I am currently at work on a new book-length project, “Everyday Colonialism: Commodities of Empire and the Crafting of French Capitalism, 1750-1950,” which offers a new analysis of the importance of empire and imperial trade in the making of modern France. From the seventeenth to the twentieth century colonial foods and drinks like sugar, vanilla, chocolate, wine, rubber, and bananas flowed into France and shaped the way metropolitan men and women understood what it meant to be French and modern. Use of colonial goods restructured French daily life, redefined family and class relations, reshaped conceptions of gender and race, and generated new economic activities and cultural expressions. Drawing on contemporary analysis of material culture and anthropological understandings of food as “embodied material culture” my project examines the economic, social and cultural practices that developed around colonial products in France over the span of two centuries. Seeing these consumption habits as essential to the formation of modern French identity and economic life, this project will offer novel answers to two recurring questions in the historiography of the French Empire: What was the economic importance of empire in the emergence of modern France? To what extent did the French embrace the empire as part of their conception of French identity and culture?
To date, historians of empire and consumption have produced a rich literature exploring how and why Europeans integrated colonial foodstuffs into their diets and colonial goods into their homes and lives. This project pushes that field of inquiry further. It begins with the premise that colonial food and drinks were far more than tasty consumables whose addictive or delightful qualities beguiled consumers and generated insatiable appetites that shaped imperial expansion. Rather, it views colonial foodstuffs and commodities as, in the words of anthropologist Michael Dietler, “highly condensed social fact[s] embodying relations of production and exchange and linking the domestic and political economies in a highly personalized way.” These meaning-laden consumables certainly contributed to novel rituals and innovative social practices, but repeated ingestion and use also produced new habits, structures of thoughts, and perceptions. Insofar as imperial goods “colonized” French everyday practices and became markers of what it meant to be French and modern, they brought colonial relations into the most intimate spheres of French metropolitan life. Consequently, colonial commodities generated new ways of thinking about economic activity and cultural practice. The study of colonial commodities thereby enables an assessment of the economic importance of imperialism that goes beyond quantitative calculations, ultimately exploring how colonial products contributed to the rise of distinctive structures of thought and practice constitutive of modern French economic life. Likewise, this approach suggests that metropolitan French did more than “embrace” the empire—they literally imbibed and consumed it—even as they sought to distinguish themselves from colonial producers and territories upon whom they depended for the products that played in central role in French culture and society. From this perspective, empire was much more than an “exotic” seasoning consumed in greater or lesser amounts by metropolitan populations, but rather a basic ingredient that structured the very essence of modern French identity.