Using Food History Texts in the World History

Classroom: A Review Essay

Michael McInneshin
After being trained to study a rather narrow slice of the earth, the challenges of
setting up a world history class are daunting. Typically, the organizational model
provided by the textbook chosen shapes a world history teacher's approach.
Textbooks alone, however, have drawbacks (and few students notice their virtues),
and many teachers prefer a different genre of scholarly writing to provide the
structure for the global past. Grand thematic histories have served as useful,
coherent global frameworks, including motifs such as cross-cultural interactions,
ecologies and environments, social histories, and the history of food. My own
dissatisfaction with my first year of teaching world history independently led me to
reconfigure the course to focus on the theme of food. Like any other thematic
approach, this process required the selection of relevant, useful, and engaging texts.
In the essay below, I will catalog the utility of certain global food history books for
world history courses, and provide advice for integrating particular texts into
certain global history models, whether as center pieces or supplementary materials
for a course.
If the number of recent publications on the topic is any indication, perhaps no
defense of food history as world history is needed. Many writers, both scholarly
and popular, have apparently agreed with Felipe Fernndez-Armesto that "Food
ought to be historians' most important topic." 1 The growing scholarly apparatus
around the field can be seen in anthologies from the last few years: Kyri Claflin and
Peter Scholliers' Writing Food History: A Global Perspective (2011) compiles
regional and some trans-regional food historiographies and The Oxford Handbook

of Food History (2012) addresses research and teaching the subject. 2 Non-academic
food histories have become prevalent enough that "X: The Commodity that
Changed the World" has seemingly emerged as its own "biographical" sub-genre.
General scholarly works have addressed food history though a number of
approaches: materialist examinations of production and exchange; cultural and
social histories of cuisines and meals; and scientific inquiries of domestication and
nutrition. This proliferation means that instructors almost have too many choices,
and this article intends to function as a world history teacher's consumer guide to
some of those works.
I have chosen eight books to cover, all of which are short enough to be
completed by undergraduate readers in a semester or two, and which are
both world history and food history. Two of these are popular works, An Edible
History of Humanity and A History of the World in 6 Glasses, by Tom
Standage.3 Two of the volumes might be considered textbooks, Jeffrey
Pilcher's Food in World History and B.W. Higman's How Food Made History.4 The
remainder are scholarly texts with concessions to popular style: Reay
Tannahill's Food in History, Kenneth Kiple's A Moveable Feast, Martin
Jones' Feast, and Fernndez-Armesto's Near a Thousand Tables.5 Books such as
Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat's History of Food (1987), Harald Brssow's The
Quest for Food (2007), and Parasecoli and Scholliers' A Cultural History of
Food (2012), while being useful teaching references, are each too expansive and
too expensive for a college survey.
First, I will summarize the structure, general arguments, and coverage of the
eight books individually. Second, I will chart their general value in relation to the
typical formats of existing world history courses. Finally, I will critique each text as
a resource for world history teaching, delineating its deficiencies and advantages.
Tannahill's Food in History (1973) set the table for food history, with a template
of topics that resonates in all the histories that followed: foraging (hunting,
gathering, and fishing), cooking, domestication, farming and pastoralism, religious
ritual, urbanization and the state, food taboos and vegetarianism, exchange and
long-distance trade, famine, social status, cuisine, agronomy, preparation and
preservation, manners and meals, labor, the Columbian Exchange, alcohol and
stimulants, regionalism and ethnicity, industrialization, technological innovation,
cook books, restaurants, brand names, the Green Revolution, and global politics.
The text extends from the prehistoric period to the late twentieth century, and
addresses Eurasia and the Americas in some depth, with a small amount of attention
paid to Oceania (including Australia) and Sub-Saharan Africa. The chronology is

