This research examines the cultural and environmental history of wheat, flour, and bread in Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century. As a result of liberal, Free Trade policies implemented in 1846, Britain effectively outsourced its food supply, coming to rely on distant fields for more than four-fifths of its daily bread by the outbreak of the First World War. This globalization of the wheat ecology that fed Britain required the proliferation of new forms of biopolitical expertise, state intervention, and cultural meaning, visible in the histories of millers, bakers, physicians, and consumers. Their combined expertise served to connect British bodies to global environments, and to produce bread that was significantly whiter than before. At the same time, the cultural distance between the production and consumption of food grew to lengths never before seen: the specific origins of Britons’ chief article of diet became impossible for consumers to discern.

Situating Antarctica within the greater context of the global history of science is at the core of my dissertation. Drawing from archives in New Zealand (Christchurch and Wellington) and the United Kingdom (London and Cambridge), my dissertation examines the history of modern Antarctic science in the late 1950s-early 1960s. Comprised of six chapters, my dissertation begins by contextualizing Antarctic science within both the historic British interest in the region and the organization of the International Geophysical Year (1957-58). The second chapter argues that the varying ways that Antarctic expeditions were funded in New Zealand and the United Kingdom reflect profoundly different visions for the future of Antarctica; one which sought to domesticate the continent and another imperial vision which viewed it as a site for practicing nationalistic, prestige granting science. Chapter Three shows that that the geographical sites of the British base at Halley Bay and New Zealand’s Scott Base, neither of which were ideal for proposed research at the respective sites, reveal clashes between the sometimes conflicting priorities of scientists and those making decisions for the bases. Chapter Four examines how science workers used behavioral and technological adaptations to do research for which their instruments had not been specifically designed. The fifth chapter studies a specific set of geological specimens gathered near the Weddell Sea, arguing that the gathering, study, and final resting place of these specimens reveal not only the roles of masculinity and British post-colonial insecurities within the scientific community, but also played an important role in the ongoing continental drift debate. The sixth chapter uses the IGY Expedition to South Georgia to explore the professionalization of glaciological science in the 1950s as well as the importance of social networks to the production of scientific knowledge.