Tea war : a history of capitalism in China and India / Andrew B. Liu.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Liu, Andrew B., Author.

Series:

Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University.

Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Tea trade--China--History.

Tea trade.

Tea trade--India--History.

Capitalism--China--History.

Capitalism.

Capitalism--India--History.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xi, 344 pages)

Place of Publication:

New Haven, CT : Yale University Press, [2020]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Note on Spellings, Transliterations, and Translations

Introduction

1, The Two Tea Countries A Brief History of the Global Tea Trade

2. Incense and Industry

3. A Crisis of Classical Political Economy in Assam

4. After the Great Smash

5. No Sympathy for the Merchant?

6. Coolie Nationalism

7. From Cohong to Comprador

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 08. Jun 2020)

ISBN:

0-300-25233-1

OCLC:

1148877434