Empire’s Fruit: Colonial Ecologies, Food Systems, and Imperial Power

Empire’s Fruit: Colonial Ecologies, Food Systems, and Imperial Power is a one-day interdisciplinary conference that will critically examine the central role of food, plants, and agricultural knowledge in the formation and maintenance of colonial and imperial systems from the early modern period to the present. By positioning food as both a material infrastructure and a cultural instrument of empire, the conference will bring together scholars from history, environmental humanities, food studies, anthropology, geography, postcolonial studies, and material culture to generate new interdisciplinary approaches to colonial power, ecological transformation, and global inequality.