Carney’s Black Rice, published in 2001, presented a hotly debated new interpretation of Africa’s technological and intellectual contributions to the rise of agriculture in the Americas. Books looking at the history of the world through one food captured readers’ attention at a particular moment of global economic change.
The driving force of the sugar economy was Africans enslaved in the Americas, and in turn they powered the rise of the British and French empires.īut in the late 1990s and early 2000s, with the emerging idea of globalization challenging the supremacy of hegemonic state power, Kurlansky’s Cod started a trend. Mintz’s 1985 classic, Sweetness and Power, showed how the trajectory of a food-in Mintz’s case, sugar-could be used to tell a story of imperial power, the rise of the modern world, and the unattributed contributions of marginalized people. Explore the issue.Ĭod wasn’t the first history to use food as a lens. THE FOOD ISSUE: This article appears in the Fall 2022 print magazine. Illustration by Vasava for Foreign Policy
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