In A Thirst for Empire, Erika Rappaport takes on the subject of tea—that fascinating Chinese plant that became synonymous with quintessential Englishness. Among an ever-growing mountain of histories of everyday commodities, A Thirst for Empire stands out as one of the best, serving as a poignant reminder of how important the genre can be to our understanding of cultures and economies.

Although focused on the British Empire, with Britain at its center, Rappaport successfully uses tea to decenter the Western narrative of consumerism, answering the challenge laid out for global histories of commodities by Arjun Appadurai and in the vein of the Sydney Mintz's groundbreaking study of sugar and Sven Beckert and Giorgio Riello's authoritative and enlightening accounts of cotton. In that sense, Rappaport pulls no punches in discussing how something as seemingly benign as tea disrupted civilizations, cultures, and ecosystems.

Following an introduction, Rappaport tackles her subject by organizing A Thirst for Empire as a primarily chronological narrative, organized into three parts. The first part, consisting of four chapters, takes the reader from the mid-seventeenth century to the early decades of the eighteenth century, when the Chinese monopoly on global tea production was at its zenith, and the British fell in love with tea. The chapters deftly detail the less-than-inevitable rise of tea in English (and later British and white colonial) society, as importers faced competition from both other European rivals and coffee as an alternative hot caffeinated beverage. During this period, tea, perhaps after sugar and cotton, became the most ubiquitous overseas commodity found in Britain and its colonies. Even the poorest and remotest people had access to at least low-quality versions, while the wealthy displayed their refinement by using the latest porcelain and earthenware from the English Midlands, whose production houses flourished as a consequence of tea consumption. Without tea, Wedgwood would not have become a household name. The East India Company's ultimate dominance of tea markets outside of Asia, Rappaport demonstrates, was as much, if not more, the result of actions taken by the Chinese as by any decision made in Britain. Even the virtual monopoly the British achieved on the tea trade of Europe and its colonies at the beginning of the nineteenth century remained secondary to China's Asian markets. This neatly sets up part two, which consists of four chapters in which Rappaport examines the hegemony of tea over the British Empire in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century. During this period, tea intermingled with industrialization to become not just a favored, but the dominant beverage of the industrial working-class families of Glasgow, conquering British soldiers, missionaries in Africa, and Queen Victoria's household alike. Tea was the empire's beverage, and, to satisfy demand, British imperialists asserted control over production by creating vast plantations in British possessions in South Asia. The considerably shorter part three (two chapters) takes the reader through decolonization, when tea competed with coffee's resurgence and a new wave of nonalcoholic social beverages for a new era, particularly Coca Cola-led carbonated drinks.

While a book of this size and scope is bound to have the odd error or arguable interpretation, there is scant material in A Thirst for Empire with which to take issue or even quibble. Rappaport decidedly focuses on consumer culture, especially marketing and domestic consumption. The production side of the equation receives considerably less attention, although her discussion of the roles of racism in the labor force in tea-producing regions of British-ruled South Asia is one of the most illuminating parts of the book. Readers looking for a quaint, familiar history of how tea drinking became a signature element of British culture are advised to look elsewhere. Approaching six hundred pages, including over one hundred pages of endnotes, A Thirst for Empire is a serious, meticulously researched academic tome. This is not to suggest that it makes for the sort of dense reading for which scholarly prose can be infamous, because Rappaport's style, as well as the book's structure, are both engaging and highly readable. In short, I would not hesitate either to recommend it to scholars outside of history or to assign it even to a suitable undergraduate course.

Ultimately, all of these attributes combined make A Thirst for Empire a masterful book that should be read not only by students and scholars of the British Empire, tea, and consumer culture but also by anyone interested in exploring the deep and complicated history of global economies and their interactions with the cultures they touch.