Food globalization has been in train for some ten millennia,1 driven by, and driving, war, trade, imperialism, colonialism, and culture. Within economic history, the dominant discipline in the study of globalization, only the first four are dealt with in any depth, invariably focusing on production and the supply side. By contrast, there have been relatively few studies of globalization in terms of culture, consumption, and the demand side, resulting in an incomplete understanding of the ways in which material life, cultural values, and political imperatives interact in a global context. These dynamics are examined in this anthropological account of culture and commerce in Britain and the empire in the interwar years, focusing on a dish that assumed tremendous symbolic and economic importance – the King's Christmas pudding

In 1769, the East India Company decided to transform the Bengali silk industry, and introduced Piedmontese reeling technologies and spatially concentrated working practices into the area. Although Bengali raw silk reeled with the new methods never reached the standards of Piedmontese silks, the Company was able to produce huge quantities of low-quality raw silks, and to gain market share in London from the 1770s to the 1830s. By investigating the reasons behind this partial success, this article shows that some features of Piedmontese technologies had a crucial impact on peasants who specialized in the mulberry cultivation and the rearing of silkworms. The Company had to cope with resistance from some rural economic agents in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Bengal, but other elements in local society were able to profit from the Company's interest in producing raw silk.

This paper analyses the importation of foreign steam technology into Cuba in the course of the nineteenth century, and the experience of the migrant workers employed to operate it, in order to focus not on Cuba as an isolatable entity, but existing in the context of transnational networks that were involving the island in processes of globalization. This was, at the outset, a ‘sub-imperial’ globalization, operating independently, and implying liberation, from empire. The search for new technologies to enable improvements in sugar production necessarily took the Creole elite beyond the restricted possibilities of the Spanish empire to the industrial centres of the United States, Britain, and France. Such new links helped fuel the emergence of an independent Cuban identity; however, the same globalizing tendencies that were eroding the Spanish empire led Cuba into new forms of imperial domination. The increasing expense of the new steam technology necessitated a growing dependence upon investment from foreign merchant banks, which gradually assumed control over much of the island's production and trade. The same migrant engineers who had begun by assisting Cuban planters took on the role of agents for foreign companies. Rather than contributing their skills, as one more group of migrants in a nation formed out of multiple migrations, these engineers asserted their foreign identity and guarded their privileged position. They came to be seen as symbolic of the process by which Cuba shook off the Spanish yoke only to replace it with another.

This article examines an aspect of the globalization of commodity production, exchange, and consumption in the interwar years: the differential impact of protectionism on primary producers in the context of the Great Depression. Focusing on West African oilseeds, especially Nigerian palm produce, it highlights the dilemma of imperial Britain in the synchronic interplay of forces that operated in the north and south, and globally in the two-dimensional inter-product competition of the late 1920s and 1930s. Imperial Britain was caught in intricate and interlocking facets of inter-product competition on the world market, both north–south (palm produce versus whale oil), and south–south (West African palm produce, Indian groundnuts, and Dutch East Indies palm produce). The article highlights the implications and consequences of the extensive interchangeability of these products, the dilemmas of the colonial and imperial governments, reactions to protectionist policies, and the differential impact of the interwar depression upon the growth and freedom of commodity flows within the global economy.

Global coffee markets entered into a deep cyclical downturn from the mid 1950s. As producers, notably Brazil and Colombia, continued to increase their output, intense struggles arose among global competitors for larger slices of a contracting market. The prospect of an economic catastrophe, following the release of Brazil's surplus stocks, preoccupied Kenya's colonial government, which was dependent on tax revenues derived from coffee sales, and was less able to support the settler-dominated industry in the face of the increased costs incurred by the Mau Mau Emergency after 1952. This left European settlers exposed, with many barely able to recover their costs of production. What began as a counter-insurgency strategy, by allowing an elite of African farmers to grow Arabica coffee (a privilege formerly reserved to settlers) was enlarged and accelerated in response to unrelenting global market pressures. These compelled the colonial government to beckon low-cost African farmers into coffee production, in a bid to save its tax base and ensure the survival of the coffee sector. Even though the Coffee Marketing Board confiscated much of their income, African farmers proved well able to rally family labour and achieve surpluses. Rationalization of production and the re-organization of the commodity chain to maintain high quality at lower cost were decisive in both reconfiguring the economic and social relationships that underpinned Kenya's independence in 1963 and securing the country's place on the world market. The aim here is to explain the crisis, and its grip on Kenya's economy during the transition to independence and beyond.

Cain and Hopkins' influential theory of British imperialism opted for a metropolitan-based model of explanation, rooted in the interests of a City-of-London-based class of ‘gentlemanly capitalists’, and discounting in the process events and experiences in the colonies and the significance of industrialization. By focusing on the simultaneous emergence of Bombay and Glasgow as modern, global ports in the second half of the nineteenth century, this article argues, in diametrical opposition, for a fresh perspective on the relationship between metropole and periphery, based on the concept of ‘interconnected synchronicity‘. This proposes that ‘imperial’ causation be viewed, at least from this period, as occurring in both arenas, based on a set of related and mutually transformative processes generated by the ‘globalizing’, commodity-driven imperatives of industrial capitalism.