The Hungry Empire

A wholly pleasing book, which offers a tasty side dish to anyone exploring the narrative history of the British Empire

Max Hastings, Sunday Times

Revelatory... Original, thought-provoking and highly entertaining

Daisy Goodwin, The Times

Dazzling… This book’s treatment of food in the empire is innovative and exciting… A remarkable achievement

Guardian

Fascinating… This is a marvellously wide-ranging and readable book, stuffed with engaging details and startling connections

Financial Times

Joyously delicious…In her original and supremely captivating book, [Collingham] has cleverly recreated the fine details of some 20 meals, consumed for four and a half centuries in a variety of homes and ships and tented encampments far from the motherland…In British terms, she is Henry Mayhew and Mass-Observation rolled into one—a stellar observer of the day-to-day and the mundane, a social historian of extraordinary talent

New York Times Book Review

The Hungry Empire is impressively scholarly… it is also fascinating. And although Collingham does not flinch from the cruelties and brutalities of empire, she refrains from the self-congratulatory finger-wagging indulged in by some modern historians

Daily Telegraph

Some of the most revelatory anecdotes are the funniest… As with all her work, Collingham has read most of what matters and has selected from it with a lively eye… She can unwind suggestive strands of evidence to lead readers through the labyrinth… Her brisk narrative of the origins of IPA is exemplary

Literary Review

Fascinating… Collingham’s decision to organize her enormously ambitious research around a series of intimate family meals is a good one. Material that would otherwise be numbingly abstract is made profoundly personal… You will certainly enjoy the journey

Mail on Sunday

One of the best, most readable practitioners of the dynamic field of food history

Times Literary Supplement

This ingeniously constructed history shows that what we think of as personal appetites have largely been constructed by the machinations of empire. The Hungry Empire uses vivid snapshots of meals to tell the story of how Britain's quest for food drove its imperial ambitions. Collingham takes the reader on a powerful journey ... Like Sidney Mintz or Margaret Visser, Collingham is a historian whose writing about food informs larger stories about human existence: about conflict and culture, about economics and politics. I was dazzled by Collingham's writing and her book also left me very hungry

Bee Wilson, author of FIRST BITE