The central theme of this edited volume is that food production and its consumption are inextricably linked to the processes of globalization, from its earliest days. To develop this theme, the editors bring together an impressive range of authors, who are predominantly historians and economic historians, but also including geographers and anthropologists. Thus while the focus is overwhelmingly historical and economic, the regional, social and cultural frames within which globalized food trade first emerged are not lost.

The editors open the volume with an introductory chapter that maps food trade and globalization, showing how the study of food relations provides important insights into the complex genealogy of globalization. This is followed by a chapter on food, culture and society by anthropologist Sidney Mintz, who elaborates on the importance of energy in the conceptualization of food and globalization, because foods must be produced, processed, packaged and distributed. In chapters that follow, William Smith and Paul Kratoska describe changes in global consumption of hot beverages and rice cultivation in South-eastern Asia in historic context. The latter is a fairly normative account, which although discussing associations of tea, coffee and cocoa consumption with religion, gender, class and politics, does not identify specific identities that such consumption has embodied. It is a good account of the ways in which the changing political economy of South-east Asia between 1850 and 1950 influenced rice production.

Richard Wilk goes on, in his chapter on the cultural and economic significance of European food exports to the colonies, to discuss the food cultures created by colonialism and the dynamics of global–local interdependence of food and cuisine, using the example of Belize in the nineteenth century. These dynamics persist to the present day, Wilks argues, as the taste for foreign food shows no sign of abating. The following chapter, by Michelle McDonald and Steven Topik, considers a local example of hot beverage consumption that is loaded with identity issues – that of coffee in the United States – which has been in turn a patriotic drink and a democratic one, the thirst for which has shaped the political economy of Latin and Central America.

By focusing on ethnic cuisine in West Germany during a period of political reconfiguration, Maren Mohring illustrates how identity can be shaped through food, concluding that food is a powerful symbol in struggles over place and territory more broadly. Alexander Nützenadel and Christian Gerlach, in separate chapters, then consider food markets and transnational politics, and transnational agribusiness inside the United Nations system. In the former, the author shows how the institutional framework for food trade has become more complex with political change from the early globalization of the nineteenth century to the present. In the latter, the struggles toward global governance of food trade have proceeded but slowly to help resolve local issues of food insecurity, leave alone global issues of eradicating world hunger.

The final chapters, by Susanne Freidberg, Peter Jackson and Neil Ward and Frank Trentmann, respectively, consider the cultural and moral geographies and economies of export horticulture, sugar production and trade, and of free trade in the modern world. They show that ethics and consumption have a long genealogy, and new configurations represent changing moral norms and political sensitivities. In the end, people need to eat, and in an increasingly urban world, they cannot grow what they need. Trade and competition in food ensures efficient supply and low prices, albeit at a moral cost. Global food markets will persist as long as there is energy to drive the processes of growing and supplying them; this volume is a welcome one, since it locates the debate within a colonial historical frame and shows how many current themes are indeed long-standing ones. This is a useful book for anyone interested in food policy. It is also of value for those involved in public health nutrition, since it shows how cultural and political economic change has influenced what we, as global citizens, eat.