It’s that time of the year when Terry’s Chocolate Oranges and tins of Quality Streets are lining the shelves – but how much do you really know about the history behind chocolate?
In the first of a three-part series, join Dr Gabrielle Story and Johanna Strong as they explore the historical production process and chocolate’s journey to Europe. This episode sets the scene ahead of two subsequent episodes which will expand upon this topic to consider the history of chocolate in Hampshire, the use of chocolate in early modern court life, and different historical recipes and uses of chocolate.
CONTENT WARNING:
Please note that this episode will contain discussions of sensitive topics including enslavement and acts of violence. Any history of the development and production of chocolate must consider the impact it had on indigenous populations and how enslaved labour was exploited. This material may be distressing to some listeners, there is a transcript available if you would like to read this episode instead
Johanna Strong is a PhD student at the University of Winchester under the supervision of Dr Ellie Woodacre and Dr Simon Sandall. Her thesis examines the way in which Mary I’s legacy was posthumously created and how this legacy was perpetuated into the Hanoverian period. She’s a contributor to the Team Queens website, a digital global queenship project, and her research has been featured on a variety of platforms, including guest blog posts, podcasts (including Hampshire HistBites’ previous seasons!), and talks with History Indoors, an online history collective. Johanna is also looking forward to the publishing of her chapter in Valerie Schutte and Jessica S. Hower’s Writing Mary I: History, Historiography, and Fiction, expected for late 2021.
Dr Gabrielle 'Gabby' Storey is a historian of medieval queenship, gender, and sexuality, specialising in the Angevin royal women of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. She is the founder of Team Queens, a digital global queenship project, and has taken part in several podcasts including the BBC's 'You're Dead To Me'. She is currently working on a biography of Berengaria of Navarre, queen of England, and a monograph based on her PhD research which was a comparative study of Angevin royal women and co-rulership.
Further Resources and Links
When Europeans discovered chocolate in 16th century Mesoamerica, desire for this delicacy exploded back home. In the podcast Johanna Strong and Dr Gabrielle Story explore the cruelty of the methods used by Europeans to meet these demands. If you want to learn more about chocolate, why not check out these articles: History of Chocolate, Chocolate's Sweet History, How Europe went cuckoo for cocoa and Smithsonian’s A Brief History of Chocolate.
Jo and Gabby also recommend these two books if you want to delve further into the world of chocolate:
Louis E. Grivetti, Howard-Yana Shapiro, eds., Chocolate: History, Culture, and Heritage (2009)
Mara P. Squicciarini and Johan Swinnen, The Economics of Chocolate (2016)
If you’re curious about their work as part of #TeamQueens, why not check out their website and read about their research on all things queens.
You can find previous HistBites episodes with Gabby and Jo in our episode library.