Food Travels: Spaghetti and Potato; Food offers many examples of long-distance cultural exchange. New crops were introduced by traders and travelers. Ready foodstuff such as noodles travelled west from China to become spaghetti. Our ancestors were not familiar with common foods such as potatoes, soya, groundnuts, maize, tomatoes, chillies, sweet potatoes, and so on about five centuries ago. Many of our common foods came from America’s original inhabitants – the American Indians.


Conquest, Disease and Trade; The Indian Ocean, for centuries before, had known a bustling trade, with goods, people, knowledge, customs, etc.; crisscrossing its waters. The entry of Europeans helped in redirecting these flows towards Europe. America’s vast lands and abundant crops minerals began to transform trade and lives everywhere. The Portuguese and Spanish conquest and colonization of America was decisively underway by the mid-sixteenth century

Europeans’ most powerful weapon was not a conventional military weapon, but germs such as those of smallpox that they carried on their person. It proved to be a deadly killer. Until the nineteenth century, poverty and hunger were common in Europe. Until well into the eighteenth century, China and India were among the world’s richest countries. However, from the fifteenth century, China is said to have restricted overseas contacts and retreated into isolation. Europe now emerged as the center of world trade.

 In Britain, food prices fell and in the mid-nineteenth century, industrial growth led to higher incomes and more food imports. In order to fulfil British demand, in Eastern Europe, Russia, America and Australia, lands were cleared to expand food production. In order to manage linking of railways to agricultural fields and building homes for people required capital and labor. London helped in terms of finance and terms of labour people emigrated from Europe to America and Australia in the nineteenth century.

By 1890, a global agricultural economy had taken shape, adapting complex changes in labour movement patterns, capital flows, ecologies and technology. In West Punjab, the British Indian government built a network of irrigation canals to transform semi-desert wastes into fertile agricultural lands to grow wheat and cotton for export. Even the cultivation of cotton, expanded worldwide to feed British textile mills

Indian indentured migrants main destinations were the Caribbean islands (mainly Trinidad, Guyana and Surinam), Mauritius and Fiji. Indentured workers were also recruited for tea plantations in Assam. Nineteenth-century indenture has been described as a ‘new system of slavery’. In Trinidad the annual Muharram procession was transformed into a riotous carnival called ‘Hosay’ in which workers of all races and religions joined.

Similarly, the protest religion of Rastafarianism is also said to reflect social and cultural links with Indian migrants to the Caribbean. From the 1900s India’s nationalist leaders began opposing the system of indentured labour migration as abusive and cruel. It was abolished in 1921