The Politics of Wine in Britain

A unique look at the meaning of the taste for wine in Britain, from the establishment of a Commonwealth in 1649 to the Commercial Treaty between Britain and France in 1860 - this book provides an extraordinary window into the politics and culture of England and Scotland just as they were becoming the powerful British state.

Charles Ludington is Teaching Associate Professor of History at North Carolina State University, USA. He has published widely on the history and political meanings of wine, and has won numerous teaching awards. He recently received a Marie Curie-Sklodowska Fellowship from the European Commission and will be researching the role of Irish merchants in the invention of luxury Bordeaux wines in the long-eighteenth century.

Introduction Part I: The Politicization of Wine Chapter 1: 'A health to our distressed king!' The Politics of Wine and Drinking in England, 1649-1681 Chapter 2: 'What's Become of Rich Burdeaux Claret, Who Knows?' Fraud and Popular Taste in Revolutionary England, 1678-1702 Chapter 3: 'The Cross Ran with Claret for the General Benefit' The Politics of Wine in Scotland, 1680s-1707 Part II: Claret Chapter 4: 'The Interest of the Nation lay against it so visibly' Claret and English National Interest, 1702-1714 Chapter 5: 'A good and most particular taste': Luxury Claret, Politeness, and Political Power England, c. 1700-1740 Chapter 6: 'Firm and Erect the Caledonian Stood': Scotland and Claret, 1707-c. 1770 Part III: Port Chapter 7: 'Port is all I pretend to': Port and the English Middle Ranks, 1714-1760s Chapter 8: 'Claret is the Liquor for Boys; Port for Men': How Port Became the 'Englishman's Wine', 1750s-c.1790s Chapter 9: 'That other liquor called port': Port and the Creation of BritishIdentity in Scotland, 1770s-1815 Part IV: Drunkenness, Sobriety, and Civilization? Chapter 10: 'By G-d, he drinks like a man!': Manliness, Britishness and the Politics of Inebriety, c. 1780-c.1820 Chapter 11: 'Happily, inebriety is not the vice of the age': Sobriety, Respectability and Sherry, 1820s-1850s Chapter 12: 'Taste is not a mutable, but an immutable thing': British Civilization and the Great Nineteenth-Century Wine Debate