apportioned into six parts: prehistory; the foundations of Western Civilization (my
phrasing); the rest of Eurasia through the Middle Ages; "Europe, AD 10001492";
"The Expanding World" to 1780; and "The Modern World." The chapters'
approaches are various, covering particular regions, periods, and transformations,
and the subtopics are equally diverse, including processes, single domesticates, and
cuisines. With this sort of coverage, or perhaps sprawl, it is the longest text under
consideration, comprising 370 pages of material. Although Food in History has a
number of flaws, Fernndez-Armesto's argument that she was "not much concerned
with the relationship between food history and history in general" is entirely
unconvincing.6
Fernndez-Armesto's Near a Thousand Tables (2002) is well-named in that its
alimentary evidence seems drawn from countless times and places. His stated goal
is: "to take a genuinely global perspective; to treat food history as a theme
of world history, inseparable from all the other interactions of human beings to
treat evenhandedly the ecological, cultural and culinary concepts of the subject
to trace connections between the food of the past and the way we eat
today."7 Although the range of this book is nearly as broad as Tannahill's, the
organization of his arguments is more disciplined. Each of the eight chapters traces
the event of a "great" food revolution and the complementary transformation in
humanity: cooking, food as not-food (ritual), herding, plant domestication, social
differentiation, long-distance trade, ecological, industrial. The chapters usually
open with a dislocating discussion. For example, the cooking revolution begins
with a raw oyster meal, and the herding revolution commences with the subject of
snails. Although the chapters are approximately chronological with regards to the
specific revolution, the temporal coverage within often hurtles between the
prehistoric, the historical, and the present. He covers geography in an analogous
fashion, as if spinning an anthropological stew in a blender; for instance, during the
discussion of exchange and empire the text moves from the Topkapi palace, to TexMex cuisine, to Central Asian foods, to Filipino and Malay syncretism, to Cajun
meals, then among Cape Colony Muslims, and finally back across the Atlantic to
African influences on diet in the American South. There is no discernible locational
pattern to the analysis, other than being as broad as possible.
A History of the World in Six Glasses (2005) uses seven beverages to discuss a
fairly standard sequence of "Western Civ" turning points, along with a penumbra of
related events, every drink but the last described across two chapters. The book is
like a series of commodity "biographies" performed in miniature. Beer-drinking
illustrates the Neolithic revolution and the rise of urban societies. Wine introduces
axial-age ideological structures, long-distance trade, and the formation of empire.

"Spirits"encompassing aqua vitae, rum, and whiskeytell the story of middleages science and the development of the Atlantic world. The coffee chapter pivots
on the Enlightenment, and tea explains a global British Empire and the industrial
revolution. Coca-Cola informs the reader of the Cold War and globalization, while
the drink of future history is water. While generally chronological, a few times
events are revisited, as the American war for independence receives treatment in the
liquor and tea chapters. The geographical coverage is dominated by locations
considered part of the West, although the Islamic world and China receive
individual treatment.8 Other parts of the world are generally only regarded in terms
of their position in Western empires.
Standage's other work, An Edible History of Humanity (2009), asks "which
foods have done the most to shape the modern world, and how?" 9 The structure is
similar to Fernndez-Armesto's, but with only six transformations wrought by food,
by which he means agricultural foods. The transformations include the discovery
of agriculture, the elaboration of hierarchies in urban societies, the development of
long-distance trade, crops' contributions to industrialization, logistics in longnineteenth-century wars and the cold war, and agronomy's centrality to twentiethcentury population growth. Geographically and chronologically, Edible nearly
duplicates the range of Six Glasses. The book addresses a good portion of the food
history topics first laid out by Tannahill, but devotes far less space for the kitchen
and table, and allocates many pages to the subject of warfare, with treatments
unknown in Food in History. Tannahill's approach addresses the impact of warfare
on food production (and food security), typically, while for Standage the story of
technological improvements is how provisioning changed the nature of war in the
Modern period.
The Modern period is the focus of Pilcher's slender textbook120 pagesa
densely-packed discourse on Food in World History (2006). Most of its subject
matter was also treated in Tannahill, though the intervening decades of scholarship
can be seen in the way the topics are framed: food shortages and moral economies;
the international division of labor; the kitchen as "the site of colonial resistance as
well as collaboration."10 While Pilcher amply covers production, distribution, and
preparation, as can be seen above, the book leans toward analyses of eating. As the
title indicates, the text's intentions are global, and each chapter examines two to
four distant cases thematically, such as Qing China, the Ottoman Empire, and
Ireland in the chapter on hunger, markets, and governments; some regions are
addressed repeatedly and others only once. The book's chronology ranges from the
Neolithic Revolution to the present, but only one chapter accounts for the period
preceding 1500 ce, and the invention of agriculture is telescoped into one page.

