Food stood at the centre of Mussolini's attempt to occupy Ethiopia and build an Italian Empire in East Africa. Seeking to redirect the surplus of Italian rural labor from migration overseas to its own Empire, the fascist regime envisioned transforming Ethiopia into Italy's granary to establish self-sufficiency, demographic expansion and strengthen Italy's international political position. While these plans failed, the extensive food exchanges and culinary hybridizations between Ethiopian and Italian food cultures thrived, and resulted in the creation of an Ethiopian-Italian cuisine, a taste of Empire at the margins. In studying food in short-lived Italian East Africa, Gastrofascism and Empire breaks significant new ground in our understanding of the workings of empire in the circulation of bodies, foodways, and global practices of dependence and colonialism, as well as the decolonizing practices of indigenous food and African anticolonial resistance. In East Africa, Fascist Italy brought older imperial models of global food to a hypermodern level in all its political, technoscientific, environmental, and nutritional aspects. This larger story of food sovereignty-entered in racist, mass settler colonialism-is dramatically different from the plantation and trade colonialisms of other empires and has never been comprehensively told. Using an original decolonizing food studies approach and an unprecedented variety of unexplored Ethiopian and Italian sources, Cinotto describes the different meanings of different foods for different people at different points of the imperial food chain. Exploring the subjectivities, agencies and emotions of Ethiopian and Italian men and women, it goes beyond simple colonizer/colonized binaries and offers a nuanced picture of lived, multisensorial experiences with food and empire.

When students gathered in a London coffeehouse and smoked tobacco; when Yorkshire women sipped sugar-infused tea; or when a Glasgow family ate a bowl of Indian curry, were they aware of the mechanisms of imperial rule and trade that made such goods readily available? In Eating the Empire, Troy Bickham unfolds the extraordinary role that food played in shaping Britain during the long eighteenth century (circa 1660–1837), when such foreign goods as coffee, tea, and sugar went from rare luxuries to some of the most ubiquitous commodities in Britain—reaching even the poorest and remotest of households. Bickham reveals how trade in the empire’s edibles underpinned the emerging consumer economy, fomenting the rise of modern retailing, visual advertising, and consumer credit, and, via taxes, financed the military and civil bureaucracy that secured, governed, and spread the British Empire.

"One night in Bangkok" : food and the everyday life of empire -- "Chasing the yum" : food procurement and early Thai Los Angeles -- Too hot to handle? restaurants and Thai American identity -- "More than a place of worship" : food festivals and Thai American suburban culture -- Thailand's "77th province" : culinary tourism in Thai Town

During the 17th century, England saw foreign foods made increasingly available to consumers and featured in recipe books, medical manuals, treatises, travel narratives, and even in plays. Yet the public's fascination with these foods went beyond just eating them. Through exotic presentations in popular culture, they were able to mentally partake of products for which they may not have had access. This book examines the "body and mind" consumerism of the early British Empire.

A history of the British Empire told through twenty meals eaten around the world 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.

Understanding the British Empire draws on a lifetime's research and reflection on the history of the British Empire by one of the senior figures in the field. Essays cover six key themes: the geopolitical and economic dynamics of empire, religion and ethics, imperial bureaucracy, the contribution of political leaders, the significance of sexuality, and the shaping of imperial historiography. A major new introductory chapter draws together the wider framework of Dr Hyam's studies and several new chapters focus on lesser known figures. Other chapters are revised versions of earlier papers, reflecting some of the debates and controversies raised by the author's work, including the issue of sexual exploitation, the European intrusion into Africa, including the African response to missionaries, trusteeship, and Winston Churchill's imperial attitudes. Combining traditional archival research with newer forms of cultural exploration, this is an unusually wide-ranging approach to key aspects of empire.

We love ragtag rebels who defeat the empire in films we watch and books we read. But living in centers of the world's wealth and power, do we recognize that we are participants in today's version of empire? Most of the Bible is written for and by people under threat or under the thumb of a variety of empires. The question faced by the children of Israel and the early followers of Jesus was how to live for the kingdom of God while powerful empires demanded full obedience. Does living with affluence and influence change the way we read and understand that story? Are we likely to miss the way the Bible critiques our use of wealth, weapons, and walls? What do Abraham, Moses, and Daniel teach us about living in the heart of the empire and reaching for something better? What can Paul teach us about using the resources of the empire to spread the message that Jesus is Lord, not Caesar? What do the birth and death of Jesus teach us about how God is redeeming the world of empires? Is our citizenship in the empire a temptation, or an opportunity?

Examines the efforts to bring political order to the English empire through projects of environmental improvement When Charles II ascended the English throne in 1660 after two decades of civil war, he was confronted with domestic disarray and a sprawling empire in chaos. His government sought to assert control and affirm the King’s sovereignty by touting his stewardship of both England’s land and the improvement of his subjects’ health. By initiating ambitious projects of environmental engineering, including fen and marshland drainage, forest rehabilitation, urban reconstruction, and garden transplantation schemes, agents of the English Restoration government aimed to transform both places and people in service of establishing order. Merchants, colonial officials, and members of the Royal Society encouraged royal intervention in places deemed unhealthy, unproductive, or poorly managed. Their multiple schemes reflected an enduring belief in the complex relationships between the health of individual bodies, personal and communal character, and the landscapes they inhabited. In this deeply researched work, Kate Mulry highlights a period of innovation during which officials reassessed the purpose of colonies, weighed their benefits and drawbacks, and engineered and instituted a range of activities in relation to subjects’ bodies and material environments. These wide-ranging actions offer insights about how restoration officials envisioned authority within a changing English empire. An Empire Transformed is an interdisciplinary work addressing a series of interlocking issues concerning ideas about the environment, governance, and public health in the early modern English Atlantic empire.

In the British territories of the North American Great Plains, food figured as a key trading commodity after 1780, when British and Canadian fur companies purchased ever-larger quantities of bison meats and fats (pemmican) from plains hunters to support their commercial expansion across the continent. Pemmican Empire traces the history of the unsustainable food-market hunt on the plains, which, once established, created distinctive trade relations between the newcomers and the native peoples. It resulted in the near annihilation of the Canadian bison herds north of the Missouri River. Drawing on fur company records and a broad range of Native American history accounts, Colpitts offers new perspectives on the market economy of the western prairie that was established during this time, one that created asymmetric power among traders and informed the bioregional history of the West where the North American bison became a food commodity hunted to nearly the last animal.

First published in 1994. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.