Part One explores how Britons came to know their empire-the foods, the people, the habits, to define or redefine their own self of Britishness and the role of imperial authority upon consumers who would adopt and adapt their eating preferences as a result of strategic advertising campaigns. Bickham employs the term “imperial ingestibles” to address how British society defined who they were, in part, by what and how they chose to eat and drink. He has chosen the politically charged commodities of coffee, tea, sugar, and tobacco as not only the tastemakers of Britain’s palate across the long 18th century (c1660 to1837), but as case studies for how taste was established, advertised, and politicized. Interdisciplinary in scope and extensively researched, Bickham’s study is precisely why the field of culinary history is so relevant as a means to contextualize history, politics, culture, and economics. While such assertions have roundly been dispelled, one has only to commence reading Troy Bickham’s book, Eating the Empire: Food and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain to close any debate on the matter.
Detractors of these fields contend that in an age of food network channels and a proliferation of YouTube videos extoling the virtues of every possible ingredient, recipe, and technique-with or without historical support, food studies lack academic rigor. Within the past decade, much debate has ensued surrounding the question of whether or not food studies and culinary history constitute valid academic disciples.
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