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Podcast: New Books in Western European Studies
Episode: Troy Bickham, "Eating the Empire: Food and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain" (Reaktion Books, 2020)
Description: 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: Food and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Reaktion Books, 2020), 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 th...