Tea War: A History of Capitalism in China and India

by Andrew B. Liu

A history of capitalism in nineteenth‑ and twentieth‑century China and India that explores the competition between their tea industries
 
Tea remains the world’s most popular commercial drink today, and at the turn of the twentieth century, it represented the largest export industry of both China and colonial India. In analyzing the global competition between Chinese and Indian tea, Andrew B. Liu challenges past economic histories premised on the technical “divergence” between the West and the Rest, arguing instead that seemingly traditional technologies and practices were central to modern capital accumulation across Asia. He shows how competitive pressures compelled Chinese merchants to adopt abstract industrial conceptions of time, while colonial planters in India pushed for labor indenture laws to support factory-style tea plantations. Characterizations of China and India as premodern backwaters, he explains, were themselves the historical result of new notions of political economy adopted by Chinese and Indian nationalists, who discovered that these abstract ideas corresponded to concrete social changes in their local surroundings. Together, these stories point toward a more flexible and globally oriented conceptualization of the history of capitalism in China and India.

Genres: History, China, India, Nonfiction, Economics, Politics, Tea

360 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 2020

Reviews

[Eustacia Tan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am a simple person. I see a book about tea, I read the book about tea. Even if it’s so academic I feel like giving up.

When I started Tea War, I was quite happy to find mentions of Wu Juenong, whose book An Illustrated Modern Reader of The Classic of Tea I read recently, and Erika Rappaport’s book, A Thirst for Empire. I’ve found that Tea War works as a complement for A Thirst for Empire. A Thirst for Empire focuses on tea in the British empire, pulling in the colonies where appropriate, while Tea War looks at the tea other way round, focusing on the tea industry in Assam and China and talking about the colonial powers in terms of their involvement in the industry.

What I liked about Tea War was that it centered Asian countries. Unfortunately, it’s also very academic and frankly, was pretty hard to read. To be fair, I am very rusty on political economic theory (I think I may have taken a class in uni but my economics degree focused on the internet most of the time) so if I was more up to date on that, I think I would have had a better time.

Anyway, my focus for the book was to track the changes in the tea industry in China and India, and that worked out pretty well. In the 19th century, tea making in both countries was very manual, but as tea in India got cheaper (due to things like technology improvement but also penal contracts that created indentured labour), it started to overtake the Chinese supply of tea. This deterioration of tea trade was first noticed in 1870 (according to a commissioner reflecting in 1891) and prompted some soul searching on the Chinese side. First, they thought that taxes were the issue, and then they moved on to other issues. In January 1896, an official named Chen Chi submitted a memorial to the imperial court to address the matter of tea. The memorial consisted of two parts:

Part 1: three major problems – the rise of South Asian tea, scattered character of undercapitalised Chinese merchants, and the tug of war between tea peasants and inland factories

Part 2: four solutions – tea-rolling machinery, motorised boats for transport, a guild warehouse, and a reduction on transport taxes.

I ended up with 9 pages of notes, but one more thing I wanted to share were some traditions related to tea-picking in Wuyi. From my notes:

The first day of tea plucking is called Kaishan, where the pluckers climb the mountain to harvest the leaves, and on the opening day, they must climb in silence to avoid to god of illness and have a rich bountiful breakfast. In addition, breakfast is eaten standing up, the workers must walk straight to the garden, and stay silent and without turning their head (if they turn back, legend says they will have an eye disease. Also turning your head means you’re not fully committed and the mountain god will be angry). After an hour of work, the baotou returns and gives the workers some cigarettes and all the taboos are lifted. There’s also a custom that “forbade the workers from eating their lunch anywhere else but near the factory at the top of the mountains, where the baotou could monitor them” If you’re thinking this sounds exploitative, you’re not the only one because to Lin Fuquan, “these customs appeared as nothing more than cynical tactics for asserting control over the pluckers.”

