Available From UC Press

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 what they pejoratively called "colonial wine." The tables only began to turn after the First World War, when colonial wines were marketed as cheap and patriotic and started to find their niche among middle- and working-class British drinkers. This trend, combined with social and cultural shifts after the Second World War, laid the foundation for the New World revolution in the 1980s, making Britain into a confirmed country of wine-drinkers and a massive market for New World wines. These New World producers may have only received critical acclaim in the late twentieth century, but Imperial Wine shows that they had spent centuries wooing, and indeed manufacturing, a British market for inexpensive colonial wines. This book is sure to satisfy any curious reader who savors the complex stories behind this commodity chain.

Jennifer Regan-Lefebvre is Professor of History at Trinity College, Connecticut, and author of Cosmopolitan Nationalism in the Victorian Empire.  In 2019 she was named one of the “Future 50” of wine by the Wine & Spirit Education Trust and the International Wine and Spirit Competition. 
 

"Fascinating and surprising. Imperial Wine traces in meticulous detail how the apparently modern fashion for New World wines is in fact the legacy of Empire."––Lizzie Collingham, author of The Hungry Empire: How Britain's Quest for Food Shaped the Modern World

"Elegantly written and with impressive far-ranging research, which quite literally spans the globe, Imperial Wine will contribute to debates about the nature of British imperialism. Jennifer Regan-Lefebvre's principal strength is how she uses the story of wine and winemaking as a window into the nature of 'settler colonialism' and the integrative forces of the British imperialism. In doing so, she shows how imperialism turned Great Britain from a country of beer drinkers into a country of beer and wine drinkers."––Stephen V. Bittner, author of Whites and Reds: A History of Wine in the Lands of Tsar and Commissar

"Like a good wine, Imperial Wine hits many notes. The narrative is brisk and lively, but it also has nuance and depth due to the attention Regan-Lefebvre gives to the roles of British imperialism and settler colonialism in the rise of the 'new world' wines of Australia and South Africa."––Dane Kennedy, author of The Imperial History Wars: Debating the British Empire

"This wide-ranging transnational history gives fascinating and often surprising insights into the connections between viticulture and Empire. It is a thought-provoking and learned page-turner."––Richard Toye, author of Churchill's Empire: The World That Made Him and the World he Made