Research

Alcohol

‘Drunkard’ was one of the insults most frequently hurled at indigenous people in colonial Spanish America. Spanish writers insisted that unlike sober settlers, locals saw no shame in getting drunk. Scholars hold differing opinions about how the high levels of alcoholism in many indigenous communities in the USA and elsewhere connect to this longer experience of discrimination, and also, perhaps, different drinking practices.

I review this sad history in several publications, including, most recently, here.

Bananas

When Carmen Miranda sashayed her way into the hearts of Britain’s war-weary population in films such as The Gang’s All Here, her combination of tame eroticism and tropical fruit proved irresistible. To audiences suffering the strictures of rationing, Miranda’s tropical headgear shouted exoticism and abundance – with a touch of phallic sensuality thrown in. I discuss the banana’s British history in The Conversation.

Breadfruit

Many people have heard, vaguely, of the mutiny on the Bounty. Fewer are aware that a prime cause of the mutiny was the preferential treatment that Captain Bligh accorded the thousands of breadfruit saplings that shared space on the ship with the increasingly disgruntled crew. I write about the breadfruit’s strange journey from the South Pacific to the West Indies here.

Breakfast

For my thoughts on the English Breakfast, and other breakfast-related topics see this interview for a German podcast, and these articles in Financial Review and the Independent.

Chiles

Chile peppers, native to the America, are now an essential ingredient of cuisines from Hungary to Szechuan. The global dissemination of chile peppers is one of the very few bright spots in the generally dismal story of European imperialism. (Calvin Trillin made the bolder claim that ‘the banh mi sandwich is really the only good argument for colonialism’.)

I review the global spread of chile peppers, maize, sweet potatoes, and many other foods, in The Oxford Handbook of Food History. I was also interviewed (on the topic of peri-peri sauce) for Channel 5’s ‘Nando’s: A Peri-Peri Big Success’.

Chocolate

Chocolate originates in Meso-America, where Maya kings and princes enjoyed the frothy drink made from cacao seeds. It is now an important global commodity, available at every price point (and formed into virtually every shape imaginable). I trace its history here.

I discuss its particular links to Valentine’s Day in articles in Woman’s Weekly (13 Feb. 2018), and The Independent.

Christmas

We in Britain didn’t always eat turkey for Christmas. These birds are native to the Americas, and did not become a popular Christmas centrepiece until the nineteenth century.   

Mulled wine, in contrast, has long been a popular Yuletide drink. I discuss some unusual variants here.

Cookbooks & Recipes

During the pandemic many of us turned to family recipes to connect with distant relatives. Cooking a familiar dish became a way of overcoming physical distance. ‘I felt the 4,000 miles between us vanish: it was like she was there with me’, Rahul Raina wrote of cooking his grandmother’s recipes. I comment on this in the Observer.

Right now I am working on a the history of cookbooks, for a project with a working title of ‘What can we learn from a cookbook (other than how to cook)?’

The answer is ‘a lot’: cookery books shed light on the growing importance of numbers, as a ‘quarter teaspoon’ replaced ‘a pinch’, on family history, on the explosion of domestic appliances (do you have a special cookbook for your instapot?), and much more.

Alongside, I’ve edited a cookbook, comprised of wonderful recipes contributed by Warwick University students, which contains possibly the best-ever measurement: ‘a piece of manchego the size of a fag packet’. The amusing phenomenon of ‘metaphorical recipes’ such as recipes for a happy marriage is the subject of an online talk I gave at McGill Library in 2020.

Eating & Identity

Eating is at the heart of all human relationships. It structures our sense of who we are, and aren’t. Our companions, after all, are those with whom we share bread.

I’ve been particularly interested in how food helps shore up national, racial and familial identities.

The Body of the Conquistador: Food, Race and the Colonial Experience in Spanish America, 1492-1700 explores the role of eating in the history of colonial Spanish America. It was described as ‘essential reading’, which ‘fundamentally shifted discussions of the colonial body, environmental history and the colonial enterprise itself’.

