Spacing the Can: Empire, Modernity, and the Globalisation of Food

The author outlines the multivalent geographies of a particular food-preservation technology: the tin can. As well as detailing the technological evolution of the can, he pays particular attention to the integral role that it played in the expansion and maintenance of Europe's empires in the Victorian era. Beginning with the demonstration of the can as part of the United Kingdom, Colonies, and Dominions exhibition at the Great Exhibition of 1851, the author examines its significance in several key events in the British imperial endeavour, including the Boer War and the marketing of the British Empire in the 1920s. The author also demonstrates the involvement of the can in the construction of new experiences of global space, as it both reduced the distance between sites of food production and consumption and perpetuated those distances by fetishising the geographies of the origins of foodstuffs. Although it is now one of the most mundane of artifacts in the burgeoning world of material culture, the author argues that the can was responsible for lengthening the networks of imperialism and globalisation, and that a retelling of its story can help us reconceptualise the ways in which such networks were built and do work.