Dr Rachel Winchcombe has won a prestigious British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship for her groundbreaking project, Edible Empire: Foodways and the Making and Breaking of Anglo-America. In this blog post, Rachel reflects on the significance of this work.
As the globe has become ever more connected, so has our food chain. Within this globalised food system there are winners and losers; some communities have far too little to eat, while others are making themselves sick with the excess of food that they consume. Global environments are also made and remade to satisfy these food needs which in turn has transformed the ways that communities engage with the natural world around them. My British Academy mid-career fellowship, Edible Empire: Foodways and the Making and Breaking of Anglo-America, seeks to make sense of these developments by exploring their origins in colonial America. The age of British empire building in the Americas (c. 1550-1783) represented a formative episode in the history of global food provisioning, during which distinct food cultures became entwined, food products, from the everyday to the luxury, were commodified on ever larger scales, and traditional, placed-based ways of producing food were irrevocably altered. My research will not only tell the story of British foods and the ways that they transformed life in the Americas, from spurring on overseas expansion to precipitating damaging ecological change and the expansion of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, it will also reveal how Indigenous communities maintained political authority through their command of sophisticated food knowledge and how enslaved people used African botanical knowledge and food protests to resist the devastating institution of slavery. From analysing the exotic pineapple to humble maize, and from tracing the histories of English livestock and sacred deer, my work recovers contested colonial foodways, throwing into starker relief how access to food, its preparation, and its consumption, both in the past and present, is critical to environmental sustainability, community cohesion, cultural expression, and human progress and resilience.
Image: Theodore de Bry, ‘Their sitting at meate’, engraving, in Thomas Harriot, A briefe and true report of the new found and of Virginia (1590) Public Domain Image Archive: Harvard University