Tea War : A History of Capitalism in China and India

**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. A history of capitalism in nineteenth†‘ and twentieth†‘century China and India exploring 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. Further, 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. Cover Half Title Title Copyright Contents Acknowledgments Note on Spellings, Transliterations, and Translations Introduction 1. The Two Tea Countries: A Brief History of the Global Tea Trade Part I: Competition and Consciousness: The Chinese and Indian Tea Industries, 1834-1896 2. Incense and Industry: Labor-Intensive Capital Accumulation in the Tea Districts of Huizhou and the Wuyi Mountains 3. A Crisis of Classical Political Economy in Assam: From Economic Liberalism to a Theory of Colonization, 1834-1862 4. After the Great Smash: Tea Mania, Overseas Capital, and Labor Intensifi cation in Assam 5. No Sympathy for the Merchant? The Crisis of Chinese Tea and Classical Political Economy in Late Qing China Part II: Coolies and Compradors: Tea and Political Economy at the Turn of the Century 6. Coolie Nationalism: The Category "Freedom" and Indian Nationalist Campaigns against Labor Indenture 7. From Cohong to Comprador: China's Tea Industry Revolution and the Critique of Unproductive Labor Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index A B C D E F G H I J L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z "Tea War studies the competition between the tea industries of China and colonial India as an exploration of the history of capitalism. Liu challenges previous histories premised on the technical "divergence" between the West and the Rest, arguing that seemingly traditional technologies and practices were central to modern capitalist development in the tea districts of China and India. He explains how the pressures of competition compelled merchants in China to adopt abstract, industrial conceptions of time, while in India colonial capitalists pushed for labor indenture laws to support factory-style tea plantations. He also explains how characterizations of China and colonial India as premodern backwaters 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 the concrete social changes in their local surroundings. Together, these stories point toward more flexible and globally oriented conceptualizations of capitalism"-- Provided by publisher