Reviewed by: Consuming Anxieties: Consumer Protest, Gender & British Slavery, 1713–1833 Devoney Looser Charlotte Sussman., Consuming Anxieties: Consumer Protest, Gender & British Slavery, 1713–1833. (Stanford UP, 2000.) As Charlotte Sussman points out in the introduction to her book, “boycotts are so commonplace these days, one hardly notices them” (1). It takes something peculiar like a consumer protest by consumption to grab our attention: Jonah Peretti’s failed attempt to purchase personalized Nikes with the word “sweatshop” embroidered on them recently made the email rounds and was described in The Village Voice . Sussman’s project is to help us understand the history of consumer protest – in particular its relationship to domestic ideology and the abolitionist movement – and how it took shape during the “long eighteenth century.” The book is organized in two parts. The first concerns the “history of consumer protests against colonialism and imperialism” (a project that concentrates on the period 1713–1771) and the second on “the role of commodity culture and consumer protest in the British debates over Caribbean slavery,” which centers on late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century texts (2). Depending on one’s interests, specific sections of the book may engage more than others. The material on Jonathan Swift and Tobias Smollett, for instance, may not hold as much appeal for those who do not work in eighteenth-century British literary studies. Nevertheless, Consuming Anxieties is a clearly written, interesting, and important contribution to histories of British colonialism, as well as to the burgeoning field of food studies. The dates that Sussman chooses to delimit her study mark two political events – the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, which granted British monopoly rights to slaves, and 1833, which saw the emancipation of British slaves in the Caribbean. On the whole, however, Sussman’s book concentrates not on political events but on the cultural interventions offered by literary productions. She argues that a focus on literary texts is defensible because their division from political material was “quite fluid” during this era (2). The scope of the project is laid out in the introduction. Sussman laments a dearth of material dealing not only with consumer protest and its relationship to British imperialism but with its gendered dimensions. Chapter one, “Colonialism and the Politics of Consumerism” shows that “the attitudes and activities surrounding tea and sugar... suggest that the consumer revolution in England helped shape attitudes toward Britain’s colonial empire” (45). Especially fascinating is her reading of Jonas Hanway’s “An Essay on Tea” (1756), which “articulates a fear that the internal ingestion of tea will cause English culture to resemble that of the Chinese” (25). Rather than finding in these consumer protests a nascent anti-capitalist movement, Sussman argues that “the reverse is probably more accurate”–that consumption provided an opportunity for proclaiming political power within a free-market system, taking for granted the “commodified relationship between colonial production and domestic consumption” (42). Chapter two concentrates on Swift’s writings of the 1720s, particularly Gulliver’s Travels and The Drapier’s Letters, arguing that it is in Ireland that “some of the first economic protests against English colonialism occur” (50). Swift’s recommendations for consumerist abstention are detailed. Chapter three moves to Tobias Smollett’s comic novel Humphry Clinker (1771), which erects “a compensatory fantasy of English self-sufficiency” through its use of “transculturation” and “cultural syncretism” in the character of Captain Lismahago (82; 86; 88). “Women and the Politics of Sugar, 1792” and “‘Reading Before Praying’: Ladies Antislavery Societies, Textuality, Political Action, and The History of Mary Prince ” (chapters four and five) draw together a myriad of texts to demonstrate the ways in which women, consumption, and abolition were linked. Sussman convincingly argues that the growing abolitionist movement compared sugar consumption to cannibalism in order to argue for an end to slavery (118). This political project was effected by the cultural imperatives of femininity and sympathy. Women were told to stop buying colonial products for the home (likened to purchasing the flesh/labor of slaves). Their compassion for slavery should then serve to convince men to change policies. In this way, “domestic management is seen to have a direct impact on colonial management” (128). The chapter on Mary...