Consuming the Empire

What did British imperialism ever do for the Welsh miner, the English factory worker, or the Scots shepherd? As it happens, the empire plied them with sugar, tea, coffee, tobacco, and spices, once exotic products that became ubiquitous during the long eighteenth century. Low prices, extensive systems of credit, and efficient distribution networks spread the spoils of Asia, Africa, and the Americas across “the geographic and social spectrums” of Great Britain, in the words of historian Troy Bickham.

“[In the 1790s,] Anne Gomm’s little grocery in the small Cotswold village of Shipton-under-Wychwood was typical in that it offered customers a choice of at least half a dozen types of tea, three types of coffee, various types and qualities of tobacco products, several types of sugar, orange peel, confectionery, chocolate and an assortment of spices that included nutmeg, Jamaica pepper [allspice], cinnamon, ground ginger, and black pepper.”

Food was a primary import from the colonies. Bickham goes so far as to call food the “heart of the British imperial experience.” People literally ate and drank the empire, or snorted and smoked it when it came to “Virginia’s Best” tobacco. And these voracious consumers of the metropole helped grow the imperial project: “The English, and later British, penchant for sweet, hot beverages helped to fuel the empire’s expansion into Asia, transformed the ecosystems of large swathes of the Americas and doomed millions of Africans and their descendants to slavery.”

“The food trade was essential to the success of the empire and the military fiscal state that helped fuel it,” Bickham writes. He offers these examples of the wealth flowing in: custom duties “on coffee alone in 1774 was enough to build five ships of the line; the annual duty on sugar in the 1760s was roughly equivalent to the cost of maintaining all the ships in the British navy.” 

Between 1650 and 1800, British per capita sugar consumption increased 2,500 percent to reach 20 pounds annually. Tea, into which much of that sugar went, was available from some 62,000 licensed British retailers by 1800. In the early 1770s, more than 7.5 million pounds of coffee, always second to tea among hot beverages, entered the country each year.

Advertising for tea, coffee, and tobacco consistently placed great “emphasis on where their products originated.” Tea meant China; in fact, an English slang word for tea, “char,” comes directly from the Chinese. Tobacco was associated with the Americas, particularly Virginia. Advertising portrayed the slaves that produced the nicotine-bearing leaf under white overseers: consumers may not have thought about where their pleasures were coming from, but the sources were not hidden from them. Sugar was an exception, perhaps because it was already a known commodity before it poured in from the West Indies, where its cultivation was introduced and maintained under horrific conditions.

It wasn’t just exotic-become-quotidian stimulants. Imperialism transformed British cookery too. British cookbooks included recipes for curry, mango pickle, pilaf, Mulligatawny, and “Carolina rice pudding,” among many other foreign recipes, beginning in the late 1740s. There was a concerted effort by the authors of these cookbooks to authenticate these recipes, using such phrases as ”the West Indian way,” “as in China,” and “as found in New England.” Or they were at least claiming the pretense of authenticity: curry in Britain “was a distant Anglicized cousin to what Indians ate.”

Gastronomy and trade intertwined to make “some extremely wealthy and others slaves.” Bickham continues: “trade helped to produce the modern consumer” in Britain, with print advertising coming into its own during the eighteenth century.

“Such products as coffee, tea and tobacco did not just infiltrate Britain, as they had in the seventeenth century; they swarmed into virtually every home to become part of the daily routine of most Britons.”

The mass consumption of products from distant places, heedless of the social and environmental costs, has deep historical roots.

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