It depends what you mean by globalization and when you think it happened. Alexander Nützenadel and Frank Trentmann adopt a broad-brush definition, encompassing any ‘process … generating interregional networks’ (p. 3). They acknowledge that this could make globalization a term more or less synonymous with what we usually call history, beginning ‘back when the first humans migrated from Africa’(p. 5). Alternatively, one could start with ‘standardized food production … when wild rye and wheat were brought under cultivation and Asian jungle fowl became the chicken of European consumers’ (p. 5). This is Kenneth Kiple’s starting point for what he calls ten millennia of globalization. Nützenadel and Trentmann opt for the Columbian Exchange as their starting point, and Sidney Mintz (in a paper presented not as an attempt at systematic exposition but as a series of interesting reflections on food as a source of energy) makes a case for the exchange ‘as the single most important food globalization event in world history’ (p. 22).

It is hard, however, to resist the feeling that most of Nützenadel and Trentmann’s contributors tacitly reject the framework the editors set. They largely ignore the implied invitation to cover the early modern period. There is no paper on the Columbian Exchange. Richard Wilk offers an excellent piece on the ‘substitution of identity’ (p. 97) that accompanies exchanges of food and food culture in imperial settings and argues suggestively that ‘local specificity and global homogeneity are two products of the same process’ (p. 93). But his examples come overwhelmingly from the nineteenth century. There is nothing on any region in the early modern period that came to depend on long-range food imports – not even the relatively well-known case of the Netherlands. There is nothing on such regionally specialized activities as the salt trade or preserved fish production or the circulation of whaling products. Not even Sidney Mintz deals with the early modern origins of globally specialized sugar production. William Gervase Clarence-Smith devotes three or four pages to the early modern period in dealing – with exemplary concision and comprehensiveness – with the global spread of hot beverages, but his emphasis, too, is on the nineteenth century. He poses provocative problems about the nature and limits of the success and failure of the appeal of various beverages but prudently refrains from advocating solutions. All the other papers focus resolutely on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – the periods on which historical consensus seems to be converging as critically important in the making of a globalized world. Empires loom large as arenas of globalization in almost all the contributions – and in none more strikingly than Dana Simmons’ stunning piece on how wartime nutritionists’ studies of starvation in Europe drew on the background of colonial famines.

Throughout the papers, tension is evident between rival and almost mutually exclusive approaches. For some contributors, globalization is cultural or ecological, signified by the diffusion of foodstuffs and foodways. For others, it is economic and is measured by a form of divergence: regionally specialized production, leading to the interdependence of widely separated parts of the world. In the first of these categories, Michelle Craig McDonald and Steven Topik with Maren Möhring study instances of foodways transmitted by trade and migration respectively. In the second category, Paul H. Kratoska draws attention to some little-noticed political and economic effects of the regionalization of rice cultivation in Southeast Asia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The editors’ own contributions reflect this tension by seeking to bridge it, concentrating on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century precedents for current efforts to cope with the inequalities of globalization. Alexander Nützenadel’s brilliant paper – which complements Christian Gerlach’s study of the UN as an institution for famine response – discovers the earliest attempts, before 1914, to create institutions of ‘global governance’ for ensuring food equity in an increasingly specialized world. In a richly comparative and thoughtful piece, which fits alongside Peter Jackson and Neil Ward’s snapshot of the current moral problems of the global imbalance between cane and beet as sources of sugar, Frank Trentmann convincingly shows how the British empire in the early twentieth century functioned as an arena of ‘ethical consumerism’ (p. 270). Susann Freidberg’s imaginatively written sketch on specialized production of high-value food exports in Burkina Faso and Zambia also bridges the divide between economics and culture. The relative success of the producers whom Freidberg has in mind suggests how global inequalities can be resolved: by encouraging peasant producers in poor economies to switch from cheap staples to the exotica that the rich world craves.

Overall, the collection draws attention to imperialism as a globalizing process, but the emphasis on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries leads the reader to suspect that industrialization and urbanization may deserve more attention. Industrialization clearly stimulated the global diffusion both of particular foodstuffs and of techniques for marketing and distributing them. The famous stories of Huntley and Palmer’s biscuit tins turning up everywhere from forbidden Lhasa to the camp of the Mahdi show how easily industrially processed foods could traverse the world. Without industrialization, the acceleration of regional specialization in the nineteenth century would have been impossible. The conversion of the ‘Great American Desert’ into the grand wheatland of the world, in a region hobbled by labour shortages, depended on steel ploughs to turn the intractable sod and railways to get the grain to market. Advertisements for the harvesting machines that the McCormick Company of Chicago produced in mid century illustrated the effects of mechanization. Two horses and one man were all that were needed, the poster seemed to say, for vast fields that stretched toward distant mountains. The company produced 1,500 reapers a year in the 1850s; this had risen to nearly 15,000 in the 1870s. Ranching, meanwhile, remained unmechanized but required only a small and specialized workforce – cowboys or, in Argentina and Uruguay, gauchos, who tended to be freelancers, cultivating and celebrating their personal independence. Steam transport, canning, and refrigeration turned the ‘new Europes’ of the southern hemisphere into suppliers of meat for parts of Europe.

