The Taste of Empire, Lizzie Collingham
The Taste of Empire, Lizzie Collingham
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The Taste of Empire
How Britain's Quest for Food Shaped the Modern World

Author: Lizzie Collingham

Narrator: Jennifer M. Dixon

Unabridged: 12 hr 3 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 10/03/2017

Categories: Cooking, Nonfiction


Synopsis

In The Taste of Empire, acclaimed historian Lizzie Collingham tells the story of how the British Empire's quest for food shaped the modern world. Told through twenty meals over the course of 450 years, from the Far East to the New World, Collingham explains how Africans taught Americans how to grow rice, how the East India Company turned opium into tea, and how Americans became the best-fed people in the world.

In The Taste of Empire, Collingham masterfully shows that only by examining the history of Great Britain's global food system, from sixteenth-century Newfoundland fisheries to our present-day eating habits, can we fully understand our capitalist economy and its role in making our modern diets.

About Lizzie Collingham

Lizzie Collingham is an associate fellow at the University of Warwick. The author of three books, including The Taste of War and Curry, she lives in Cambridge, England.


Reviews

The concept isn’t new. You may have read Salt or one of the other books in this vein. One of the nice things about discussing foodstuffs is that we can all relate to buying, cooking, eating. Another fortunate thing is that there is plenty of information out there about cost, amount, use, etc. Colling......more

In the very last chapter of The Hungry Empire, Lizzie Collingham writes: “To trace the history of the ‘national’ foods of former British colonies is to create a map of the web of connections the British Empire wove around the globe.” This is the basic gist of this ambitious book (an ambition which I......more

Goodreads review by Erik

The text ranges from the 16th to the 21st century from the perspective of Britain and its empire, employing the production and consumption of foodstuffs (including opium) in a series of case studies in order to describe aspects of the creation of world markets and, incidentally, the differentiation......more

Goodreads review by Sue

What a delightful and original way to sidle into history, with stories of food, entertaining on the surface and revealing in the depths. Lizzie Collingham has written a deeply-researched and lively account of the role of food, and the pursuit of new foods, in changing the global economy, beginning in......more