Tea War: a history of capitalism in China and India

My book was published in spring 2020. The official description:

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.

I envisioned this book as an intervention into debates over the history of capitalism — both old and new yet almost always centered on the north Atlantic — and also into debates over the economic comparability of Europe and Asia, aka, “the great divergence” debates. For more on this, I have a longer essay expanding on these ideas in the Journal of Asian Studies (2019).

The book itself is the product of multi-sited, comparative research, using archival materials from China, India, the UK, and Taiwan, written in Chinese, Bengali, and Japanese (and uh English).

My conceptualization of the argument also drew upon an ongoing effort to reimagine the historical dynamics of capitalism, in particular, a rereading of Karl Marx’s mature critique of political economy for the contemporary world. On this, see my piece in Spectre, if you’re into that sort of thing!

There’s also, of course, a lot about tea, probably more than I ever needed to know. There are some funny stories of British people saying racist things, some Bengali plays and fiction, Qing officials trying to explain Adam Smith (without being able to read English), and some interesting discoveries about incense sticks and Chinese labor.

If any of this sounds interesting, you can check out the introduction here.

I liked Yueran Zhang’s review below.

Tea War was the recipient of the 2022 Ralph Gomory prize from the Business History Conference, which “recognizes historical work on the effects of business enterprises on the economic conditions of the countries in which they operate.”

It was also long-listed for the International Convention of Asian Scholars (ICAS) 2021 book prize for best work in the humanities in English.

ways to get it

some nice reviews

“Capitalism is not a ‘Free Labor’ System”
      Jacobin Magazine
      by Yueran Zhang
      January 10, 2021

Chinese version:
“中国与印度的早期茶叶贸易:资本主义的“自由劳动”体系迷思”
      澎湃新闻
      by 张跃然
      February 15, 2021

“A fascinating history of the conduct and impact of the tea trade”
      The Economist
      by Jeffrey Wasserstrom
      July 24, 2020

“Chai Capitalism”
      New Rambler Review
      by Kelvin Ng
      December 10, 2020

“Storm in a Teacup”
      The Baffler
      by Francis Wade
      July 16, 2020

“Rumo ao fundo do poço” (“Towards Rock Bottom”)
      Dystopia
      by Fernando Pureza
      April 2021

Review in Journal of Agrarian Change
      by Jairus Banaji
      March 2021

“Reviews of ‘Beyond Pan-Asianism: Connecting China and India, 1840s-1960s’, and ‘Tea-War: A History of Capitalism in China and India’: India’s forgotten China links”
      The Hindu
      by Ananth Krishnan
      May 8, 2021

short features by me

“Tea and capitalism: The China tea trade was a paradox – a global, intensified industry without the usual spectacle of factories and technology”
      Aeon Magazine
      May 19, 2020

“Notes Toward a More Global History of Capitalism: reading Marx’s Capital in India and China”
      Spectre
      July 6, 2020

interviews

“Histories of Capitalism and Race in the Middle East and Indian Ocean” seminar series
      Walter Rodney Collective for Historical Research, SOAS, University of London
      December 8, 2022

Blue and White: Columbia’s Undergraduate Magazine
      with Claire Shang
      September 23, 2021

Guerrilla History
      with Henry Hakamaki, Adnan Husain, and Breht O’Shea
      June 18, 2021

“In Theory”: podcast for the Journal of Intellectual History
      with Simon Brown
      March 10, 2021

The New Books Network
      with Lukas Rieppel
      November 4, 2020

The India China Institute, the New School
      with Mark Frazier
      May 23, 2020

The Weatherhead East Asia Institute, Columbia University
      April 22, 2020

Long US-China Institute, UC-Irvine
      with Emily Baum
      April 27, 2020

Lekh Review podcast
      with Karthik Nachiappan
      July 1, 2020

Brown History podcast
      with Ahsun Zafar
      September 26, 2020

Counterpoint with Amanda Vanstone
      Australian Broadcasting Corporation
      January 11, 2021

mentions and lists

“Diversify and Decolonise your Economics Reading List: Fall 2020”
      D-Econ blog
      September 19, 2020

“2020 China Books: China and the World”
      China Channel, Los Angeles Review of Books
      June 7, 2020

“Making Sense of the Multipolar World”
      The Wire China
      May 10, 2020