Empire and the Reordering of Edibility: Deconstructing Betel Quid Through Metropolitan Discourses of Intoxication

摘要

Exotic, plant-based stimulants such as sugar, tea, and coffee linked metropolitan bodies with colonial expansion in support of the formation of modern Europe. But, not all tropical commodities easily flowed along these metropolitan routes. Betel quid,a prepared comestible, was among the most widely consumed stimulants in the world, but it was not popularized as a masticatory in modern Europe. This article traces the reconfiguration of betel quid in the British metropole in the early modern and modern periods. Through discursive analysis of medical and herbal texts, advertisements, British guides, and parliamentary papers, it shows how evolving discourses of intoxication motivated the betel quid's transition from stimulating fruit into a largely inedible substance. Shifting notions of intoxication - first as a form of dissolute inebriation, and later as a state of measurable toxicity - provided the tools, language and social context to dissolve the betel quid's edibility in conjunction with a broader civilizing process in imperial Britain. These metropolitan discourses reconfigured betel quid and in the process mobilized it as a new site of colonial differentiation.