crystallised into sugar ran six days a week, with only their complement of slaves, horses and cattle occasionally exchanged. By the end of the 17th century, Britain was already importing 320,000 hundredweight of West Indian sugar, with crown revenues enriched by duty on every sack.

By the late 19th century, Britain’s success as a pioneer in food-processing contributed mightily to its export trade. This was the era when the output of biscuit-makers Huntley & Palmer represented a thousandth of the nation’s total industrial production. Every year, Crosse & Blackwell shipped to India, Australia and China more than 30,000 one-pound tins of Oxford sausages; 34,000 half-pint cans of oysters; more than 3000 dried ox tongues; 17,000 cans of cheddar and berkeley cheese; and over 1000 plum puddings.

How deeply nasty most of this fare seems to a modern palate! One of the charms of this book is that Collingham includes recipes and menus from many periods and colonies. A reader’s principal sensation on studying them will be gratitude not to be obliged to sample such fare. It was bad enough, surely, to be a British imperialist serving in Honduras without living on the staple expat diet of tinned Australian rabbit and American lobster, or boxes of tapioca transformed into ‘‘shape’’ pudding.

For those of us who wish to think well of capitalism, it is depressing to be reminded that industrialists who supported the 1846 repeal of the Corn Laws, permitting a flood of American wheat to Britain, did so because cheaper bread meant that workers could be paid less. Up to 16 million Indians died in famines between 1875 and 1914 because the Raj was so unyieldingly committed to a free market that merchants could export wheat to higher international bidders, allowing their own countrymen to starve.

In 1900, a fifth of Britain’s wheat imports came from India. Yet some other influences of imperialism on food production were benign: in the course of the 19th century, European emigrants extended the world’s tilled acreage and productive pastures by almost 2 billion acres.

Those with delicate sensibilities should avoid certain chapters: for instance, the one headed ‘‘In which John Dunton eats oatcake and hare boiled in butter in a Connaught cabin’’, because some aspects of the late 17thcentury Irish diet make stomachchurning reading. But it is fascinating to learn that analysis of bones of Tudor sailors drowned in the 1545 sinking of the Mary Rose shows that they had eaten fish caught far from home, off Iceland or perhaps even as remote as the Newfoundland cod banks.

This is a wholly pleasing book, which offers a tasty side dish to anyone exploring the narrative history of the British Empire. We hear so much about how the lust for gold, silver and land impelled generations of colonialists to roam the globe in pursuit of conquests, that it is droll to be reminded how many sought merely a square meal.

The Hungry Empire – How Britain’s Quest for Food Shaped the Modern World, by Lizzie Collingham (Bodley Head, pp400)