This fits with the goal to chronicle "the global transition to modernity." 11 The rest of
the survey is divided into three parts, Early Modernity (15001800 ce), the
nineteenth, and the twentieth centuries.
Kiple's A Movable Feast (2007) is a largely successful attempt to render the
information in the Cambridge World History of Food (2000) as a narrative history,
and as such, its scope of topics is just as broad as Tannahill's. Like the other
candidates, the book is well named, as the recurring theme is the movement of
food, from cultigens (both ancient and Early Modern) to cuisine (recent
globalization). Plenty and scarcity recurs as a sub-theme. The chapterstwentyseven of themare too numerous to describe individually, but they tend to be
organized around a set of domesticates, particular eras, or a historical process.
Basically chronological in presentation, the book ranges from the Paleolithic to the
twenty-first century in just over 300 pages. The book's geography is the most
comprehensively global of all the texts here.
Conversely, Jones' Feast (2007) has the narrowest horizons, both spatially and in
its theme, which concentrates on the process of meals themselves. Feast is an
outlier, the work of an archaeologist that does not purport to be a world history.
With the exception of jaunts to Tanzania, the Levant, and Oregon, every site in the
book is European. It is strictly organized chronologically, with only three chapters'
starting points more recent than Jesus' lifetime (1372, 1954, and 1980 ce). Nearly
all the chapters begin with an imagined narrative of food production, preparation,
or consumptionin other words, the beginning, middle, or end of a feasta story
constructed from archaeological evidence. The author often then treats the reader to
a look at the evidence and methodology, then expounds on the diet-related natural
and social evolution of the human animal.
Higman's How Food Made History (2012) shares the thematic assortment of
Tannahill, Kiple, and Pilcher. Each of the ten chapters elucidates a small cluster of
topics, some of which seem only tangentially related to one another (genetic
modifications, taboos, and the global spread of domesticates comprise one chapter).
Nearly all the chapters range from very deep history into the recent past, operating
also with a geographic breadth. Chapter six covers the Han Dynasty, medieval
trans-Saharan trade, Early Modern Russian salt taxes, Indian Ocean pepper and
Mediterranean grain routes, the Swahili coast, tinned meat sales in neo-Europes, the
demographic explosion and structural adjustment programs in the Global South,
and the evolution of the American supermarket, trucking, and container ships in the
twentieth century. The central theme of Higman's text is the "choices people made
about what to eat and how to produce and consume it, [which] has been a

fundamental driver of world history in all its aspects." 12

The varying organization, themes, and chronological coverage of these texts
mean that the scope and configuration of world history courses is crucial to
determining how they might be incorporated. World history is taught in one, most
typically two, or three courses. To complicate the problem further, world histories
taught in two or three units also have been periodized differently. Below is a grid
(Figure 1) which indicates coverage among the texts. The periodization is adapted
from a combination of Peter Stearns' and Jerry Bentley's models; the periodization
is decidedly Eurasian-centric, and sometimes Eurocentric. 13 The darker shading
indicates substantial coverage by the text in question, light shading designates
cursory attention, and no shading none. The black line indicates the most common
division between two-part world history surveys.

Table 1: Chronological Coverage of the Texts.

