Food history narratives sell only in the tiniest quantities in the UK, so any publisher contemplating such a proposal needs to find a marketing angle, one that resonates with contemporary issues perhaps, or addresses our national psyche.
In the cinema world, films such as Viceroy’s House, and Victoria & Abdul are testament to our enduring fascination with the British empire, the gift that keeps on giving. In the book world, empire nonfiction is another demonstrably commercial genre, and the latest title from distinguished historian Lizzie Collingham, The Hungry Empire: How Britain’s Quest for Food Shaped the Modern World – with its striking similarity to Niall Ferguson’s Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World – clearly aims for this market.
“Happy empire” themes do appeal. In 2014, a YouGov survey found that most of the British public thought that “the British empire is more something to be proud of (59%) rather than ashamed of (19%)”. Nevertheless, most museum curators these days put slavery, the ugly conjoined twin in many imperial tales, into the “difficult histories” category, subjects that require careful perspective and interpretation if they are not to strike an offensive, ugly note. Unfortunately, Collingham’s matter-of-fact writing, while undeniably predicated on immaculate research, doesn’t demonstrate this awareness.
Her theme is how Britain’s search for ingredients (sugar, pepper, tea, rice, cod and more) drove the rise of its empire. Each chapter opens with a particular meal and then explores its history. One chapter, for instance, is entitled, “In which la Belinguere entertains Sieur Michel Jajolet de la Courbe [both slave traders] to an African-American meal on the west coast of Africa (June 1686)”. It is subtitled, “How West Africa exchanged men for maize and manioc”. But “exchange” is a consensual act; enslavement (kidnapping, deportation, rape, murder, theft, cruelty, torture) most definitely isn’t. Collingham’s book is studded with euphemisms. “Adventurers” [slave owners] established “plantation agriculture” [the now infamous chattel slavery system], “appropriated” [stole land from its indigenous inhabitants], and “imported slaves” [enslaved people, ripped from their homelands].
As the historian David Olusoga has pointed out: “Few acts of collective forgetting have been as thorough and as successful as the erasing of slavery from Britain’s ‘island story’.” Collingham’s language continues that tradition. She does include some references to colonial brutality that should make the reader flinch, but the prevailing tone is one of awe at the achievements of the great imperial project, “the web of trade that held them [trading posts] all together”.
What a shame, because otherwise Collingham’s book offers a colourful history that illuminates the roots of contemporary diets, exploding any notion that global fusion food is something new. She traces how a dish of iguana curry, savoured by Guyanese diamond miners in 1993, blended Amerindian hunter-gatherer wisdom, the cuisine of enslaved Africans and the spicy culinary traditions of Indian labourers who were shipped to the colony’s sugar plantations once slavery was abolished. We learn how white settlers wiped out the cured buffalo of the Plains Indians, the fern, root, taro and kumasi preparations of the Maori, and grilled frog of Australian aborigines, to make way for bland frontier dishes, such as salt beef stew, and damper, “the first truly global meals”.
As Collingham dots around the globe – Newfoundland, India, New England, Barbados, South Carolina, the Cape, Guyana, Kenya, the south Pacific and more – weaving in and out of diverse histories from 1545 to 1996, she serves up an eclectic diet of historical fact. Much of it is interesting, although less dedicated readers might have welcomed stricter editing. Having uncovered some nugget of information, however supplementary or tangential to the central theme, Collingham seems loth not to use it. For a non-academic audience, The Hungry Nation is bloated with fact and frustratingly light on analysis.
Collingham doesn’t use the opportunities she creates to examine the imperial legacy on contemporary diets. She quotes the anthropologist Audrey Richards, who observed in 1939 that “the diet of many primitive (sic) peoples has deteriorated in contact with white civilisation (sic) rather than the reverse”.
Given that sugar is public health enemy number one, Collingham might have commented on how colonial crops now also undermine the health of Britons today.
Her observation that Britain’s reliance on food from faraway places was a hallmark of empire invites a postscript. A less palatable result of The Hungry Empire is our current food security predicament. The UK can’t fully feed itself today; our self-sufficiency in food has dropped to 61%.
While Collingham ably catalogues the quest for ingredients that began in the 16th century with West Country fishermen setting sail to search for cod, some remark on the culmination of this imperial adventure would not go amiss. An acknowledgement, even, that the UK is now a neo-imperialist food economy, still using other people’s land and low wage foreign labour to feed its appetite. But perhaps such analysis is beyond the historian’s remit.
• The Hungry Empire by Lizzie Collingham is published by Bodley Head (£25). To order a copy for £21.25 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
