This is a solidly researched and skilfully executed monograph that does its author credit. Unusually for a revised dissertation on Republican China, it simultaneously addresses no less than four overlapping issues in contemporary historical inquiry: 1) the economic patterns of national and transnational grain supply; 2) the coalescence of a particular set of grain policies under the Kuomintang in the late 1920s and 1930s around a unifying theme of nationalism and science; 3) the pushes and pulls between centralized nation-state and sub-national region (in this case, Canton); 4) the importance of regional in shaping taste and preference in food culture and consumption. The monograph then goes on to illustrate how these four analytically separate strands influenced each other, often in surprising ways.

The monograph's real strength is in the way it lays out a compelling narrative arc of the nation and nation building through rice policy in the first third of the 20th century. The opening chapter describes the difficulties of internal rice transport, and Canton's early reliance on overseas sources of high-quality rice, primarily from Annam and Thailand. It then goes on to plot the twists and turns in how Canton was provisioned with rice against the weakening and collapse of the Qing dynasty, and the gradual rise of the Nationalist centralizing party-state of the 1920s and 1930s. State disintegration and collapse led rice-deficient Canton to rely almost exclusively on regional networks of merchants to solve local problems of shortage through collaborative informal organization in distributing relief grain and calling on extant merchant networks in south-east Asia to increase their exports. The rise of the national party-state deeply suspicious of Canton's “luxurious” culture of food led to a series of propaganda campaigns to promote “healthy” and “patriotic” food consumption, and a one-size-fits-all policy of a national tax on grain imports in order to reduce gaps between city and countryside and stem the outflow of funds to pay for food. Unfortunately these measures did not address a range of ongoing and considerable problems in the storage, transport and quality of “national” rice to a place such as Canton, where transport by sea brought in rice that was both cheaper and of much higher quality. The penultimate chapter analyses how a broad coalition of Kuomintang planners and policy makers in rice policy eventually acknowledged these deficiencies, and sought to overcome them with a “scientific” and heroic project to revive the historical importance of Hunan as the rice-producing heartland of China by linking it to Canton through a massive railroad construction project, and then politically forcing through consumption of inferior Hunan rice in 1936, when National Government officials actually took control of the main offices of the province of Guangdong. This victory was pyrrhic and short lived, leading directly to major food shortages and reversal: under conditions of famine in 1936 and the outbreak of war in 1937, the National Government's centralizing push in the name of national development came to an abrupt halt, when national rice policy was recalibrated to include any and all measures to ensure grain supplies at reasonable prices.

Gourmets in the Land of Famine is a solid and intriguing piece of scholarship. The sources the author draws on are not in the main archival but they are comprehensive: contemporary newspapers, customs reports, handbooks, policy analysis, surveys and gazetteers all feature, as do memoirs and the occasional piece of fiction. The arguments and narrative line are clear. But perhaps the most substantial contribution of this work on the Republican era is to offer a kind of history that will appeal broadly to other scholars in quite different sub-fields: economic history, food and consumption, state building in the early 20th century, and of course Cantonese regional and local history. This is a tall order indeed, and Gourmets in the Land of Famine will rightly find its way onto the bookshelves of many.