The chart indicates that Jones in its entirety, and an easily-apportioned section of
Kiple or Tannahill generally would be the most suitable for the first semester of a
two-semester survey. Two-and-a-half drinks (five chapters) from Six Glasses would
also be appropriate. Due to its brevity and sharp focus, Pilcher is easily the
strongest candidate for the second semester of a two-part world history course, and
a portion Kiple, Tannahill, and both of Standage's books could work in those
circumstances. Because of the internal chronologies of Fernndez-Armesto and
Higman, they would be very difficult to use in either semester of a chronologicallyordered two-semester survey. They might serve a single-semester world history,
particularly one configured thematically.
The other complexity of incorporating one of these texts is whether it conforms
to the existing structure of information in the world history course. There are three
basic models of coverage, none of which is entirely pure, but which have strategies
that can generally be labeled as a) an emphasis on chronological analysis, as
discussed above, b) a predominantly sequential regional analysis, and c) a
principally thematic analysis. Judging from existing textbooks, the regional
approach is by far the most common structure for world history
courses.14 Unfortunately, only Tannahill, and maybewith a substantial effort of
chapter selectionKiple, mirror this model. A dominant thematic analysis is rare
among textbooks, but an instructor pursuing this approach, as suggested earlier,
could find Higman and Fernndez-Armesto useful. 15
Despite its status as the founder of the genre, I cannot as a whole (or even half)
recommend Tannahill's Food and History as the main text or chief supplement of a
world history course.16 Too much of its information has become outdated or
outmoded in the years since its publication, particularly with regard to primitive
and "primitive" peoples. The dating and descriptions of hominin evolution that
open the book are incorrect, and the portrayal of prehistoric foraging societies as
underfed and over-worked no longer has currency in anthropological
literature.17 Particularly galling are the depictions of Sub-Saharan Africa and
Africans. African food does not warrant its own chapter, just scattered references
throughout. The research (she uses) that suggested that Africans never invented
domestication has long been superseded. Tannahill's discussion of the Atlantic slave
complex rightly addresses sugar plantations, but neglects the cultigens (peanuts,
maize, manioc) of the Columbian exchange that altered African economies across

the continent. All of "The Dark Continent" is painted as a land of perpetual famine
for starving farmers, yet a picture caption claims that "much of Africa in the
eighteenth century was still the haunt of pre- or early Neolithic [i.e., stoneagehunters." In reality, iron had been in use across the continent more than a
thousand years earlier, and raw iron was a major import from the Atlantic since the
sixteenth century, for waiting African blacksmiths. Long-translated major source
materials are missing (The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea and Ibn
Battuta's Rihla describe agricultural production, trade, and meals in West and East
Africa), while European observers are cited uncritically. And the statement "Until
the very last years of the eighteenth century Europe knew almost nothing about
Africa beyond the coastal fringes, and Africa even less about Europe," is entirely
ignorant. Many Africans had set foot in Europe as diplomats, slaves, and
merchants, and had been doing so for centuries. 18 The structure of the book also
reveals a subtler Eurocentrism (or Orientalism), by having Europe's cuisine divided
into eras, and Asia's into static regions, suggesting that only Europeans changed,
were historical peoples. The best parts of Tannahill's book have been replicated in
newer volumes, and we would do better to employ them.
In an old-fashioned sense, Fernndez-Armesto's Near a Thousand Tables is the
most literary of the texts, given to flights of showy erudition and provocative
proclamations. (Pilcher's clean, dense prose reflects more recent literary
trends.) Tables might work in a thematic, one-semester world history course
certainly an uncommon combinationbut used unaccompanied would not serve to
establish a global chronological framework. Its strengths would play to a seminar
format with a philosophical approach to the historical meaning of food. For
example, in "The Edible Horizon: Food and the Long-Range Exchange of Culture,"
Fernndez-Armesto explores the paradox of the typical human resistance to
strangers' cuisines and the evidently historical encounters that created the deeply
syncretic foodways of the present.19 He challenges (at least American) received
wisdom about the past, "Although a popular, romantic and primitivist view of
hunting peoples credits them with ecological sensitivity and conservation strategies,
these are really rather unusual. In most hunting cultures, the habit of overkill
occurs."20 Among the most impressive passages in the book is a delineation of
precisely how the processes of preparation and consumption of meals established
high status for certain eaters, and how that changed over time. 21
While Tables' combative nature is one of the reasons that the book is
compelling, the bellicosity occasionally produces failures. The author ironically
devotes ample space to conversations or arguments with other food history
scholarship (sometimes composed of straw), but only cites the most rudimentary