On the other hand, farmed products, such as palm oil and cocoa from West Africa, cotton from Egypt and India, and opium from India and Turkey, were labour intensive. To satisfy the market, peasants had to be mobilized – induced or compelled – into growing these crops, along with other lesser but still important items of growing demand, such as rubber and coffee, and easily transportable foodstuffs such as bananas and citrus.

The pressures or promise of the market made peasants switch from subsistence agriculture or farming alone to supplying crops for export. Max Havelaaris the best-known Dutch novel – indeed, it is virtually the only Dutch novel widely known outside the Netherlands. It is a fearless condemnation of colonialism and, in particular, of the system by which the Dutch, in collaboration with native elites, forced peasants in the Dutch East Indies to grow coffee because it was a cash crop, whether their land was suitable or not. In the late nineteenth century, the Dutch forced about half the population of Java to take part in this system. Elsewhere in the Dutch East Indies in the 1870s, people seem to have had more children to meet the colonial government’s demands for forced labour. In Egypt, too, world demand for primary materials forced peasants to grow a product – cotton – that they could not eat and could sell only at prices that they were unable to influence. Peasant landholdings tended to split under the strain. By the end of the century, Egypt had some two million landless peasants, who were subject to forced labour in the irrigation works and to conscription into the army.

So agriculture, like industry, became an increasingly specialized activity, with particular crops concentrated in favoured regions and large domains. Revolutions in tenure arose as the brokers or middlemen who sold peasants’ crops to merchants began to invest in land themselves, using their control of credit to obtain holdings cheaply. The Ottoman Empire, for instance, became a net exporter of crops for the first time in history, thanks to the grapes and opium of western Anatolia, where exports increased by more than 500% between 1845 and 1876. Private owners took over state landholdings, while much land passed from the hands of peasants into those of tribal or local chiefs, city merchants, moneylenders, and officials. In Ottoman Syria – once a peasant land – 60% of the soil was officially reclassified as large estates in the early twentieth century. The estate owners included some local families but many were outsiders – especially Armenians, Greeks, and Jews.

In West Africa, palm-oil production, formerly the work of gatherers of wild plants, became, from the 1840s, a focus of increasingly systematic farming. Harvesting palm fruits, pounding the nuts to extract the oil, and getting the product to market demanded plenty of labour. Typically, a group of independent farmers would combine under an elected leader. In some areas, especially in what is now Nigeria, families could operate small, independent palm-oil farms. Elsewhere – and more insistently as time went on – merchants would grab land and start slave-operated plantations. Much of the profit went into private armies, maintained to fight for power or to seize more slaves. Labour was wrenched away from food production to keep up the flow of oil. Transporting and marketing the oil enriched a growing commercial class.

In southern Bengal, indigo planting was the big new opportunity. But it required capital investment, which forced peasants to borrow. Getting a loan, said a magistrate in 1830, was a ‘misfortune’ that reduced the borrower to ‘little better than a bond slave to the factory’. In the second half of the century, jute – a cheap fibre good for making rope and bags – became dominant. Small cultivators could grow jute economically with little capital on plots of an acre or two. Peasants abandoned rice to grow it. But reliance on a single exportable crop left producers at the mercy of the market and led to high levels of debt, incurred to tide them over hard times or meet high rents. The peasant class survived, but the rising standards of commercial and industrial activity elsewhere in the world left them impoverished.

In some places, where Western immigrants themselves took to the land, they could also end up joining the ranks of the losers in the global marketplace. In the mid nineteenth century, the Portuguese government began settling poor white farmers in Angola, in south-west Africa, as a way to extend and perpetuate Portuguese control of the native Africans. Most of these settlers never made a success of their ventures, renouncing the opportunities to grow export crops and turning instead to subsistence farming to feed their own families, living in hovels, and dressing in rags. The plight of black peasants in Angola was even worse. Before the 1870s, having their land seized and being enslaved was their usual fate. Late in that decade, when Portugal officially abolished slavery, their status hardly improved in practice. Not until the early twentieth century did the authorities make serious or sustained efforts to stop the illegal export of slaves.

