UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, IRVINE The Global Staff of Life: Wheat, Flour, and Bread in Britain, 1846-1914 DISSERTATION submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in History by David C. Fouser Dissertation Committee: Professor Douglas Haynes, Chair Associate Professor Sarah Farmer Professor Kenneth Pomeranz 2016 © 2016 David C. Fouser DEDICATION To my wife, without whom this work, and life itself, would be unimaginable my daughter, whose arrival changed my world, and who has been a constant inspiration my son, who has renewed my inspiration, though he will only ever know the time after this work and my grandfather, whose tales and deeds started me on the path to history, but who never got to know this work. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iv CURRICULUM VITAE v ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION vi INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER ONE: Global Wheat and British Bodies 37 CHAPTER TWO: Roller Milling and the Obliteration of Knowledge 68 CHAPTER THREE: Bodies and Environments in London Bakeries 115 CHAPTER FOUR: Scientific Baking and White Bread 163 CHAPTER FIVE: Nature and Nutrition 218 CHAPTER SIX: The Staff of Life and the Bread of Idleness 260 CONCLUSION 306 BIBLIOGRAPHY 313 iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to express my deepest gratitude and appreciation to my committee chair and mentor, Professor Douglas Haynes. His support, guidance, and inspiration have made this work and my success possible. I would also like to thank my committee members, Professor Sarah Farmer and Professor Kenneth Pomeranz. They were some of the first instructors I had as a new and very green PhD Student at UC Irvine, and they were instrumental in both showing me the dedication required to succeed, and in giving me the confidence to do so. Many others deserve mention here: Professor Jeffrey Auerbach, my first mentor and the person perhaps most responsible for inspiring me to make the history of modern Britain my career. I often ask myself, “What would Jeffrey do here?” Professor Laura Mitchell, for being a brilliant instructor and scholar, as well as a good friend. I never left a conversation with her without feeling that I saw the world in a new way. Professor David Igler, for guiding and supporting me in some of my earliest research of real quality, and for helping to keep me grounded in many ways, at crucial points over the past nine years. Professor Thomas Andrews, who introduced me to environmental history and showed me a whole new realm of history that I had never imagined. I still have and not infrequently refer to the notes I took in his environmental history seminar at CSU Northridge. Professor Chris Otter, whose intellectual fingerprints are all over this work. Professor Bill Deverell, for his constant support. Professor Vinayak Chaturvedi, Professor Timothy Tackett, Professor Yong Chen, have all offered valuable advice and insight in my time in UC Irvine’s History Department. UC Irvine’s Humanities Core has also been a major influence and a wonderful home for me, and I must thank Professor Carol Burke, Dr. Christine Connell, Dr. Susan Morse, Dr. Larisa Castillo, Dr. Giovanni Fogli, and Dr. Vivian Folkenflick for their support and comradeship. I must also thank the many colleagues who studied with me, and who were always willing to lend an ear and often far more; among them, particularly Dr. Aubrey Adams, Professor Ernesto Bassi, Professor Tina Shull, Dr. Annessa Stagner, and Professor Jared Olesen. My deepest thanks go to the staff of the UC Irvine library, particularly Becky Imamoto, and to the staffs and research librarians at the British Library, the National Archives of the United Kingdom, the University of Reading’s Museum of English Rural Life, the Merseyside Record Office, the National Advertising Trust, the National Archives of Scotland, the London Metropolitan Museum, the University of Liverpool, and the Huntington Library. Finally, a very special thank you to my friends at Buster’s Coffee Shop, my unofficial office, and Reddit’s AskHistorians, the best community of historians in the world. iv CURRICULUM VITAE David C. Fouser 2004 B.A. in History, California State University, Northridge 2004-06 Teaching Assistant, California State University, Northridge 2007 M.A. in History, California State University, Northridge 2008-13 Teaching Assistant, Department of History, University of California, Irvine 2009-11 Graduate Student Coordinator, Teaching American History Program with the Huntington Library’s Institute of California and the West and Pasadena Unified School District 2010-15 Teaching Associate, Humanities Core Course University of California, Irvine 2012- Liberal Arts Instructor Laguna College of Art & Design 2014- Adjunct Faculty, Department of History Santa Monica College 2016 Ph.D. in History University of California, Irvine FIELD OF STUDY Cultural and environmental