The Hungry Empire

Title: The Hungry Empire – How Britain’s Quest for Food Shaped the Modern World

Author: Lizzie Collingham

Publisher: The Bodley Head, 2017 (First)

ISBN: 9781847922700

Pages: 367

 

Apart from introducing new political, administrative and commercial frameworks in its colonies, the British Empire had been instrumental in radically altering what is on the dining plates of the people over which it ruled. Beginning from fish processing in Newfoundland, it introduced cotton, tobacco and sugar in the slave colonies, obtained tea from China and then spread the habit of afternoon tea in the whole of its domain. Before the advent of the Industrial Revolution, the empire treated its colonies as sources of food rather than raw materials for its nascent industries. As in any item of trade, a monopoly can be sustained only by surpassing the rivals which meant suppressing them in those times. Lizzie Collingham is a historian ‘interested in linking the minutiae of daily life to the broad sweep of historical processes’. Her book ‘Curry – A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors’ was reviewed earlier. This book tells the tale of how the British shaped modernity by their relentless effort to source food from across the world for consumption as well as trade. Each chapter tells a different story, and opens with a particular meal and then explores the history that made them possible.

 

The British were rather late in the rush to the West across the Atlantic in search of spices, which was led by Spain and Portugal. Henry VIII’s break with the Pope, which added a religious angle to the already existing geographical separation, convinced the British to start their own explorations. Fishermen from West Country acquired knowledge of Atlantic currents by their mastery over Newfoundland cod fishing. This helped the explorers who went in search of a sea route to the Spice Islands. In a sense, the fishermen who mastered food-processing techniques laid down the foundations of empire. The expanding merchant marine used the competent fishermen to man its ships. The salted cod found willing customers all across the Atlantic rim, till they took to better food crops. Between 1570 and 1689, the tonnage of English shipping grew seven-fold and England emerged as a major European power.

 

Production of food and other cash crops were invariably linked to slavery for almost four centuries from the discovery of the New World. This book explains the movement of men and materiel to and from the Americas and Africa. When the indigenous Americans proved unwilling to toil in the tobacco, cotton and sugar plantations, Black Africans were forced to occupy that place. Collingham suggests that the farms at first used white labour force in the same appalling conditions as the Blacks did later. Many slaves perished in the sugar plantations that it was said that what you get by adding sugar to water was the slaves’ blood. Emancipation came with Enlightenment, but the living conditions hardly improved. As the Blacks opted not to work in farms after they were liberated, the British ushered in indentured labour as a substitute. Indians ground down by poverty accepted a paltry sum and worked for the British, almost like slaves.

 

Medieval trade worked best in a barter system between countries. As the ships are to be laden both ways, trade had had to be a give-and-take proposition. When the balance tilted in favour of one party, the other has to rebalance with gold or silver, which would cause erosion of resources in that country. This state of affairs is a prescription for instability and violence. The British desperately wanted tea from China, but the Chinese didn’t take anything in return, ensuring continuous outflow of British silver. To stem this tide, they found opium to be marketable clandestinely in large quantities in China. They grew opium in north India and an elaborate cycle was perfected. The English East India Company advanced loans to farmers to grow poppies. The produce was collected at fixed prices, irrespective of the demand. This was then auctioned at Calcutta for up to four times the price paid to farmers. The opium was then transported to Canton in private ships and sold there for equal weight in silver. This Chinese silver was collected by merchants and paid into the company’s treasury at Canton in return for bills of exchange. The company purchased tea with this bullion in its treasury and auctioned it at London. The proceeds were used to redeem the instruments of exchange held by retail traders. Thus most of the Chinese silver remained in the country. From late-eighteenth century, opium revenues were the third most important source of income for the company after land revenue and salt tax.

 

The Chinese are indignant at being forced to consume opium by the British. When the emperor ordered a ban on its trade, the British went to war with China and made it obligatory for the defeated Chinese to keep the existing trade routes open and allow more ports in which the Europeans could trade. This is often depicted as a cruel act by a colonial power on a helpless Oriental country. Collingham snaps this bubble by offering an alternate narrative that terms the Chinese position as an ‘opium myth’. The Chinese state is often presented as powerless against the superior forces of an imperialist drug cartel. This was supposed to have drained silver out of the economy while turning the Chinese into a nation of addicts who smoked themselves to death. However, a number of scholars argue that opium’s reputation as a demon drug is just hyperbole. Opium inhalation was probably one of the least physically damaging ways of taking any of the recreational drugs at that time. Besides, China was not drained of silver as the company had used it to purchase tea, porcelain and silk.

 

The British made lasting impressions on the people they ruled. In India, their political, legal, educational and commercial frameworks are still in use. But India steadfastly refused to adopt British food on their dining tables. In fact, it was the other way round, with the adaptation of Indian curry to suit British tastes. The author has not examined this aspect of the colonial interchange. On the other hand, the cases of many colonial societies integrating colonial food for own use is mentioned. The Kikuyu in Kenya traditionally used millets and sorghum for their principal dish ‘Irio’. As maize from Americas became widely available and began to be cultivated in Africa, they replaced millets with maize in Irio.

 

A book on food would also be the ideal platform to highlight the lack of it. The author has made a neat review of the man-made Bengal famine of 1943 and some other famines that ravaged British India. A touching picture of a group of highly emaciated survivors of the Madras Famine of 1876 exposes the gravity of the problem. The Bengal famine was caused by a mix of poor harvest, wartime measures that hampered the movement of rice and the government’s incompetence when they fixed rice prices too low. This channeled the supplies to the black market. At the same time, buildup of US troops had been going on in England for the invasion of the continent then reeling under Hitler’s yoke. Britain needed more ships for provisioning them and consequently, the number of ships sailing to Indian Ocean was cut by half. Famine raged in Bengal and around three million people died in miserable circumstances. When the villagers could no longer find the strength to walk to the community kitchen, they simply lay down on the cold ground and died. Hard-hearted Churchill still maintained that the colonies should feel the pinch in the same way as the Mother Country did. But such lofty rhetoric did not prevent the British from airlifting supplies to the Netherlands when starvation was reported. Lord Wavell himself expressed resentment at this discrimination.

 

The book displays a marked change from the common practice of British authors to don the mantle of regret and empathy from head to toe when discussing colonial matters. Collingham does nothing of the sort and evaluates the possibilities objectively. Chinese claims of victimhood on imposition of opium on the country by war are reexamined in the light of recent research which shows that China’s plight of economic distress was caused as much, if not more, by domestic policies and politics than foreign aggression. The book includes recipes for the principal item discussed in each chapter. Recipes of things which had long gone out of common use are interesting to aficionados.

 

Rating: 4 Star