The erosion of independence and of local prosperity was a common – but not universal – consequence of the specializations that the global market encouraged. In the second half of the century, Thailand, formerly a self-sufficient country, began to specialize in a few exportable commodities: rice (which accounted, on average, for 60–70% of total exports), tin, and teak. The emphasis on rice ensured that some traditional ways of life continued. The Thai people stayed on the land, increasing output almost entirely by extending the amount of land under cultivation. They resisted the lure of high wages or returns from activities outside agriculture and left commerce to Chinese immigrants. The amount of capital investment required for growing rice was modest and, among foreigners, the Chinese supplied most of it. Thailand therefore never succumbed to foreign business imperialists’. Relative to other staple foods, rice earned good profits for the people who grew it. Only about 50% of the export price went to the middleman, miller, and shipper.

Whatever we think about the relative contributions of imperialism, industrialization, and urbanization to the creation of a global food market, the growing consensus in favour of the nineteenth century as the era of ‘first globalization’ seems to leave Kenneth Kiple’s notion of ten millennia of globalization out on a limb. His fascinating book teems with facts and is enlivened by sparingly injected but effective provocations, which are often memorably expressed: the brand revolution of the nineteenth century ‘accelerated the art of peddling plenty’ (p. 201); food allergies are an ‘unintended consequence of globalization’ (p. 291); the global homogenization of food habits ‘could almost be viewed along the lines of Darwinian natural selection’ (p. 305). As we might expect from an author who is perhaps the world’s leading authority on the history of food-related pathologies, connections between nutrition and disease are particularly well handled. But the book works better as a quarry for data and ideas than as a study of globalization or a continuous history of food. Avowedly, the author has compiled it from The Cambridge world history of food, a vast compendium that he edited, magisterially, with K. C. Ornelas. It is part reduction, part réchauffé. Though Kiple has made his selection with an unerring eye for what is interesting and important, an organizing principle has eluded him. A long, more-or-less introductory section of about fifty pages is arranged (like substantial sections of the Cambridge volumes and like Marguelonne Toussaint’s popular food history) product by product. The author then switches to an uneasy mixture of regional, thematic, and chronological approaches, occasionally inserting chapters on particular groups of foods. As a result, none of the approaches quite yields continuous coverage. Rome gets a whole chapter – but no other ancient empire does. Whole epochs are swallowed at a gulp or barely chewed. The section on animal domestication is particularly interesting as it raises one of Kiple’s most engaging themes – the importance of religion, in this case the need for animals for sacrifice, in determining new departures in food history; but creatures as important as llamas, snails, and fish get no mention. The large number of short chapters – averaging only just over ten pages each – make for easy reading but not for easy overall grasp.

Kiple is, understandably, so interested in the vast array of wonderful topics he touches that the argument about globalization drops out of sight for long stretches. It is hard even to be sure what the argument is. In the preface, the author announces a bold thesis, defining globalization as the dispersal of the fruits of agriculture so that ‘today, in the West at least, diets are no longer tied to regional food production’, with the consequence that ‘food homogenization’ is displacing regional cuisines (p. xiv). This is confusing because dispersal in itself cannot produce regionally specialized production: on the contrary, it would, if unchecked by other influences, diffuse production of particular foodstuffs throughout the world. Whether the exchange of ingredients and cuisines has a homogenizing effect seems moot, in any case. Fusion seems to have multiplied cooking styles without eliminating any of those that formerly existed. In as much as globalization creates global culture, it seems to add an extra layer to existing cultures. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Kiple almost immediately retreats from the strong claims of the Preface to tell us (on p. 1) that the thousands of years he proposes to cover ‘have carried us to the brink of food globalization’.

Obviously, in a work of this scale, not all readers will agree with all the author’s judgements. It is surprising, for instance, to find Kiple endorsing the view that cooking came about ‘by accident’ (p. 11); or that agriculture was a response to population stress (p. 12); or that protein deficiency is responsible for cannibalism (p. 126); or that fat-tailed sheep were originally bred as a delicacy (p. 16); or that avocados are ‘underutilized’ in South America if, say, Chile or Colombia are in question (p. 185). Still, this is a book to be enjoyed by sampling, like a smörgåsbørd or a menu dégustation, not tackled like a boringly balanced meal. If it were unexceptionably agreeable, it would be far less interesting. If it were controlled by a tight argument, it would be far less rich.