Review: Imperial Wine: How the British Empire Made Wine’s New World, by Jennifer Regan-Lefebvre

Abstract

Wine production and consumption—including the movement of laborers, vines, pests, microbes, and drinking cultures—has long knit the world together. However, as historian Julie McIntyre has argued, scholarly interest in wine has directly increased with the “current globalization of grape wine production, distribution, and consumption” (2019: 1).Much of this current scholarly interest on wine focuses on its role in European imperialism. Jennifer Regan-Lefebvre’s Imperial Wine: How the British Empire Made Wine’s New World represents a notable addition to this conversation. While many books on this subject have focused on the development of the wine industry in a single settler colony, Regan-Lefebvre instead takes the British Empire more broadly as her framework. A professor of history at Trinity College, Regan-Lefebvre focuses on the development of wine production in several settler colonies, including Australia and South Africa. She explores the creation of a British market for those wines from the beginning of vinifera vine cultivation in the Cape under Dutch colonialism to the rise in popularity of Australian wine in the late twentieth century.Unlike the researcher who acts as an “export merchant [standing] on the dock waving goodbye without examining what happens to his shipment afterward, or even wondering why there was a market for it in the first place” (Topik, Marichal, and Frank 2006: 9), Regan-Lefebvre traces the development of the imperial wine industries from grape cultivation in the colonies to consumption in Britain. By focusing on the industry’s development in the settler colonies, Regan-Lefebvre makes two arguments. First, she argues that British imperialists encouraged the development of colonial wine industries not out of economic need, given that Britain had “no difficulty” in importing wine from European countries, but instead in hopes that wine production would further the civilizing mission of empire (p. 17). Second, she contends that British consumers’ eventual embrace of these so-called “New World” wines was a fraught process that only came about due to varying economic, political, and cultural changes in the global wine industry during the twentieth century.The first section of the book, “Origins,” takes up the line of argumentation surrounding the role of wine in the civilizing mission. As Regan-Lefebvre points out, much of the scholarly literature on imperial commodities “takes for granted that there was a demand for colonial and dominion goods in Great Britain” (p. 25). Even as Britain was the world’s top wine importer, per capita wine consumption was low and could be easily filled by European imports (or perhaps from closer Mediterranean colonies). Regan-Lefebvre attempts to unravel this “giant paradox” of British wine consumption by tracing the development of imperial wine industries as a civilizing mission, which she argues intertwines economy and ideology (p. 28). By tracing the development of wine industries in South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand, she highlights the way British imperialists believed producing wine also led to the production of a civilized society and served to connect imperial administrators with the broader global economy.This notion of wine’s connection to the civilizing mission is well-trodden ground for historians, some of whom Regan-Lefebvre cites (see for example, Hannickel 2013; McIntyre 2011). Potentially due to the pervasiveness of this analysis, Regan-Lefebvre marshals less evidence than a reader may want to fully understand how the imperial “civilizing mission” functioned through wine. For instance, Regan-Lefebvre makes an important point at the end of the chapter on the development of the Cape wine industry, writing that wine “was critical to the creation of race and class distinctions that would hold steady in South African society for centuries” (p. 39). This is no doubt crucial to understanding the Cape wine industry. However, for the most part, Regan-Lefebvre does not tell the reader the particular structures of this labor force and its forced global migrations, nor the contours of its violence (a chapter in the next section on “Echunga Hock” does briefly describe aspects of the South African labor system). Further, how British imperialists understood vineyards to ecologically and aesthetically “civilize” the environment does not feature much in this analysis.Where this book really shines is in its analysis of the import market of “Empire Wines.” In the book’s second section, “Growth,” Regan-Lefebvre draws on a diverse and wide-ranging set of sources. Through import statistics, tariff laws, and wine logs of a Cambridge college’s cellar, among other sources, she demonstrates the lukewarm reception of British drinkers to colonial wine due not only to its perceived bad taste but also to changing tariff regimes.This careful social and economic analysis allows Regan-Lefebvre to make an intervention in commodity history. While tempting to situate Regan-Lefebvre’s book as another line on the long list of scholarship on imperial commodities, as she reminds us, wine, unlike tea, sugar, or coffee, “did not ‘make’ the world, and it did not create or transform the British Empire” (p. 18). By highlighting the various social, economic, and governmental factors that impeded Britain’s easy embrace of Empire Wines, Regan-Lefebvre tells a tale of a commodity never necessarily bound for success. She undercuts the traditional tendency of commodity history to present “each commodity … as the star of capitalism’s story,” to draw on Bruce Robbins’s critique (2005), and highlights how the development of the imperial wine industry—much like the development of the empire itself—was not inevitable. In doing so, she models how historians of both empire and commodities can avoid telling teleological narratives of progress (or decline), despite the eventual embrace of these wines in the twentieth century, as detailed in the remaining parts of the book.Regan-Lefebvre sensibly narrates this history by focusing primarily on South Africa and Australia, which remain two of the most important wine producers in the former British Empire. However, some of Regan-Lefebvre’s most riveting and surprising pieces of evidence come in a chapter that details wine production and consumption “from Melbourne to Madras.” In this chapter, she highlights the connections engendered by wine in the so-called colonial periphery. She explores wine production in places like India, Cyprus, Malta, and Canada, as well as the networks of consumption between them and other colonies. While Regan-Lefebvre mostly privileges a metropole-periphery relationship, in this chapter she points to the way histories of commodities and food might be written without Britain as a central node.As with any good history, Regan-Lefebvre’s book sparks more questions than it answers; readers may come away wanting to learn more about wine and the environment, labor forces, the impact of different colonial structures on vineyards, consumption practices in the colonies, and the phylloxera epidemic. This is, however, not a shortcoming of the book but a strong point: like a glass of rich red wine, the topic of wine in the British Empire certainly has legs. These legs—and the ideas propounded in this book—will provide fertile ground for future discussion and scholarship in the years to come.