Imperial Wine: How the British Empire Made Wine’s New World by Jennifer Regan-Lefebvre

Academic monographs about commodities generally distinguish themselves from the commercial genre by offering more than entertainment for the curious. Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York, 2014) and Erika Rappaport’s A Thirst for Empire: How Tea Shaped the Modern World (Princeton, 2017) wielded the might of significant economic and political research within their pages, even if the footnotes were neatly stowed out of sight at the back of thick volumes. Wine achieved scholarly recognition as an agent of historical development in David Hancock’s Oceans of Wine: Madeira and the Emergence of American Trade and Taste (New Haven, 2009) and as a social marker in Charles Luddington’s The Politics of Wine in Britain: A New Cultural History (New York, 2013), which is mainly about fortified wines. In her study of British involvement in the production and sale of wine in its settler colonies, Regan-Lefebvre looks at unfortified wine...