Meaty Things

During the 16th century, eating pork could be a matter of life and death. The Spanish Inquisition viewed diet as a good indication of religious belief; refusing pork was considered prima facie evidence of Jewish or Muslim identity. I explore the connections between meat and religious/ethnic identity in The Body of the Conquistador: Food, Race and the Colonial Experience in Spanish America (as well as in this short piece in The Guardian).

I’ve also weighed in on the ‘is a scotch egg a substantial meal’ debate, the history of Christmas turkeys, how sausages conquered the world, and other matters of national interest.

Cannibalism, a form of meat-eating, is the topic of a fine new collection (To Feast on Us as their Prey: Cannibalism in the Early Modern Atlantic) to which I contributed a chapter.

Pineapples

Just before the pandemic struck in 2020 the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge hosted a spectacular conference about the pineapple. Here I discuss the pineapple’s global history, from the Caribbean to Carmen Miranda.  I also put in an appearance on BBC Radio 4 ‘The Today Programme’ (21 Feb. 2020).

Potatoes

Potatoes are the world’s number one non-grain food commodity, and a major source of food to people in many parts of the world. This is quite an achievement for a plant that 500 years ago was totally unknown to most of humanity. My work on the potato’s global history stresses the contributions made by peasants and small farmers to disseminating this important food, and also traces out the surprising connections between capitalism, the Enlightenment, and our individual eating habits. You can listen to me discuss some of these ideas on the BBC’s Food Chain show (external link).

The Potato Project led to two books: Feeding the People: the Politics of the Potato is a global history of the potato’s remarkable journey from the Andes to everywhere. A shorter essay called, simply, Potato offers a more poetic meditation on people, potatoes and the pursuit of happiness. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, ‘each section educates, brings a smile, makes you hungry, and makes you think’. ‘I’ll never look at a potato the same way again’, said the food writer Ruby Tandoh.

Queen Victoria

Queen Victoria enjoyed food, including sponge cakes and other sugary delights. I write about her love of eating in ‘Queen Victoria’s Appetites’.  My mixed success in making Victoria sponge features in several bake-off inspired articles. And since you can’t really make a Victoria sponge without jam, here are my thoughts on jam and the WI.

Sugar

Sugar is not all sweetness and light. Its affordability in nineteenth century Britain resulted from the barbaric conditions on sugar plantations in the Americas, where, as the saying went, sugar was made with blood’. For this reason, I nominated sugar when asked to identify the world’s most dangerous food.

Sweet Potatoes

Sweet potatoes feature regularly in lists of super-foods, where they are lauded for their purported ability to reduce cancer risk, support digestive health, and other nutritional virtues. In 2015 The Guardian reported excitedly that British supermarkets were now selling home-grown sweet potatoes, converting this once-unfamiliar vegetable into something ‘not so exotic’.

 In fact, people in the British Isles were eating—and growing—sweet potatoes in Tudor times; this article explores their surprising history.

Casta Paintings

Casta paintings are remarkable. These eighteenth-century paintings from Mexico and Peru depict mixed-race families, sometimes in intimate domestic settings. There is nothing else quite like them.

‘The Pleasures of Taxonomy: Casta Paintings, Classification and Colonialism’ situates these paintings in the sentimental world of the colonial romance, as well as in the debates about human nature and mankind that typified eighteenth-century enlightened science. I’ve also used casta paintings to study clothing and its connections to ethnicity.

Clothing

In 1686 a man named Blas de Horta tried to convince a court in Quito that he was not an Indian. He did not summon his parents. Instead he produced a witness who swore that he always wore Spanish dress.

In colonial Spanish America racial identity did not reside solely, or sometimes even at all, in physical appearance. Racial identities were profoundly social—a performance—and for both elites and plebeians, clothing played an important role in this process.

