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Book Cover
E-book
Author Liu, Andrew B., author

Title Tea war : a history of capitalism in China and India / Andrew B. Liu
Published New Haven : Yale University Press, [2020]

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Description 1 online resource (xi, 344 pages) : illustrations, maps, charts
Series Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University
Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University.
Contents 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
Summary 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
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Notes Online resource; title from digital title page (viewed on April 16, 2020)
Subject Tea trade -- China -- History
Tea trade -- India -- History
Capitalism -- China -- History -- 19th century
Capitalism -- China -- History -- 20th century
Capitalism -- India -- History -- 19th century
Capitalism -- India -- History -- 20th century
Tea trade -- China -- 19th century
Tea trade -- China -- 20th century
Tea trade -- India -- 19th century
Tea trade -- India -- 20th century
HISTORY -- Asia -- China.
Capitalism.
Tea trade.
China.
India.
Genre/Form History.
Form Electronic book
ISBN 0300252331
9780300252330