What could be more British than a cup of tea? What has proved more resilient vice in Western life than tobacco? What are the origins of our enthusiasm for spice, smoke, and sugar? James Walvin here illustrates how the tastes of the British people, and ultimately the sensory predilections of the entire West, were profoundly transformed by the fruits of distant empire and trade.

Tracing the history of British global trade and the drive for imperial pre-eminence to the rise of a new kind of domestic material consumption, Fruits of Empire devotes chapters to the allure and spread of tea, coffee, tobacco, chocolate, the potato, and sugar, thereby revealing a continuum between the British passion for empire and the contemporary Western passion to consume.