This caught my eye because I haven’t thought of superstition as a tool for controlling workers. I didn’t mention it much in my very, very brief summary of the book, but at the start, it’s clear that Chinese labour practices were also somewhat exploitative. They didn’t go to the length of penal contracts, but looking at how they measured and paid for work (such as randomly selecting when to weight the leaves to determine contracts and the superstitions to modify their behaviour), Chinese merchants also had no scruples trying to get the most work for the least amount of money.

It does seem that the most exploitative process ends up with the cheapest tea (hence the rise of India tea, although I would argue that a campaign for Empire Tea also helped to shift demand towards them), so I would argue that regardless of who is producing the tea, one of the things we can take from this book is to be wary of tea that is too cheap. If farmers and/or farm workers are to be paid fairly, then we must expect the cost of tea to increase.

Overall, if you’re looking at the supply side of tea during the modern period, this is definitely a book to read because it deals with two major producers. If you want to look at tea consumption, though, you may have to look somewhere else.

This review was first posted at Eustea Reads

[Shoon Teoh · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars - interesting premise and exhaustive research but written in a less than accessible manner. This is a history book first and foremost - long passages of historical accounts followed by longer passages interpreting said accounts with a good dose of political economic thought thrown in.

Liu really does present a large number of historical sources including texts by chinese thinkers during the qing era and british colonialists in charge of Assam, contrasting it with western economic thinkers of the time such as Smith and Marx to explore in greater detail and nuance the economic history of China and India. Liu largely succeeds in arguing that elements of capitalism did exist within Chinese and Indian societies - as demonstrated by their tea industries - during colonial capitalism.

[Henry Hakamaki · Rating 5 out of 5]

GUERRILLA HISTORY EPISODE WITH ANDREW LIU: https://guerrillahistory.libsyn.com/a... or wherever you get your podcasts.

[KT · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting and insightful book that I thought took a new look of the history of capitalism in China and India through the lens of tea and emphasises the the connections between both industries in the period between the end of the English East India Company's monopoly over trade with Canton (1833) and the subsequent Opium War, and the outbreak of WWII (1937-1945)

I thought the innovations of existing technology used to measure time in production of tea such as the burning of incense was interesting as well as the comparative history framework that takes a non-anglocentric lens to the history of modern capitalism
In the anglocentric view, capitalism was equated with a high level of technological sophistication and a specific set of class relations founded upon free labour and first located within England
By contrast, the stories the author presents demonstrate how both purportedly independent peasant households in China and unfree indentured workers in India, regardless of levels of mechnisation, produced economic value as part of a circuit of capital accumulation spanning the globe

[Zhen Hao · Rating 5 out of 5]

A convincing reformulation/ historicising of the global history of capitalism. An ambitious work that’s simultaneously a comparative economic, social and intellectual history.

“Political-economic principles of high industry may have presented themselves in natural, almost metaphysical language, but they have since been revealed as ideologies specific to a discrete, if massively important, historical era. For students of history, it makes little sense to interpret the long term temporal and spatial scope of capitalism’s history through the exclusive lens of the mid twentieth century, anachronistically projecting its expectations onto distinct places and eras.”

[Pradheep · Rating 4 out of 5]

Informative. Not an easy read for someone without economics background. I had to read about different theories mentioned in this book. However, it is definitely worth the effort.

[Pierre · Rating 5 out of 5]

An absolute must read for all those interested not only in the history of tea in modern times, but also in political economy. The author uses tea as an example of how economic ideology and social, political, technical and economic evolution are interwoven.

I can't summarize my impressions now, but I can stress that the author's view is scientifically rigorous to the highest point, and very interesting for those interested in tea evolution in China and India, as well as the general development of economic ideas in those countries and others.

5 stars. I'd put 6 stars if possible.

[Chloe Z · Rating 3 out of 5]

read this for class. i thought it complements pomeranz' divergence theory well, and challenges our conception of modernity and our understanding of the history of capitalism on the "edges of empire"

[paovale · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book goes insanely fucking hard for no reason, give me ten more Andrew B Liu

[Mary-Catherine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read for my comp, super informative if a bit tedious at times.