Empowering Appetites: The Political Economy and Culture of Food in the Early Atlantic World

Abstract

This special issue of Early American Studies explores the dynamic relationship between food and power in the early modern Atlantic world. Originating from papers initially presented at a conference coconvened in October 2018 at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, “Empowering Appetites” interrogates the complex political, economic, cultural, and environmental histories of food and diet in a range of maritime, plantation, and settlercolonial contexts between the seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries. Part of the inspiration for this conference—and this publication— arose from the resurgent scholarly interest in food and drink as vital topics of historical inquiry in early American and Atlantic studies.1 Building on groundbreaking works in these fields—from Sidney Mintz’s Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History to Judith Carney’s Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas—the selected articles reinterpret the role of Native foods in mediating encounters between Indigenous and colonizing peoples; examine competing definitions of legitimate forms of sustenance, along with contests to control