A fascinating and approachable deep dive into the colonial roots of the global wine industry. Imperial Wine is a bold, rigorous history of Britain's surprising role in creating the wine industries of Australia, South Africa, and New Zealand. Here, historian Jennifer Regan-Lefebvre bridges the genres of global commodity history and imperial history, presenting provocative new research in an accessible narrative. This is the first book to argue that today's global wine industry exists as a result of settler colonialism and that imperialism was central, not incidental, to viticulture in the British colonies. Wineries were established almost immediately after the colonization of South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand as part of a civilizing mission: tidy vines, heavy with fruit, were symbolic of Britain's subordination of foreign lands. Economically and culturally, nineteenth-century settler winemakers saw the British market as paramount. However, British drinkers were apathetic towards what they pejoratively called "colonial wine." The tables only began to turn after the First World War, when colonial wines were marketed as cheap and patriotic and started to find their niche among middle- and working-class British drinkers. This trend, combined with social and cultural shifts after the Second World War, laid the foundation for the New World revolution in the 1980s, making Britain into a confirmed country of wine-drinkers and a massive market for New World wines. These New World producers may have only received critical acclaim in the late twentieth century, but Imperial Wine shows that they had spent centuries wooing, and indeed manufacturing, a British market for inexpensive colonial wines. This book is sure to satisfy any curious reader who savors the complex stories behind this commodity chain.

James Francis Xavier O'Brien is best known as a Fenian and member of the Irish Parliamentary Party, but his autobiography reveals an exciting life of bohemian travel before he entered nationalist politics. Born in Waterford, the young O'Brien studied in Paris, where he befriended artist James McNeill Whistler, left to join William Walker's military campaign in Nicaragua, then settled in the cosmopolitan city of New Orleans on the eve of the American Civil War. He describes in detail his return to Ireland, his leadership in the Fenian insurrection of 1867 and subsequent imprisonment, and his conversion to constitutional nationalism and election to Parliament. Written between 1895 and 1897, the autobiography offers a defence of O'Brien's political journey when competing factions were fighting for Irish nationalist hearts and minds. The autobiography is published here for the first time, edited and with a critical introduction by Jennifer Regan-Lefebvre.