This talk delivered by Dr Shantel George (University of Glasgow), will chart the complex history and wide-ranging influence of the African kola nut, focusing on Nigeria, Jamaica and Scotland from 1500 to 1900. It uses this investigation as a case study to emphasise and explain the long-neglected role of Africans as distributors and consumers of global commodities and to highlight the relationship between consumption cultures and imperialism in late-nineteenth-century Scotland.
