I am a Professor of History at Texas A&M University and Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. I teach and research broadly in the histories of Britain and its empire, North America, and the Atlantic world. I am the author of four books, including Making Headlines: The American Revolution as Seen through the British Press and The Weight of Vengeance: The United States, the British Empire, and the War of 1812. I am especially fascinated with how imperialism shape colonizers’ cultures.
I wrote...
Eating the Empire: Food and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain
By
Troy Bickham
What is my book about?
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.
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The Books I Picked & Why
Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History
By
Sidney W. Mintz
Why this book?
This book pioneered the blending of anthropology, sociology, and history to explore the impact of a single commodity on the history of the world. Europeans, Africans, and Americans transformed sugar from a relatively rare luxury into one of the most widely available goods and a staple of modern life. This sweetness, as Mintz explains, came at a heavy price—the destruction of indigenous peoples and landscapes, slavery, and the health of the consumer.
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Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History
By
Rachel Laudan
Why this book?
I love this book primarily for the ambitiousness of its breadth. It begins thousands of years ago with the role of early grain domestication in empire-building and stretches to the roles of modern cuisines in global trade, industry, and capitalism. Although a whirlwind of peoples and places from across human history, this beautifully written and illustrated book is easy for any reader interested in the subject to digest.
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Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures
By
Marcy Norton
Why this book?
Focusing on the Spanish Empire, this book explores two of the most imported goods from the Americas. Norton carefully examines the deep cultural significance of Tobacco and Chocolate amongst the indigenous peoples of the Americas and how the goods were adopted and adapted in Europe, ultimately highlighting the profound impact imperialism had on European cultures.
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The Taste of Empire: How Britain's Quest for Food Shaped the Modern World
By
Lizzie Collingham
Why this book?
Collingham has written multiple books on food and the British Empire, and this one is my favorite. Stretching from 1545 to 1996, each of the twenty chapters selects a historical meal, dissecting its ingredients and manner of preparation in order to explore the imperial forces and experiences that created it. Painstakingly research, each chapter is a standalone history.
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A Thirst for Empire: How Tea Shaped the Modern World
By
Erika Rappaport
Why this book?
There is no shortage of great books on the history of tea, but this one is my favorite because it is a global history of how a commodity, rather than a people, conquered the world. Carefully researched and engagingly written, the book begins its story in the seventeenth century, when China controlled the trade and Europe was a distant secondary market. The book then moves through tea's history—from exclusively Asian drink to staple at the heart of English identity—and the consequences for the planet and human history.