history of modern Britain, the British empire, and the world v ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION The Global Staff of Life: Wheat, Flour, and Bread in Britain, 1846-1914 By David C. Fouser Doctor of Philosophy in History University of California, Irvine, 2016 Professor Douglas Haynes, Chair This research examines the cultural and environmental history of wheat, flour, and bread in Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century. As a result of liberal, Free Trade policies implemented in 1846, Britain effectively outsourced its food supply, coming to rely on distant fields for more than four-fifths of its daily bread by the outbreak of the First World War. This globalization of the wheat ecology that fed Britain required the proliferation of new forms of biopolitical expertise, state intervention, and cultural meaning, visible in the histories of millers, bakers, physicians, and consumers. Their combined expertise served to connect British bodies to global environments, and to produce bread that was significantly whiter than before. At the same time, the cultural distance between the production and consumption of food grew to lengths never before seen: the specific origins of Britons’ chief article of diet became impossible for consumers to discern. vi INTRODUCTION From the middle of the nineteenth century until the First World War, perhaps as at no other time, wheaten bread was the principle article of diet for the majority of Britons. Henry Mayhew began his 1849 account of the working classes of London by explaining that Those who obtain their living in the streets of the metropolis are a very large and varied class; indeed, the means resorted to in order to ‘pick up a crust,’ as the people call it, are so multifarious that the mind is long baffled in its attempts to reduce them to scientific order or classification.1 Sixty years later, in her study of working-class London households conducted between 1909 and 1913, the Fabian Socialist Maud Pember Reeves asserted of the children who populated the metropolis that Bread… is their chief food. It is cheap; they like it; it comes into the house already cooked; it is always at hand, and needs no plate and spoon. Spread with a scraping of butter, jam, or margarine, according to the length of the purse of the mother, they never tire of it as long as they are in their ordinary state of health. They receive it into their hands, and can please themselves as to where and how they eat it. It makes the sole article in the menu for two meals in the day.2 Together, these authors illustrate bread’s role as both the cultural and caloric foundation of Britons’ diets: to “pick up a crust,” or the more common phrase “earn one’s bread,” carried meanings both literal and metaphorical. Bread, the “Staff of Life,” stood in for one’s living, so that earning one’s bread included not merely feeding oneself, but also caring for a family, providing shelter, clothing, and basic amenities, and even pursuing a career by devoting oneself to expertise in a particular line of business. And yet, for many Britons in the nineteenth century, the “bread” they earned was literally bread, for it dominated British 1 Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor (London: Penguin, 1985), 5. 2 Magdalen Reeves, Round About a Pound a Week, Repr. (London: Virago, 1994), 97. 1 diets, providing the bulk of calories: working men could eat a pound or more per day.3 For women and children, bread was even more important, for custom dictated that the father— the “breadwinner”—got what meat or other protein was available.4 Bread also took on political salience at critical moments. In 1846, the newly enfranchised industrial middle classes lobbied successfully for repeal of the Corn Laws, a set of duties on imported grain imposed in 1815.5 Although the process of removing restrictions on the international grain trade was longer and more drawn out than the scholarly focus on 1846 acknowledges,6 there is no doubt that Repeal was one of the pivotal moments of Victorian politics. It was a central piece of Liberal legislation, and it signaled the ascendance of “Free Trade” as both political and moral value. And, it was built around bread: the campaign to remove import duties was framed as a campaign to emancipate “the People’s Bread” from the self-interest and greed of the landowning classes.7 Some sixty years later, the 1906 General Election was fought in large part on the issue of Free Trade. The Conservative Party’s “Tariff Reform” plan sought to reintroduce import duties to protect British businesses from foreign competition, while the Liberal Party advocated a continuation of Free Trade. In campaigning, the Liberal Party 3 Derek Oddy, From Plain Fare to Fusion Food: British Diet from the 1890s to the 1990s (Woodbridge, Suffolk, U.K.: Boydell Press, 2003), 4. 4 Petersen calls 1770 to 1870 the “century of the wheaten loaf,” although somewhat earlier work by E.