endnotes possible as evidence. His allegiance to his own taste buds leads him to
make ahistorical moral judgments. During a disquisition mostly on the problem of
the microwave, which he admits is liberating in several senses, he claims "The
loneliness of the fast food eater is uncivilizing. Food is being desocialized. In the
microwave household, home cooking looks doomed. Family life must fragment if
people stop having shared meals." He laments the "growing market in the West
for boring, overprocessed pap."22 But what of the boring, under-processed pap that
constituted nearly everyone's pre-Modern meals? Finally, a few of his more strident
arguments fail to adduce convincing evidence. Regarding mollusk "herding,"
Fernndez-Armesto argues that "The increase in the rate of accumulation at many
of these sites, usually between about six and eight thousand years ago represents an
undetected revolution in the history of food." 23 While he appeals to logic as the
reason why this must have been so, the archaeological evidence comes from a
period when some of the purported Eurasian shellfish husbandmen already had
access to domesticated mammals. Still, in this way the book offers ready material
for a class investigating bias in secondary sources.
Standage's two books come the closest to familiar historical narratives, only
with beverages either causing or bearing witness to great social transformations.
My own students' essays show that the prose and subject matter is accessible and
his arguments are clearly laid out. I cannot, however, recommend the entire texts
for a world history class. Their "global" stories reflect the problematic "Western
Civ-Plus" model of early (and current) world histories. 24 Muslims shuffle onstage
briefly to provide a few contributions to Europe's ever-upward progress, and then
retire; Indians serve only to supply 'Arabic' numerals. 25 Although the brutality of
the Atlantic slave complex is acknowledged, in Standage's narrative capitalism is an
actor that heroically feeds populations, while other economic systems produce
starvation. This ignores the recurring historical role of commercialized agriculture
in the extraction of food from famine zones. (And Standage knows that massive
famines struck British colonial India, as they are referenced briefly in a citation
quoted from Amartya Sen.26) These problems notwithstanding, individually several
of Standage's chapters offer a welcome supplement to a world history course. He
does things like problematize the meaning of "natural" and calls domesticates
"technologies" (Edible, Part I), carefully covers the fitful diffusion of crops and
cuisines in various chapters, and centers military history on soldiers' stomachs
(Edible, Part V). Assigning one piece can show students how food culture, everyday consumption had substantial ramifications historically.
Pilcher's Food in World History is nearly perfect for a comparative
chronological world history set after 1500 ce, particularly a course centered on the

construction of Modernity, as Pilcher explicitly connects ideologies of the Modern

to recent foodways. The book's brevity means that the whole could even serve as a
supplementary reading, while the density of content means that coverage is more
than sufficient. The masterful chapter on classical Rome and China encourages
hopes that Pilcher composes a "prequel." His great contribution to the genre is
telling the stories of Modern proletarian migrations great and small as food history:
porters in Africa carrying "civilization" in the form of biscuits and wine; "coolie"
and other immigrants' invented diasporic cuisines; oscillating domestic workers and
nationalist breakfast soups (Chapters 8 and 9). The only weakness might be the
choices of the micro case studies, which have no definite spatial pattern, and might
not be easily adaptable to an instructor's needs. For example, McDonald's
globalization is pitted against Nando's, a Mozambican chicken fast food franchise. 27
Where Food in World History is precise, Kiple's Moveable Feast is rambling,
perhaps befitting its overarching theme. A number of oddities also mar its
presentation. The text uses the unusual combination of bce and ad to date events.
Specialist jargon, like the word "horticulture," appears without being defined. The
author occasionally uses ethnic terminology that would be unsurprising in
Tannahill, such as "Moors" and "Saracens," but are largely eschewed in present-day
scholarship. Chapter titles are sometimes strikingly inaccurate: "Empires in the
Rubble of Rome" largely recounts the story of Turkic nomads and conquerors after
1000 ce, the Mongol Empire, and Song Chinese Modernity.28 Most troublesome,
from the perspective of assigning Moveable Feast as reading, is that the chapters
(which accurately describe their contents) seem increasingly arbitrary (and
redundant) in their division. Although a vast topic, the Columbian Exchange's
diffusion over seven chapters is not usefully excessive. Modern "Plenty" earns a
place in five chapters. The master narrative is also centered on the Old World,
though this may be defensible. The ancient foodways of Americans, Polynesians,
and Australians are not described in parallel with contemporary domestications,
migrations, and diffusions, but rather in flashbacks when these New Worlds are
drawn into the orbit of Europeans. Despite these shortcomings, the unparalleled
coverage makes Moveable Feast an excellent sourcebook for an instructor material,
and almost any theme can be plucked in chapter form for a short reading, like
"Building the Barnyard" which describes the domestication of all the major
Eurasian animals, or "Faith and Foodstuffs," which offers a comparative account of
the spread of the universalist religions and their eating habits in the first millennium
ce.
Like Moveable Feast, Jones' Feast is probably not suited for reading in an
undergraduate course as a whole, but provides several useful chapters that might be

