Eating the Empire: Food and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain by Troy Bickham, and: British Orientalisms, 1759–1835 by James Watt

Abstract

Reviewed by: Eating the Empire: Food and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain by Troy Bickham, and: British Orientalisms, 1759–1835 by James Watt James Mulholland Troy Bickham, Eating the Empire: Food and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London: Reaktion Books, 2020); distributed by Univ. of Chicago Press). Pp. 285, 85 halftones. $35 cloth. James Watt, British Orientalisms, 1759–1835 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2019). Pp. 285. $99.99 cloth. One summer afternoon, while researching in the Manuscripts Room of the British Library, I came across a memorandum book of India's first Governor-General, Warren Hastings. He lived in India since the 1770s and was an enthusiastic sampler of South Asian culture (as well as an orientalist who combined colonial governance with cultural creation). Included among his drafts of poems, notes on weather, and accounts of meetings was a recipe for chicken kebabs—he called it "Kabaub Fowl"—which called for washing the chicken in salted water, rubbing it with "corriander seed, pepper and garlick" and "juice of ginger, chicory, and figs strained through a cloth" before stuffing it with "ghee and cloves" and roasting it over a gentle fire "until it is done, & looks red."1 Delicious, no doubt, and just as likely never prepared by Hastings himself. I thought of Hastings' recipe as I read Troy Bickham's capacious account of food and empire in the eighteenth century. Bickham's reads like a cross-over: a scholarly account that popularizes sharp expertise to knowledgeable non-academic readers. His book feels at times like the synthesis of accounts, among academic and popular writers alike, which tracked commodities and their effect on the globe, including salt (Salt: A World History [2003]), tea (A Thirst for Empire [2017]), sugar (Sweetness and Power [1986]; Sugar and Civilization [2015]), coffee (Uncommon Grounds [1999]), and curry (Curry: Cooks and Conquerors [2006]).2 As with many of these other accounts, Bickham sees in the preparation, consumption, and popular representation of food an image of how empire affected Britons and an indication of empire's extraordinary reach yet often ordinary effects. He describes empire as an "ever-moving umbrella" (10) of nearly incongruous activities, some of which were under British sovereignty but others that were negotiated with others. The middle grounds, translators, and imperial brokers that have become standard metaphors of twenty-first-century studies of empire are evident in how food connected domestic Britons to imperial dominion. Bickham describes the "abundance of choice" and the rituals it created as "a language" (17) that solidified "national and regional identities" (18) in Britain but also acted as a "tool for cultural critiques" (19). Doubleness of experience pervades Eating the Empire, which is also an explanation of how the foreign and exotic was made familiar and domestic. Bickham approaches foodways in the manner of an anthropologist or sociologist—as fundamentally about the interpersonal relationships forged by empire (9). In this way, his book is an elegantly interlocking story, and is extensively illustrated, typically with satirical prints that show commodities' imperial associations, making it an engaging overarching history of food and empire. At its most important, Eating the Empire describes the transformation of empire's goods from "rare luxuries to commonplace staples" across the eighteenth century (28), which necessarily altered diets, changed social practices, and arguably [End Page 556] made the current United Kingdom what it is, with teatime and biscuits but also curries and kebabs, of the type that Hastings encountered centuries ago. During the eighteenth century, consumer choice expanded rapidly, and what was a luxury in the seventeenth century was a staple one hundred years later (56). Then, as now, the rich censured the poor for the ingestion of what was seen as above their station (54), with anxieties about tea or coffee being replaced later with worries over carbonated drinks. Throughout Eating the Empire, Bickham touches on broad changes that are formative for the present: shopping (59–60), credit (61–65), fashion and fashionability (65), social visits and visiting (67), cook books (144), and in turn the evolution of politeness and manners, especially as related to the preparation and consumption of food. Some topics, such as coffee, are familiar to most eighteenth-century studies scholars, while...