I’ve written a number of articles about the connections between clothing, race, and identity in the colonial world. Some of these also look at legislation (sumptuary laws) that tried to regulate who could wear what.

Health in the Early Modern World

We are not the first generation to recognise the importance of healthy eating to staying well. In the early modern era (roughly 1400-1800) food was a fundamental part of a proper health regimen. ‘A good cook is half a physician’, explained the doctor Andrew Boorde in 1542.

I’ve written general guides that explain food’s place in early modern understandings of health, as well as The Body of the Conquistador: Food, Race and the Colonial Experience in Spanish America, which shows how these ideas shaped the experiences of Spanish settlers in colonial Spanish America. ‘The Political Economy of Nutrition in the Eighteenth Century’ explains what it meant to call a food ‘nutritious’ before the invention of calories and vitamins. ‘Is it Sinful to Eat an Owl after Communion?’ showed that the answer was ‘yes’.

During the pandemic everyone became more interested in food. My research featured in a New York Times article about ‘What We Eat During a Plague’.

The Idea of Race

Since the sixteenth century (if not earlier) race has provided one of the most powerful languages for articulating the inequalities that lie at the heart of colonialism. Many scholars have written about when the idea of race was invented, and how its meanings have changed. My work has underscored the importance of food and clothing to these debates. People in early modern Europe believed that lifestyle helped determine what sort of body you had: what you ate and how you dressed had a physical impact on who you were, and how you looked. I explored this most fully in The Body of the Conquistador: Food, Race and the Colonial Experience in Spanish America and ‘The Pleasures of Taxonomy: Casta Paintings, Classification and Colonialism’.

Letters & Printing

Does love have a history? In ‘Letters and Love in Colonial Spanish America,’ I examined the salutations and closings used in hundreds of letters sent across the Atlantic by husbands and wives between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, to explore how married couples expressed their feelings for each other.

I also edited a collection of essays on letters of all sorts, from Emily Dickinson’s poetic missives to the anguished letters sent by German wives to their soldier husbands during World War One.

Other work studied the spread of printing in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Spanish America, to assess the impact of the printing press on the spread of revolutionary ideas.

Nationalism

Nations are ‘imagined’ into existence. The idea that nationalism is an imaginative construct, popularised by Benedict Anderson in his 1983 Imagined Communities, has become axiomatic in the humanities and the social sciences. My research has explored the ways in which elite nationalists in postcolonial Spanish America imagined their nations during the nineteenth century. I was particularly interested in the place of ancient indigenous cultures such as the Aztecs or Incas in these imaginings. The Return of the Native: Indians and Mythmaking in Spanish America traces white nationalists’ ambivalent relationship with the precolonial past. Drawing on a vast archive of sources from postage stamps and place names to legislation designed to protect precolumbian ruins, it tells a coherent story about the emergence of official nationalism across Spanish America. En route it also explains why the Argentine flag features a giant golden sun, and why there are metro stations in Mexico named after Aztec emperors.

I’ve also looked at the invention of ‘national costume’ in Latin America. ‘Nationalism and National Costume in Spanish America’, which appeared in The Politics of Dress in Asia and the Americas, explains how and why the outfits of gauchos and the Mexican ‘china poblana’ began to be celebrated as national. Beauty pageants also feature in the analysis.

Travel

Travel was a perilous undertaking for early modern Europeans. Leaving aside shipwreck or brigands, nostalgia alone could make you ill. Writers insisted that even corpses were happiest when buried in their natal soil. The era’s increase in long-distance travel took place against this backdrop. I’ve written about how Europeans negotiated the challenges of leaving home, and explained food’s role in keeping the travelling body in good health.

War & Revolution in Spanish America

Much of the ‘Age of Revolution’ between the 1770s and the 1840s took place in Spanish America. I’ve written about Colombia’s war of independence from Spain, as well as the impact of the French Revolution in Spanish America. I’ve also studied small-scale local uprisings in colonial Colombia, and edited a collection of essays about civil wars across nineteenth-century Latin America.