How Britain’s Quest for Food Shaped the Modern World

The Hungry Empire

A mouthwatering journey across the centuries and continents to discover how food drove the British Empire and shaped the world

This is a fascinating and timely study of the far-flung sources of our food supply

After reading this you’ll never sit down to dinner without finding a trace of empire in your meal again

A wholly pleasing book, which offers a tasty side dish to anyone exploring the narrative history of the British Empire

Revelatory... Original, thought-provoking and highly entertaining

Dazzling… This book’s treatment of food in the empire is innovative and exciting… A remarkable achievement

Fascinating… This is a marvellously wide-ranging and readable book, stuffed with engaging details and startling connections

Joyously delicious…In her original and supremely captivating book, [Collingham] has cleverly recreated the fine details of some 20 meals, consumed for four and a half centuries in a variety of homes and ships and tented encampments far from the motherland…In British terms, she is Henry Mayhew and Mass-Observation rolled into one—a stellar observer of the day-to-day and the mundane, a social historian of extraordinary talent

The Hungry Empire is impressively scholarly… it is also fascinating. And although Collingham does not flinch from the cruelties and brutalities of empire, she refrains from the self-congratulatory finger-wagging indulged in by some modern historians

Some of the most revelatory anecdotes are the funniest… As with all her work, Collingham has read most of what matters and has selected from it with a lively eye… She can unwind suggestive strands of evidence to lead readers through the labyrinth… Her brisk narrative of the origins of IPA is exemplary

Fascinating… Collingham’s decision to organize her enormously ambitious research around a series of intimate family meals is a good one. Material that would otherwise be numbingly abstract is made profoundly personal… You will certainly enjoy the journey

One of the best, most readable practitioners of the dynamic field of food history

This ingeniously constructed history shows that what we think of as personal appetites have largely been constructed by the machinations of empire. The Hungry Empire uses vivid snapshots of meals to tell the story of how Britain's quest for food drove its imperial ambitions. Collingham takes the reader on a powerful journey ... Like Sidney Mintz or Margaret Visser, Collingham is a historian whose writing about food informs larger stories about human existence: about conflict and culture, about economics and politics. I was dazzled by Collingham's writing and her book also left me very hungry

Lizzie Collingham taught History at Warwick University and was a Research Fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge before becoming an independent historian. Her books include Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors and The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food. She is currently an Associate Fellow of Warwick University and the Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Newnham College, Cambridge. She recently completed a project researching the history of the kitchens of the Indian President’s palace and regularly lectures on a gastronomic tour of Kerala. She works in a garden shed near Cambridge.

'A wholly pleasing book, which offers a tasty side dish to anyone exploring the narrative history of the British Empire' Max Hastings, Sunday Times 
 
WINNER OF THE GUILD OF FOOD WRITERS BOOK AWARD 2018 
 
The glamorous daughter of an African chief shares a pineapple with a slave trader… Surveyors in British Columbia eat tinned Australian rabbit… Diamond prospectors in Guyana prepare an iguana curry… 
 
In twenty meals The Hungry Empire tells the story of how the British created a global network of commerce and trade in foodstuffs that moved people and plants from one continent to another, reshaping landscapes and culinary tastes. The Empire allowed Britain to harness the globe’s edible resources from cod fish and salt beef to spices, tea and sugar. 
 
Lizzie Collingham takes us on a wide-ranging culinary journey, revealing how virtually every meal we eat still contains a taste of empire.

World War Two and the Battle for Food

The Taste of War

Amazing... she makes it impossible to think of the war in the old terms

Fascinating, shocking ... For anyone who thought that the subject of food in the Second World War could be dispatched with a few clichés about digging for victory

Ambitious, compelling, fascinating... uncomfortable reading if you began by believing in the possibility of a just war

This fascinating calorie-centric history of the greatest conflict in world history is wholly convincing

A powerful and important book... One of the beauties of this book is its savage unpicking of cherished myths

Lizzie Collingham's book possesses the notable virtue of originality...[She] has gathered many strands to pursue an important theme across a global canvas. She reminds us of the timeless truth that all human and political behaviour is relative

The great merits of [this] book...lie in its extraordinary range...and in the entirely new perspective it throws on the Second World War

Lizzie Collingham is the author of Imperial Bodies: The Physical Experience of the Raj and Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors, hailed by William Dalrymple as 'scholarly, accessible and above all utterly original'. Having taught History at Warwick University she became a Research Fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge. She is now an independent scholar and writer. She has lived in Australia, France and Germany and now lives near Cambridge with her husband and daughter.

In World War Two, 19 million people died in the conflicts across the globe. Yet in those same years, more than 20 million died from starvation and malnutrition. In The Taste of War Lizzie Collingham shows how food - and its lack - was central to the war's causes and continuation. She explores how starvation was often a deliberate governmental policy, and reveals how the necessity of feeding whole countries lead to Pearl Harbour, Germany's invasion of Russia, and the Holocaust itself.

A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors

Curry

This imaginative book tells the history of India and its rulers through their food. It follows the story of curry as it spread from the courts of Delhi to the balti houses of Birmingham, from the tiffin-carriers of Bombay to the army canteens of Japan

Marvellous and well-illustrated...based on exhaustive research and full of intriguing nuggets of information

A beautifully balanced book, melding historical fact with modern anecdotes... It's the definitive history of curry

Fascinating and meticulously researched... layers historical fact with mouth-watering dinner table gossip of maharajah's epicurean excesses

Curry tells the story of an array of familiar Indian dishes and the people who invented, discovered, cooked and ate them. Curry is vivid, entertaining and delicious. 
 
‘Fascinating and meticulously researched…layers historical fact with mouth-watering dinner table gossip’ Meera Syal, The Times 
 
This imaginative book tells the history of India and its rulers through their food. It follows the story of curry as it spread from the courts of Delhi to the balti houses of Birmingham. 
 
Curry is the product of India's long history of invasion. In the wake of the Mughal conquerors, an army of cooks brought Persian recipes to northern India; in the south, Portugese spice merchants introduced vinegar marinades and the chillies they had recently discovered in the New World; the British soon followed, with their passion for roast meat accompanied by cauliflowers and beans. When these new ingredients were mixed with native spices, they produced these distinctly Indian dishes.

Lizzie Collingham

The History of a Very British Indulgence

Bourbons. Custard Creams. Rich Tea. Jammie Dodgers. Chocolate Digestives. Shortbread. Ginger snaps. Which is your favourite? 
 
 British people eat more biscuits than any other nation; they are as embedded in our culture as fish and chips or the Sunday roast. We follow the humble biscuit's transformation from durable staple for sailors, explorers and colonists to sweet luxury for the middling classes to comfort food for an entire nation. Like an assorted tin of biscuits, this charming and beautifully illustrated book has something to offer for everyone, combining recipes for hardtack and macaroons, Shrewsbury biscuits and Garibaldis, with entertaining and eye-opening vignettes of social history.

Lizzie Collingham

The Biscuit

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