Book Extract | The Rise of Mass Meat Consumption in 18th-Century Britain

Power

Another dimension of slow nutritional violence is famine. Today, it has become commonplace to view famine as an “entitlement crisis”. Famine is not caused by an absolute lack of food, but by a lack of purchasing power, stemming from structural powerlessness and economic turmoil—the natural outcome of the slow evolution of food systems. Through the control of resource frontiers and agro-food systems, Britain began to command, allocate, and consume vast quantities of animal and plant-based foods. It could refuse food to those starving, or provide it based on stipulated conditions. The famines in Ireland (1845–1850) and India (1876–1878, 1896–1902, 1943–1945) were the results of this “slow violence”. While these crises were initially triggered by plant diseases or climatic disasters, they struck populations already in a state of extreme economic instability. The British utilised these crises as opportunities to further marketise and de-peasantise these fragmented regions, depopulate them, and absorb them into their agro-food system. Hobson noted that imported grain allowed some countries to “evade (their own) population problems” by “exacerbating population problems elsewhere”. In effect, famine was outsourced. Conservative estimates suggest that approximately 13 million people died from famine in 19th-century Ireland and India. Britain’s mastery of the global food system also created its own vulnerabilities. In 1898, Rear-Admiral Beresford argued that, due to heavy reliance on imports, Britain’s global commercial structure had developed a weakness “precisely where our system is most powerful”. Between the two World Wars, Britain abandoned economic liberalism and readjusted its control over global and domestic agro-food systems through various technical means, including the restoration of domestic agriculture, rationing, the use of convoy fleets, and the armed protection of merchant ships. From the British perspective, this effort was highly successful: Britain faced no threat of famine during either war. In the First World War, it mobilised its control over agro-food systems, intelligence networks, and logistical transport capabilities to implement blockades, resulting in the deaths of approximately 800,000 Germans and 400,000 Austro-Hungarians—clearly one of the reasons for the collapse of the Central Powers. Hitler’s vision of ruling Eastern Europe and Ukraine through genocide stemmed precisely from his psychological fear of facing a similar famine in the future.

The control of agro-food systems also involved the reconfiguration of power relations across “commodity frontiers“, typically achieved through purchase, occupation, conquest, or treaty. For example, land in Australia was seized by declaring or assuming a legal vacuum of power, or by designating it as *terra nullius* (nobody’s land). Europeans offered various, often contradictory, justifications for their claim to land, most notably the ideas of Locke: that those who improved “unassisted nature” fundamentally increased productivity and created value, and thereby acquired ownership of the land. In Australia, because British colonists found no farms, they claimed that the local hunter-gatherers were at the lowest level of socio-economic development—essentially no different from animals or plants. Ownership was inseparable from productive use; merely occupying land did not mean owning it. This view gradually consolidated during the 19th century, though it never entirely dominated. The imposition of private property rights was essential for land improvement and the accumulation of production surpluses. This was starkly reflected in the colonists’ forced killing and displacement of indigenous peoples; the Highland Clearances provided an early template. Indeed, many Highlanders emigrated to Australia, where they replaced the local indigenous people, who were deemed unproductive. The Tasmanian indigenous population was swiftly exterminated by colonists and replaced by sheep, with many perishing in camps on Flinders Island, which nominally provided sanctuary and missionary work. The establishment of Royal Tea Plantations in Assam was accompanied by violent military conquest. In 1885, Métis resistance in Canada was crushed by the North-West Rebellion; in the early 1870s, the gauchos of Argentina were conquered by the government in Buenos Aires. Indigenous Patagonians were driven into designated settlements and forbidden from following their traditional way of life. The gaucho way of life began to collapse in the 1870s, enclosed by fences and barbed wire. The gauchos were forced to submit to a form of capitalist agriculture that required little labour, eventually becoming mere hired hands.

However, human violence towards animals manifested in a faster, more mechanised form. Before 1800, slaughter was a small-scale, common, and even social activity, producing relatively small quantities of meat and other animal products. Yet, as the demand for meat grew, traditional slaughter systems reached a bottleneck. The eventual solution was industrialised slaughter, which isolated the process from human communities and reached an unprecedented, increasingly inconceivable scale. This system of slaughterhouses was pioneered in France, promoted in Germany, and reached its zenith in the massive abattoirs of the New World and Australia. These complex systems employed a triple process of separation and concealment: first, slaughter was completely isolated from society, albeit gradually; second, within the slaughterhouse, the act of killing was separated from non-slaughter activities; and finally, the animals themselves were penned in holding areas separate from the killing floor. The consumption of meat was completely divorced from its production in both space and perception, turning slaughter into a silent, invisible process. As Rebecca Woods put it: moving slaughter to the distant “commodity frontiers” was the most successful technique of obfuscation. “Slaughter… was moved to the edges of the empire, and indeed to the ends of the earth.” This deep-seated violence within the agro-food system became largely imperceptible, a fact equally evident in the growth of global chicken consumption during the 20th century.