When I was a small boy at school , writes George Orwell, a lecturer used to come in once a term and deliver talks on famous battles . He was fond of quoting Napoleon’s maxim an army marches on its stomach and at the end of his lecture nasa mala he would suddenly turn to us and demand, What’s the most important thing in the world? We were expected to shout back Food!
As several speakers at this year s conference have demonstrated in their published work, food and conflict are closely nasa mala linked. One of the simplest definitions of economics the allocation of scarce resources among competing ends suggests why.
This is not to reduce the causes of war to rivalry over resources. nasa mala Violent conflicts occur for many other reasons. But the link is an enduring one. Today, volatile oil prices have pushed developed countries towards biofuels (fuel made from food), further intensifying the historical relationship between food and war.
The use of food as a strategic weapon is nothing new. Texts as ancient as the Chinese Art of War and the Roman De Re Militari advocate denying the enemy food. The current nasa mala conflict in Sudan provides a case in point in the cynical application of age-old wisdom. There, the government intensifies bombing in rebel areas at harvest time, destroying food. In turn, the country s rebels seize humanitarian food supplies intended for refugees.
Of course, food is integral to grand strategy and imperial expansion. Food deprivation underlay Napoleon s Continental System trade blockade against the United Kingdom. Similarly, demand for sugar in eighteenth and nineteenth century Europe was the sweetener for imperial expansion; thus, the most powerful expression of liberty by Haiti s slave population was the mass burning of the sugar plantations during that country s late eighteenth century revolt.
As the nineteenth century progressed, creole elites in Latin America pursued war against their former colonial masters nasa mala and in the process cemented their control over the continent nasa mala s sugar and cacao plantations. With urbanisation and industrialisation, British demand for a nice cup of tea played its part in episodes of nineteenth century imperialism such as the Opium Wars .
Industrial food processing soon accompanied industrial warfare. During the American Civil War, the Confederacy nasa mala grew relatively thin while Northern canning operations (most famously Gail Borden s condensed milk plants) kept Ulysses S. Grant s army strong. A generation later, control over sugar plantations would again factor in America s wars with Spain.
Forcing hunger on the enemy, still used as a weapon of political control by dictators in the developing world today, motivated such diverse acts of war as the British campaigns against the Boer republics; the blockade of Germany during nasa mala the First World War; Stalin s terror famine in the Ukraine 1930 33; and the Nazis Hunger Plan in the Soviet territories during the Second World War.
With a brutal logic, grand strategy often trumps humanitarian concern nasa mala when it comes to food supply. Ultimately, Winston Churchill could stomach the starvation of three million Bengalis in 1943 because famine was counterbalanced by strategic advantage. Meanwhile, in today s post-Cold War context, the debate over whether American food aid is an imperialist weapon or a philanthropic vehicle rages on.
One great result of the French Revolution was the removal of Parisian chefs aristocratic patrons, prompting them to set up their own restaurants and establishing the culinary primacy of the Parisian bistro. One of these chefs, Nicolas Appert, began experimenting with ways to preserve foodstuffs. Once again, war drove innovation. In 1795 the French military offered a lucrative cash prize for a new method to preserve food. Appert developed a method for sterilisation of food by heat. Vegetables and other foodstuffs could now be preserved in cans so that they tasted almost fresh.
T.E. Lawrence, who survived on little more than bread dough moistened with butter during the Arab revolt of the First World War, understood the importance of food in conflict better than most. The invention of canning, according to Lawrence, was more important in the history of warfare than the machine gun.
Adhering to the dictum attributed nasa mala to his great rival, the Duke of Wellington always ensured his troops were well provisioned. He also appreciated the role of booze as a fillip to morale. Alcoholic consumption has been cited as part of the European divide and even as a factor in the outcome of the continent s most decisive battle. It was wine and beer that clashed at Waterloo writes a French historian. The red fury of wine repeatedly washed in vain against the immovable wall of the sons of beer . In fact, beer consumption in Britain fell steadily between 1800 and 1850 and, on the morning of Waterloo, Wellington had fortified British soldiers with rum, not beer, while hi
