Consuming Empire: Tea, Spice, and Colonial Commodities in Victorian Short Fiction

Abstract

This article examines how colonial commodities and imported organic threats function as agents of imperial anxiety in the short fiction of Rudyard Kipling and Arthur Conan Doyle. Drawing on Sidney Mintz's theories of commodity capitalism and Patrick Brantlinger's concept of the "Imperial Gothic," it argues that Victorian consumption
transformed the domestic sphere into a site of racial and psychological instability. In stories like Kipling's "The Mark of the Beast" and "Without Benefit of Clergy," and Doyle's "The Adventure of the Speckled Band" and "The Adventure of the Crooked Man," objects and figures associated with the colonial East—ranging from cigars and Indian rupees to lepers and swamp adders—contaminate the metropolitan home. These narratives suggest that the British drive to consume the empire exposed the imperial self to "atavism" and "reverse colonization." By focusing on the condensed form of short fiction, this study demonstrates how material traces of empire, such as the "pillage and plunder" of India, generated a persistent Gothic anxiety within everyday domestic life. These commodities do not remain external possessions; they reorganize the spatial and emotional logic of the home, revealing that imperial comforts were never ideologically secure.

Keywords