Over a remarkably brief period in the late nineteenth century, coffee replaced tea as Sri Lanka's primary export and plantation crop. Roland Wenzlhuemer argues that this transition “brought about drastic changes to almost every aspect of Ceylonese society” (p. 4). His goal in this book is not only to describe the move from coffee to tea, but also to assess its broader economic, political, and social consequences.

The first four chapters provide basic geographic, historical, and demographic information about Sri Lanka in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Readers who are familiar with Sri Lanka may wish to skim this material, but it does make the study very accessible to nonspecialists. The fifth and sixth chapters, which treat the spread of the coffee-leaf disease, the decline in coffee production, and the rise of tea plantations, form the book's core. Wenzlhuemer argues that cinchona cultivation played an important role in allowing coffee planters to make the transition to tea. Cinchona bark was used to make quinine, which was used to treat malaria. In the 1870s, plantation managers had begun to plant it alongside coffee, and when coffee failed in the 1880s, they intensified their harvesting of cinchona bark, damaging the trees and driving the price down. The temporary profits from cinchona, however, enabled the industry to raise the capital needed to make the transition to tea. By 1890, tea was established on abandoned coffee lands, and by the end of the century, its acreage surpassed that attained by coffee at its height. However, the development of other export commodities, such as coconut products and graphite, prevented tea from dominating the island's exports to quite the same extent that coffee had earlier. In 1870, coffee accounted for 85 percent of the value of the island's exports, but the analogous proportion for tea peaked at 64 percent in 1894. In the early twentieth century, another plantation crop, rubber, also became an important export.

The seventh through twelfth chapters seek to assess the impact of the move from coffee to tea on subsistence agriculture, the colonial administrative system, education, class formation, immigration, and religious revival. The problem here, as Wenzlhuemer notes at the end of his introduction (pp. 8–9), is that except in the case of immigration, he does not find the direct connections that he had expected when he began his study. So instead of focusing narrowly on the period 1880–1900, Wenzlhuemer looks to developments that occurred earlier in the nineteenth century to explain end-of-century patterns. These chapters, based mostly on secondary sources, are quite uneven, and the tension between the original intention to focus on the change brought about the shift from coffee to tea and a more general argument that long-term economic changes explain social and political conditions at the end of the nineteenth century is never resolved. Some points, such as the claim that the colonial state favored infrastructure projects that benefited the plantation sector, are convincing. Others, such as the assertion that late nineteenth-century religious revivals “originated in a clash over the distribution of the educational resources between the Christian missionaries and the indigenous religions” (p. 9), are more problematic, and seem to have little to do with economic change.

The strongest aspect of the book is the clear presentation of a great deal of information about Sri Lanka's demographic, economic, and administrative history in the late nineteenth century. Wenzlhuemer includes fifty tables, with data drawn mainly from published official documents and often obscure secondary sources. The book also includes many useful maps and illustrations. On the other hand, Wenzlhuemer offers few new interpretations for scholars who are familiar with the older historical literature on this period. Many specialists might have preferred that Wenzlhuemer had used the collection at the Department of National Archives in Colombo to focus in more detail on the social, economic, and ecological changes that took place in the plantation districts. By limiting his archival research to London, Wenzlhuemer passed up the opportunity to mine unused sources. Even specialists, however, will appreciate his efforts in bringing together much material that was previously available only in scattered and sometimes hard to get publications, and the book will serve as a useful resource for scholars who are interested in colonial Sri Lanka.