02/10/2026
Food can give us a glimpse into global history: trade, migration, empire, slavery, industry, and all sorts of unexpected connections.
Take pav bhaji.
Long before Manchester became Cottonopolis, India was one of the great centres of the global cotton trade, producing textiles that were exported around the world.
Britain imported huge quantities of finished Indian cottons — calicoes, chintzes and muslins — before the Industrial Revolution shifted the balance.
Lancashire mills increasingly imported raw cotton and turned it into cloth themselves. By the nineteenth century, much of that cotton was coming from the American South, where it was grown by enslaved people.
Then the American Civil War disrupted those supplies. Britain turned increasingly to Indian cotton, and Bombay experienced a huge cotton boom.
Pav bhaji is often said to have begun as a quick meal for Bombay’s textile workers during that period. The cotton boom is well documented; whether the dish itself was actually invented because of it is much harder to prove.
The plate tells other histories too. Potatoes, tomatoes and chillies came originally from the Americas. And pav comes from Portuguese pão, meaning bread.
I love the coincidence of eating pav bhaji at Bundobust in the basement of Clayton House — a building with its own textile and warehousing history — in a city tied to the other end of that cotton trade.
And if you’ve ever wondered why there’s a statue of Abraham Lincoln in Manchester, that takes us back to the American Civil War and the Lancashire Cotton Famine.
But that’s a story for another day.
Best food & drink Tours in Manchester. Scran: A term used for food generally in the North of England, originally used by the British Navy.
