![]() ![]() These metropolitan discourses reconfigured betel quid and in the process mobilized it as a new site of colonial differentiation. In Eating the Empire, Troy Bickham unfolds the extraordinary role that food played in shaping Britain during the long eighteenth century (circa 16601837), when such foreign goods as coffee, tea, and sugar went from rare luxuries to some of the most ubiquitous commodities in Britainreaching even the poorest and remotest of households. Shifting notions of intoxication – first as a form of dissolute inebriation, and later as a state of measurable toxicity – provided the tools, language and social context to dissolve the betel quid’s edibility in conjunction with a broader civilizing process in imperial Britain. Through discursive analysis of medical and herbal texts, advertisements, British guides, and parliamentary papers, it shows how evolving discourses of intoxication motivated the betel quid’s transition from stimulating fruit into a largely inedible substance. This article traces the reconfiguration of betel quid in the British metropole in the early modern and modern periods. Betel quid, a prepared comestible, was among the most widely consumed stimulants in the world, but it was not popularized as a masticatory in modern Europe. ![]() ![]() But, not all tropical commodities easily flowed along these metropolitan routes. Exotic, plant-based stimulants such as sugar, tea, and coffee linked metropolitan bodies with colonial expansion in support of the formation of modern Europe. ![]()
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