Engagingly narrated, Troy Bickham's Eating the Empire: Food and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain explores the ways in which eighteenth-century British subjects consumed their empire by ingesting a range of imperial commodities. Based on state trade, taxation, and customs records; shopkeepers’ accounts, trading cards, and insurance policies; personal diaries; newspapers, essays, pamphlets, and political tracts; cookbooks; travel guides; and medical treatises; and the rich visual culture of the long eighteenth century, Bickham argues that people across the British Isles encountered, and thus engaged with, imperialism almost every time they nibbled, sipped, snorted, or inhaled a range of increasingly available and affordable ingestibles.

Accessibly written, Eating the Empire provides an introduction to Britain's imperial consumer culture through the lens of food, drink, and other stimulants. Bickham demonstrates that British cuisine came to be shaped by the products imported from the empire over the course of the eighteenth century. Bickham reveals the ways in which the eating habits of Britons changed throughout the 1700s as it became commonplace to consume foods from India, the Americas, and the West Indies. In eating their empire, Bickham argues, men and women from across the socioeconomic spectrum marked themselves as civilized, patriotic, cosmopolitan imperialists who used food to signify their status, their political leanings, and their global knowledge. Full of interesting detail and a pleasure to read, Bickham's account of the central place of ingestible products in Britain's expanding imperial culture joins a range of other scholarship that has sought to take “the culinary turn” and place food at the heart of British social, cultural, economic, political, and imperial history.

The first half of the book explores how the British encountered the empire through imperially traded commodities, focusing on what Bickham usefully terms ingestibles: tea, coffee, sugar, and tobacco. It demonstrates the ways in which these exotic products became domesticated, evolving over the course of the long eighteenth century from foreign luxuries to staples of almost every home in the British Isles. Bickham then convincingly argues for the ways in which these particular products became central to the making of British consumer culture through advertising and other novel retailing strategies, which deployed a burgeoning print culture that was increasingly dependent on visual imagery. The second part of the book examines food preparation and consumption (the latter meaning in this case both eating and purchasing) as central components of the making of British national, imperial, and political identities. Here Bickham illustrates the ways in which a national cuisine developed in relationship to imperial products and preparations, how food then served to demarcate some peoples as more civilized than others, and the ways in which food became a political tool most notably in the emerging public sphere of the coffeehouse, in disputes over tea in the American colonies, and in debates over whether to consume free sugar from the East Indies or slave sugar from the West Indies. In both parts of the book, Bickham is attentive to issues of gender, class, and geographical location, noting how food can both unite and divide particular British populations.

Although two of the middle chapters of the book engage food more broadly, despite its name, Eating the Empire is largely about this narrow range of ingestibles: tea, coffee, sugar, and tobacco. While Bickham makes a strong case for the ways in which these specific commodities were central to both formal and informal imperial economic relationships, and became embedded within the cultural life of the nation, they occupy a significantly different place in the British diet than did bread, meat, and potatoes, which formed the basis of British foodways. For the rich, these ingestibles were conspicuously consumed, a sign of status rather than adding significantly to an already ample diet. For the poor, on the other hand, these products were consumed largely to stave off hunger and thus were primarily food substitutes, especially as they became cheaper. These particular products, which neither nourished the body nor filled the belly, thus seem constantly to be in tension with the category of food more generally, a problematic that would benefit from further elucidation. In addition, by focusing so heavily on these commodities in particular, Bickham's book rehearses arguments already well developed by other scholarship, including Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (1985); Brian Cowan, The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse (2005); and Erika Rappaport, A Thirst for Empire: How Tea Shaped the Modern World (2017).

Well researched and a highly enjoyable read, Eating the Empire is a good place to start for those seeking an introduction to Britain's commodity culture, its imperial dimensions, and the range of stimulating products that increasingly came to define the practices of “civilized” consumption in the British Isles over the long eighteenth century. Bickham's beautifully illustrated text is chock full of interesting tidbits and fun asides while still engaging themes that are central to the historiography of this critical period of British imperial history.