Clothing and food

As Bernard Cohn has stressed, the distancing of indigenous people that was undertaken socially, culturally and physically lay at the heart of modern colonialism. Sartorial distan­cing constituted a particularly visible and effective form of differentiation, and was itself part and parcel of an effort to ‘maintain Englishness’ or Germanness, Dutchness, French­ness, etc.

Prescriptive colonial texts dwelled at some length on questions of clothing. To give one example, a 1931 French colonial guide to Madagascar stressed the need for travellers to plan for two climates, the highlands and the lowlands. Furthermore, the nineteenth­century accoutrements of colonial rule were still very much de rigueur in 1931: a white pith helmet, a flannel belt and tinted glasses were all considered essential.⁴⁹

Sartorial divisions did not stop at the colonial—colonised divide. In 1896, C. Vray could not help but observe that the mores, nomenclatures and dress codes she witnessed on Reunion Island seemed hopelessly dated by metropolitan standards. She wrote:

This land is a bit like a preserved vision of 1830, as is evidenced by the carriages known as ‘my-lord’, and the pretentious names people bear, that are straight out of Madame de Stael’s time; people are just one step short of wearing leg-of- mutton sleeves.⁵⁰

Here, distance between motherland and colony was measured in time, the colonies constituting a space of unwitting nostalgia.

How did the colonised view and mediate such practices? Obviously, the answer varies. In the late 1930s, Vietnamese novelist Vu Trong Phung offered an interesting rejection of the practices of Westernisation among his compatriots.

In the realm of food, as well, colonial differentiation often triggered unintended con­sequences. Long after having understood the link between fresh fruit deficiency and scurvy (a lime-based remedy can be traced at least to the eighteenth century), many colonials adopted a diet based on canned goods that was intended to maintain their Europeanness. Erica Peters provides the example of Belgians in the Congo relying almost entirely on tinned foodstuffs c. 1900, to the point where visitors chided them for this diet.⁵³ This was not an inexpensive option, and it flew in the face of the logic of freshness, but it was frequently deemed essential in maintaining colonial hierarchies. Yet at least one French doctor noted in 1945 that colonials returning home to take the waters at Vichy presented not only signs of tropical ills like amoebic dysentery, yellow fever and malaria, but also symptoms of vitamin deficiency.⁵⁴ The latter, he attributed to a diet centred too squarely on canned goods.

The answer to the dilemma of maintaining Europeanness while living in the tropics lay in technological advances. In the 1880s, refrigeration had started to transform the colonial commodity sector, with Australia and New Zealand beginning to make use of the technology to export lamb and other perishables to Britain and beyond. By the turn of the century, the technology was being widely utilised by such enterprises as the Australian Shipping and Freezing Company, the New Zealand Shipping Company, the Christchurch Meat Company, and the Wellington Meat Company.⁵⁵ However, this revolution initially served mostly to satisfy metropolitan markets, rather than assist colonials with their culin­ary predicaments, and individual refrigerators, as opposed to industrial ones, would take considerably longer to make their appearance in the colonies. In 1934 Indochina, an advertisement featuring an Indochinese servant pulling ingredients from a refrigerator made the case that ‘in Indochina more than elsewhere, a refrigerator is necessary!’.⁵⁶ Such pitches were not always heard, nor could the expensive devices always be readily purchased.