Suitable for both the academician as well as the layman, this book draws from sources as varied as fiction, essays, reviews, and more.

This book utilizes cuisine to understand the construction of the colonial middle class in Bengal who indigenized new culinary experiences as a result of colonial modernity. This process of indigenization developed certain social practices, including imagination of the act of cooking as a classic feminine act and the domestic kitchen as a sacred space. The process of indigenization was an aesthetic choice that was imbricated in the upper caste and patriarchal agenda of the middle-class social reform. However, in these acts of imagination, there were important elements of continuity from the pre-colonial times. The book establishes the fact that Bengali cuisine cannot be labeled as indigenist although it never became widely commercialized. The point was to cosmopolitanize the domestic and yet keep its tag of 'Bengaliness'. The resultant cuisine was hybrid, in many senses like its makers.

Tea-ology- A Guide To All Things Tea! by Maya-Rose Nash From its early beginnings, to how Tea found its way into our cups and hearts, Tea-Ology is filled with historic and interesting facts about Tea. The author has blended her love of the Victorian Era and family traditions, with all things tea, for the reader to not only learn about the world's second most popular beverage, but to discover some useful and practical infomation. Recipes, hosting a tea party and a section devoted to the art of tea leaf reading, including a tutorial on becoming an expert in the age old form of divination. So brew a pot of tea and pick up a copy and get ready to discover Tea-Ology!

This book outlines both the overlapping stories of the international birth control movement in south India, one of the strong-holds of Indian birth control advocacy, as well as the south Indian indigenization of international birth control. More than simply a supplementary narrative or case study, it argues that India's engagement with birth control remade the international scene just as India was refashioned by its engagement with international birth control.

How the global tea industry influenced the international economy and the rise of mass consumerism Tea has been one of the most popular commodities in the world. Over centuries, profits from its growth and sales funded wars and fueled colonization, and its cultivation brought about massive changes—in land use, labor systems, market practices, and social hierarchies—the effects of which are with us even today. A Thirst for Empire takes a vast and in depth historical look at how men and women—through the tea industry in Europe, Asia, North America, and Africa—transformed global tastes and habits and in the process created our modern consumer society. As Erika Rappaport shows, between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries the boundaries of the tea industry and the British Empire overlapped but were never identical, and she highlights the economic, political, and cultural forces that enabled the British Empire to dominate—but never entirely control—the worldwide production, trade, and consumption of tea. Rappaport delves into how Europeans adopted, appropriated, and altered Chinese tea culture to build a widespread demand for tea in Britain and other global markets and a plantation-based economy in South Asia and Africa. Tea was among the earliest colonial industries in which merchants, planters, promoters, and retailers used imperial resources to pay for global advertising and political lobbying. The commercial model that tea inspired still exists and is vital for understanding how politics and publicity influence the international economy. An expansive and original global history of imperial tea, A Thirst for Empire demonstrates the ways that this fluid and powerful enterprise helped shape the contemporary world.