A fascinating and approachable deep dive into the colonial roots of the global wine industry. Imperial Wine is a bold, rigorous history of Britain-s surprising role in creating the wine industries of Australia, South Africa, and New Zealand. Here, historian Jennifer Regan-Lefebvre bridges the genres of global commodity history and imperial history, presenting provocative new research in an accessible narrative. This is the first book to argue that today-s global wine industry exists as a result of settler colonialism and that imperialism was central, not incidental, to viticulture in the British colonies. -Wineries were established almost immediately after the colonization of South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand as part of a civilizing mission: tidy vines, heavy with fruit, were symbolic of Britain-s subordination of foreign lands. Economically and culturally, nineteenth-century settler winemakers saw the British market as paramount. However, British drinkers were apathetic towards
