Fruits of Empire: Exotic Produce and British Taste, 1660-1800 by James Walvin

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  • ISBN 10 0814793142
  • ISBN 13 9780814793145
  • Published Apr 01 1997
  • Format Hardcover
  • Page Count 1
  • Language English
  • Countries United States
  • Publisher NYU Press

Publishers Text

What could be more British than a cup of tea? What has proved a more resilient vice in Western life than tobacco? What are the origins of our enthusiasm for spice, smoke, and sugar? James Walvin illustrates how the tastes of the British people, and ultimately the sensory predilections of the entire west, were profoundly transformed by the fruits of distant empire and trade. Tracing the history of British global trade and the drive for imperial preeminence to the rise of a new kind of domestic material consumption, Fruits of Empire devotes chapters to the allure and spread of tea, coffee, tobacco, chocolate, the potato, and sugar, thereby revealing a continuum between the British passion for empire and the contemporary Western passion to consume. Lively and revealing, Fruits of Empire is that unusual work of history that will both inform and entertain.

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