Empire, Migration, and Culinary Fusion

Colonial empires reshaped the diets of both colonizers and colonized populations, often deliberately, as part of broader projects of economic extraction and cultural transformation. Colonial administrations frequently pressured or compelled colonized farmers to shift land from subsistence food crops toward export commodities demanded by metropolitan markets, tea in British India, cocoa in the Gold Coast (present-day Ghana), and peanuts in French West Africa among many examples, a reallocation of agricultural land and labor that could undermine local food security even as it enriched colonial treasuries and trading companies.