BOOK REVIEWS 209

home, leaving them with no gains after years of sacrifice. This closed the circle of the whole patron‐client network in
which every level of the colonial administration service was involved and benefited in different ways.
This book is an enormous contribution to the academic literature on labour dynamics in Portuguese speaking
African colonies. The case study of the Cassequel sugar plantation is a paradigmatic example of how labour relations
worked in the colonial period and how forced labour was the cornerstone of the economic system in the colony.
What is even more important, is that this case goes beyond labour issues in three key ways. First, it shows that
the economic situation of Portuguese elite today probably has a common origin in their position during the colonial
period. Second, it demystifies the alleged competitiveness of the Angolan economy during colonial rule that was
based in a system in which labour was almost free and duties and tariffs protected Angolan products from interna-
tional competition. Third, it consolidates the vision that the Portuguese government created an extractive system
based on the use of the colonies for basic and primary activities contributing to the transformation and industrializa-
tion of Portugal, a situation that changed after the events of 1961 and the real threat of the struggle for indepen-
dence. Ball has managed to make a comprehensive academic piece that brings together a rigorous historical
analysis and deep anthropological research.

Borja Monreal Gainza

RE FE R ENC E S
Bender, G. (1978). Angola under the Portuguese: The myth and the reality. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press.
Varanda, J., & Cleveland, T. (2014). (Un)healthy relationships: African labourers, profits and health services in Angola's Colo-
nial‐Era Diamond Mines, 1917–75. Journal of Medical History., 58(1), 87–105. https://doi.org/10.1017/mdh.2013.73

DOI: 10.1111/joac.12329

The hungry empire: How Britain's quest for food

shaped the modern world
Lizzie Collingham
London: The Bodley Head. 2017. x+400 pp. £25. ISBN 9781847922700 (hb)

For many readers of this journal, the general gist of this book will be unsurprising. Even they, however, might be
startled to see it so boldly proclaimed as in its subtitle. “How Britain's quest for food shaped the modern world?”
That's going some they might say, relapsing into colloquialism. Collingham's lucidly written book consists of a succes-
sion of most appealing chapters that pile on example after example to illustrate that thesis. The range is wide: the
timescale runs from Tudor times to the present and inevitably the global reach reflects the geography of Britain's
colonies/Empire.

So, for instance, she sets out the ironies of early New England colonial settlers' failed attempts to reproduce
English landscapes, crops, and farms that forced them to set aside their disdain as they adopted indigenous agricul-
tural practices to grow maize—a crop they had initially thought of as fit only for animals. They had to learn to like
it or go hungry. Using the English technique of boiling a pudding in a cloth, they made a version with cornmeal
discovering that with, perhaps, molasses or even eggs, butter, and spices, the result was actually tasty. Eventually
210 BOOK REVIEWS

they redefined it, no longer Native American but plain, unassuming food suitable for the plain honest
American” (p. 34). Even readers familiar with the examples Collingham presents may still find examples new to
them, some with notable twists. Another also involves the erasure of its origins. Rice production made late eigh-
teenth century planters in South Carolina “fabulously wealthy” (p. 110) at the very same period that rice growing
on the West African coast was dying out. Along the way, those planters rewrote history, obliterating the West
African origins of their own highly successful mode of cultivation (which ironically was reliant on black slaves who
earlier had brought that very “know-how” with them) to be able to regard themselves as “an extension of English
polite society” able to keep up, only a few years behind, with London fashions for tea drinking or mahogany tables
and chairs.