inserted in a pre-Modern history. The volume would dovetail best with a survey
taking the "Big History" approach, and covers early humanity with a depth that
none of the others come close to.29 Most of the chapters present a series of scientific
applications to food history. The fourth chapter, "Fire, cooking, and growing a
brain," discusses the work of archaeological excavations, ruminates on the
chemistry of cooking and the concomitant evolution of the human body, and
conducts Neanderthal anthropology. Other chapters explore DNA, extract "dietary
inputs" from coprolites, and extrapolate social class from potsherds. The recurring
theme of the historical fiction vignettes that open the chapters is the social history
of human meals. Although I have not used them for the purpose, they might be part
of a useful exercise for advanced classes on how historians construct narratives
from sparse evidence. One of the most rewarding components of Feast is its
inclusion of rural, non-elite history, treating even "cave men" as fully human. While
a Roman official's latrine is excavated in frontier Britannia in one chapter, a
contemporary "barbarian" farm girl's pickled corpse is dug from a bog in Germanic
Europe in the next, her circumstances deduced from the contents of her dissected
stomach. Feast's drawbacks are its Eurocentrism (if taken as a whole) and its
difficult arguments.
The downsides of How Food Made History are of a different nature entirely.
Higman's somewhat idiosyncratic groupings of topics to create themes, juxtaposed
with a tornadic temporal coverage, make the book's subsections very difficult to
incorporate in existing world history frameworks. Although it evaluates some
useful subjects with a depth that the other texts treat in a superficial or scattered
fashion, like food preservation and packaging, and covers other food realms
neglected elsewhere, including feeding in Modern institutions and forest farming, I
have not found it worthwhile to introduce in a world history class. It remains,
however, a useful sourcebook.
Nearly all of the books have some utility to a world history classroom, but most
of them require some sort of modification to fit them into existing pedagogical
frameworks. In upper-division classes not beholden to the strictures of world
history surveys, however, a number of the texts might serve students well, and I
hope the investigation here has revealed some possibilities in using the books for
this purpose. On the professor's shelf, all of these global food histories are useful as
sourcebooks, and their peculiarities are sometimes like the frontiers where
foodstuffs collide, where the juxtaposition of difference produces a tasty new dish.
Michael McInneshin is an assistant professor of African, Imperial, and Global
History at La Salle University who has enjoyed snacking on the streets of Seoul,

Dar es Salaam, Oxford, and Berlin. He recently published "Alexander's march,

Abu-Lughod's ovals, and other curiosities of world history cartography" in World
History Connected. He can be contacted at mcinneshin@lasalle.edu.

Notes
1

Felipe Fernndez-Armesto with Daniel Lord Smail, "Food," in Andrew Shryock

and Smail, eds., Deep History: The Architecture of the Past and Present (Berkeley,
University of California Press: 2011), 131. Jonathan Deutsch and Jeffrey Miller
"review some of the arguments for making food history a standard part of the
curriculum. First, the production of food constituted the livelihood of most people
in pre-industrial societies . [F]ood can thus help ground an inclusive history that
values their accomplishments. Second, the culture and symbolism provide rich
texture to our understanding of past societies . . . . Before the industrial era . . . the
intensely physical tasks of gathering, preparing, preserving, and sharing food were
very much the fabric of daily life." Deutsch and Miller, "Teaching with Food," in
Jeffrey Pilcher, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Food History (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2012), 197.
2

Peter Scholliers and Kyir Claflin, eds., Writing Food History: A Global
Perspective (London: Berg, 2012).
3

Tom Standage, An Edible History of Humanity (New York: Walker & Company,
2009), and A History of the World in 6 Glasses (New York: Walker & Company,
2005).
4

Jeffrey Pilcher, Food in World History (New York: Routledge, 2006). B. W.

