No Useless Mouth: Waging War and Fighting Hunger in the American Revolution by Rachel B. Herrmann (review)

Food is power. This was the essential truth grasped by both the planters who forced enslaved peoples to make sugar in the Americas—turning sweetness into power, as Sidney Mintz has put it—and by those merchants of corn and fish who grew rich by provisioning military forces and Caribbean slave plantations.¹ Rachel B. Herrmann's No Useless Mouth: Waging War and Fighting Hunger in the American Revolution shows us that controlling the absence of food could also be an instrument of power in the eighteenth century, a tool used to seize agency or destroy a political threat in a turbulent age. Food was power to Cornplanter, the Seneca representative who used provisions as leverage against first British and then American diplomats. Food was power for Timothy Pickering, the U.S. agent and future secretary of state, who promulgated an alternative vision of agriculture and civilization to deny these same Seneca the right both to manage their own food security and to control their own land. Food was power to the enslaved peoples of Virginia who used their knowledge of farms and foodways to raid plantations on behalf of the British army in the 1770s. Food was power to officials in the Sierra Leone Company at Freetown, who used the law to control access to provisions for some of those same Black Loyalists decades later. These are the stories and people Herrmann wants us to hear and see.

No Useless Mouth is an ambitious book about hunger, war, power, and conflict in the British colonial world. In particular, Herrmann argues that "from the 1770s to the 1810s, food diplomacy and victual warfare respectively granted Native and black revolutionaries the most leverage, but both groups suffered when white officials introduced victual imperialism" (15). Though Herrmann frames her work as focusing on a longer narrative of the American Revolution, in practice the revolution is only a small part of the book. That desire both to recast the American Revolution and to examine the history of food in the British Atlantic, however, gestures at the scope and depth of the problems with which Herrmann grapples. She has chosen not to focus exclusively on Indigenous American hunger or the experience of enslaved and freed Africans in the British Empire but to put the two together in a single narrative framework. Fully realizing the ambitions of this interwoven approach is at times hampered by the work's structure and scope, but her choice to write about hunger, food, and empire through the lived experiences of both communities has produced a book that is enriching and thoughtful and makes several important interventions that should shape future study.

The beauty of No Useless Mouth is its capacity to take overlooked, mundane, and hidden dimensions of the past and show how they fit into a long story about food, hunger, and empire. An Iroquois rejection of provisions for not conforming to their dietary preferences, a planter's proclamation promising food to any slave who did not run away during wartime, the laws of food distribution in Freetown—these moments come alive through the research and attention to detail that shine throughout the book, which is suitably dedicated to "archive rats and primary source enthusiasts" (v).

No Useless Mouth sets an important model by studying hunger not principally as a social and economic phenomenon but as a political one. Only recently, with the translation of Louise Dechêne's work on grain and scarcity in New France, have historians of the British colonial era been giving more attention to the limits of food in the American colonies, and then principally as a question of political economy.² Herrmann goes further and shows how important access to food was for diplomacy, warfare, and imperial expansion in the late eighteenth century. In chapter 4, for instance, she offers a brief but arresting study typical of the book. Here...