The book is well written in more ways than one. Not only is the style clear and the prose pleasingly smooth, it is
also agreeably structured. Inspired by Martin Jones' Feast, Collingham begins each chapter with a meal—not meals
confected by Collingham herself, but those to be found in one or other record (including fiction), often vividly
described. John Dunton's description, during his 1698 travels through Ireland, of his revulsion at the way the women
of a household prepared his food leaves the reader equally revolted; the roasting of the landlady's Sunday leg of lamb
(made possible as her income rose) reared in New Zealand and then frozen during its voyage to 1930s Manchester,
can almost be smelled. And then, before the reader knows it, each chapter's meal leads in to yet another example of
the central thesis—for instance, the demand created by the British navy leading first to the establishment of the
Newfoundland fishery in the sixteenth century and then leading to the growth of the provisions trade, notably ships'
biscuit makers in English ports, two centuries later. The transition from the small scale domesticity of each meal to
high level features of social and economic history appears effortless, although to achieve it will have required
thought to craft it so well. Collingham has embellished each chapter by styling its title in a nineteenth century man-
ner which to twenty-first century ears may sound a little quaint (although readily recognisable to devotees of
A.A. Milne's House at Pooh Corner). For, after its chapter number, she begins them all with “In which … ” followed by
a sentence summarising its meal. Slightly oddly, the chapters are mostly, but not quite, arranged chronologically, so
one “(I)n which diamond miners cook up an iguana curry at a rum shop in Guyana during the rainy season” is from
1993, with the subsequent four chapters all set earlier.
There is a further feature of this book which may be very unusual for this journal's readers to encounter in the
literature they ordinarily consult. Most chapters include at least one recipe or instruction for the
storage/preparation of a foodstuff. The first chapter has good advice for ensuring that salt cod does not go tough
(a useful tip for any readers who have found their own attempts end in hard, unpalatable mouthfuls). The chapter
starting with that Manchester roast leg of lamb reproduces the advice for handling frozen meat issued in the 1880s
by The New Zealand Loan and Mercantile Agency Co. Chapter 7 “(I)n which the Latham family eat beef and potato
stew, pudding and treacle: Scarisbrick, Lancashire (22 January 1748)” explains that labourers' wives like Mrs.
Latham would not look up recipes. Cookery books of the period would be for the well-to-do, but an eighteenth
century example is reproduced to give some sense of what her cooking may have been like. And a recipe for
“Welsh Rarebit the Cretan Way” (cheese on toast) recorded by a WWII army cook incorporates the ingenuity
required to feed the troops—first, he explains, a fatigue party has to be assigned to unwrap multiple quantities of
the miniature cheese segments enclosed in foil which the troops refuse to eat. A nice instance is the juxtaposition
of an eighteenth century recipe for okra soup found in The Carolina Housewife and a version from 1960s Ghana, to
illustrate the African origins of the dish—mirroring the African origins of Carolina rice cultivation. Collingham's use
of recipes augments and enriches her illustrations. She thus adroitly evades an all too commonly deserved criticism
that historians and those in food studies include recipes gratuitously, a criticism that thereby does fellow historians
who avoid so slack a practice a disservice by providing further ammunition for those who think studying food is
frivolous or self-indulgent. The absence of a list of recipes is a little frustrating, but the inclusion of tiny little black
and white drawings of an ear of maize, a teapot, or a pan and its spatula, to divide sections within chapters
enhances the look of the page.
BOOK REVIEWS 211

There are two ways of approaching reviewing this book. One is to consider it solely as a contribution to the
academic literature. The other is to regard it as an instance of a genre that may be expanding. That genre is of more
popular histories written by trained historians. As a result, they mostly do not sacrifice diligence, for example, in
the use of sources, to accessibility by a general readership. The possible growth in this sort of work results, if the
impression is correct, from an increasing number of academically highly trained historians who do rigorous, careful
work but for one reason or another are not employed full- or even part-time by a university, but must make their
living by writing. Collingham's book is an example of the latter—not an academic book for academics only, but one
written engagingly and accessibly for a far broader readership than trained historians, but which, none the less,
remains scholarly. What makes it more firmly one of the second genre is that its thesis is stated but not argued.
Certainly, it is illustrated, amply and compellingly, but the pros and cons of the case are not debated. So saying is
not to offer adverse criticism—that would be to judge it by inappropriate criteria—but to identify the type of
book it is.
Towards the end of the book, the question that the book does not spell out and begins with only an inchoate
impression starts to come into sharper focus in the reader's mind. Quite what is the modern world to which the
subtitle refers? Is the book really about that strikingly bold claim of its subtitle? Or is really about the version found
on the first page of the Introduction which announces that “(T)his book tells the story of how Britain's quest for
foodstuffs gave rise to the British Empire”—a far more modest and possibly more plausible undertaking. Is it, as
initially rather vaguely assumed that the modern world referred to is the configuration of nations states, their respec-
tive wealth, polities, modes of governance, types of economy, and associated attitudes, broadly speaking, one nation
has toward another? A clear statement of what the modern world is that the British quest for food shaped is not
squarely addressed, but remains elusive, only glimpsed not delineated. Not till the final chapter does a revision to the
initial assumption about Collingham's modern world allow it to come into clearer focus. The final chapter reveals that
in effect “the modern world” is truly all encompassing, any and everything—from the Christmas pudding ingredients,
their stirring and serving recognisable to today's residents of Britain, to popular culture in the form of Bridget Jones'
diary/film, via the impoverishment of African countries—all rolled up with hints that so many troubled twentieth
century histories of that continent's nations must also be incorporated as elements of that modern world which,
Collingham avers, is, so extraordinarily, shaped by one small island nation's search for food.

Anne Murcott

Food Studies Centre, Department of Anthropology, SOAS University of London, London, UK

Email: anne.murcott@gmail.com; anne.murcott@nottingham.ac.uk