Higman, How Food Made History (Singapore: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012).
5

Reay Tannahill, Food in History, 2nd ed. (New York: Crown, 1988 (1973)).
Kenneth Kiple, A Movable Feast: Ten Millennia of Food
Globalization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Martin
Jones, Feast: Why Humans Share Food (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
Felipe Fernndez-Armesto, Near a Thousand Tables: A History of Food (New
York: The Free Press, 2002).
6

Fernndez-Armesto, Tables, xii.

Fernndez-Armesto, Tables, xii.

Mesopotamia and Egypt appear at the beginning, but they are situated as a
foundation of the West. See J. M. Blaut, The Colonizer's Model of the World (New
York: Guilford Press, 1993).
9

Standage, Edible, xii.

10

Pilcher, World, 74. Although E. P. Thompson's work pre-dates Tannahill's, she

does not cite him.
11

Pilcher, World, 5.

12

Higman, Made, x.

13

Ross Dunn, "Periodizing World History," in Dunn, ed., The New World History:
A Teacher's Companion (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2000), 3612.
14

Textbooks using this model: Peter von Sivers, Charles Desnoyers, and George
Stow, Patterns in World History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Richard
Bulliet, Pamela Crossley, Daniel Headrick, Steven Hirsch, Lyman Johnson, and
David Northrup, The Earth and Its Peoples: A Global History, vol. I, 5th ed.
(Boston: Wadsworth, 2011); John McKay, Bennett Hill, John Buckler, Patricia
Ebrey, Roger Beck, Clare Crowston, and Merry Wiesner-Hanks, A History of World
Societies, 8th ed. (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2009); Jerry Bentley and Herbert
Ziegler, Traditions and Encounters, 4th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2008); and
Peter Stearns, Michael Adas, Stuart Schwartz, and Marc Gilbert, World
Civilizations: The Global Experience, 3rd ed. (New York: Longman, 2001). This
model typically becomes less behold to regional organization as it approaches the
present.
15

Robert Strayer, Ways of the World: A Brief Global History with Sources, vol. 1
(Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2011 (2008)).
16

Food in History might be useful for a historiographic exercise, or a study in

secondary source bias.
17

Tannahill, Food, 35 and 3233. See Steven Mithen, After the Ice: A Global
Human History 20,0005,000 BCE (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006).
Although Food in History has reached its fourth edition, only superficial changes

have been made since the second edition.

18

Tannahill, Food, 36 and 2769.

19

Fernndez-Armesto, Tables, 1327.

20

Fernndez-Armesto, Tables, 63.

21

Fernndez-Armesto, Tables, 1135.

22

Fernndez-Armesto, Tables, 1920.

23

Fernndez-Armesto, Tables, 57. The subject is not un-broached, see Martin

Hull, Farmers, Kings, and Traders: The people of Southern Africa 200
1860 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1990).
24

See Robert Bain and Tamara Shreiner, "The Dilemmas of a National Assessment
in World History: World Historians and the 12th Grade NAEP," World History
Connected 3, no. 3 (July
2006),http://worldhistoryconnected.press.illinois.edu/3.3/bain.html. Standage, of
course, is not a world historian even though he has written a history of the world.
25

Standage, Glasses, 937 and 13641. Edible, 75.

26

Standage, Edible,17192 and 1378.

27

Pilcher, World, 1101.

28

Roman "rubble" could conceivably, and more accurately, refer to the fall of the
Byzantine Empire, but that would only account for the Ottomans' inclusion.
29

David Christian, Maps of Time: an Introduction to Big History (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 2003).