Imperial Wine: How the British Empire Made Wine’s New WorldA fascinating deep dive into the colonial roots of the global wine industry. Imperial Wine is a bold, rigorous history of Britain’s surprising role in creating the wine industries of Australia, South Africa, and New Zealand. Here, historian Jennifer Regan-Lefebvre bridges the genres of global commodity history and imperial history, presenting provocative new research in an accessible narrative. This is the first book to argue that today’s global wine industry exists as a result of settler colonialism and that imperialism was central, not incidental, to viticulture in the British colonies. Wineries were established almost immediately after the colonization of South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand as part of a civilizing mission: tidy vines, heavy with fruit, were symbolic of Britain’s subordination of foreign lands. Economically and culturally, nineteenth-century settler winemakers saw the British market as paramount. However, British drinkers were apathetic towards what they pejoratively called "colonial wine." The tables only began to turn after the First World War, when colonial wines were marketed as cheap and patriotic and started to find their niche among middle- and working-class British drinkers. This trend, combined with social and cultural shifts after the Second World War, laid the foundation for the New World revolution in the 1980s, making Britain into a confirmed country of wine-drinkers and a massive market for New World wines. These New World producers may have only received critical acclaim in the late twentieth century, but Imperial Wine shows that they had spent centuries wooing, and indeed manufacturing, a British market for inexpensive colonial wines. This book is sure to satisfy any curious reader who savors the complex stories behind this commodity chain. |
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Contents
part one origins c 16501830 | 9 |
Europe | 18 |
The First Wine at the Cape | 29 |
South Africa | 30 |
Creating Australian Vineyards | 40 |
Australia and New Zealand | 41 |
New Zealands First Grapes | 48 |
part two growth c 18301910 | 61 |
Detail map of Australia and the Cape | 148 |
Plonk Colonial Wine and the First World War | 157 |
The Dominions and the Interwar Period | 168 |
Quantity of total wine exported from South Africa 190661 | 173 |
Percentage of South African wine exported to the U K 190661 | 174 |
Australian other empire and foreign European wine imports to the U K 190931 | 178 |
The British Market for Empire Wines | 180 |
The Joyous Grape | 181 |
Colonial Wines of the Nineteenth Century | 72 |
Grape pickers at Dalwood Vineyard 1886 2 | 85 |
Have You Any Colonial Wine? Australian Producers and British | 88 |
Working the Colonial Vineyard | 104 |
Sulphur Sulphur Sulphur Phylloxera and Other Pests | 118 |
British Consumers in the Victorian Era | 127 |
Malta and Canada | 135 |
Detail map of wineproducing countries | 146 |
Waerenga wines 1934 | 190 |
Colonial Wines in the Postwar Society | 207 |
Burgoynes Harvest Burgundy | 213 |
Colonial Wines Battle Back | 219 |
British per capita consumption 19612013 | 232 |
Notes about Measurements | 245 |
Other editions - View all
Imperial Wine: How the British Empire Made Wine’s New World Jennifer Regan-Lefebvre Limited preview - 2022 |
Common terms and phrases
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Bibliographic information
| Title | Imperial Wine: How the British Empire Made Wine’s New World |
| Author | Jennifer Regan-Lefebvre |
| Edition | illustrated |
| Publisher | Univ of California Press, 2022 |
| ISBN | 0520343689, 9780520343689 |
| Length | 342 pages |
| Subjects | › › › BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Economics / General History / Europe / Great Britain / General History / World Social Science / Agriculture & Food Technology & Engineering / Agriculture / General |
| Export Citation | BiBTeX EndNote RefMan |