Tea War by Andrew B. Liu is a meticulously researched and persuasively argued text that is a valuable addition to recent scholarship that reconceptualizes the history of global capitalism. By adopting a transnational approach, Liu compares and contrasts the global context of the tea industries of China and India during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to decenter the temporal and spatial emphasis on past scholarship on the history of industrial capitalism, ultimately generating a richer and more compelling history that can serve as a template for “capitalism's history in other postcolonial sites, such as the Americas, Central and Southeast Asia, Africa, and Central Europe” (p. 281).

The fundamental argument of the text is that the tea industries in China and India were compelled by global market forces to adopt structural changes to survive in the increasingly competitive global marketplace. Although the particulars of the immediate political-economic contexts of China and India exhibited both similarities and differences, the underlying pressures of the market induced colonial actors in India and imperial officials in China to pursue innovations in labor, marketing, and finance that were often premised on the study of colonial labor patterns, as well as each other's tea industries. Liu argues that actors in both regions simply could not adequately understand the challenges of the tea industry in their own milieu “without simultaneously situating themselves within the global circuit of tea and global commodities” (p. 274). This situating of local/regional dynamics within market-shaping global forces is convincingly explored by Liu. Ultimately, he argues, this nexus adds up not to a “story of global homogenization nor of the universal dissemination of ideas from the West to the Rest. Instead, competition gave rise to a set of shared, mutually constitutive pressures and uneven rates of profit and accumulation. It produced regionally distinctive tensions exacerbated by the marketplace and manifested through idiosyncratic labor practices and ideological forms” (p. 274).

The text is divided into two sections. Part one focuses on the structure of the respective tea industries through, roughly, the beginning of the twentieth century. First, Liu engages a fascinating comparison of social change, more generally, and labor practices, more particularly, to argue that patterns of industrial production in India and China were not predicated on mechanization or on an unfettered industrial working class—two determinants of classically defined industrialization. In China, changes in the tea industry of central/southeast China were driven not by technical features, but “rather the unprecedented degree to which the social compulsion to grow and produce for the world market has come to dominate everyday life” (p. 79). This “compulsion” expressed itself in innovations in measuring labor productivity that rewarded speed and competition. Significantly, it is these same dynamics of “competition-inspired intensification” that would usher in more capital-intensive methods in the twentieth century.

In Assam, similar global competitive pressures drove labor intensification practices that culminated in the nineteenth-century institutionalization of the penal labor contract system (a form of indentured labor) that not only maximized labor inputs, but also represented a reversal of earlier British colonial policies premised on classical liberal ideals of free labor markets. Liu convincingly elucidates how peasant households in China and indentured workers in India, despite the absences of mechanization, created economic value as part of a “circuit of capital accumulation around the globe” (p. 189). As such, he argues these findings “should dispel any easy formulas about the incompatibility of capitalism with itinerant merchant capital or immobile unfree labor. Both were crucial to patterns of intensive capital accumulation in the Chinese and Indian tea districts (pp. 189–90).

Part two of the book, entitled “Coolies and Compradors: Tea and the Political Economy at the Turn of the Century,” highlights the similar social and political challenges that the competitive global tea trade engendered in Assam and coastal China, including the changing nature of imperialism, economic development, nationalist politics, and appeals to resist foreign capital. In India, the push to end indenture was largely not the result of economic considerations but instead emerged from the growing sensibility among nationalist actors that a free labor system was more rational. As commercialization penetrated Indian society, a “naturalization” of free labor ideology occurred among national actors. Liu argues with historians who see this moment suggesting that earlier indenture practices (and their critical role in accumulation) were antimodern or precapitalist.

In China, Liu highlights the work of several individuals who studied and proposed reform of China's tea industry. For example, the surveys of Wu Juenong confirmed that, despite studies at the time by Western observers and academics that claimed China's peasantry was precapitalist because of the prevalence of noncommodified family labor, the “lending practices of rural China represented a disguised form of wage labor that shared much in common with the industrialized world” (p. 233). In addition, the comprador and the tea warehouse merchant, social roles deemed important to the economic order of the late imperial period, came under political attack by nationalist actors in the twentieth century. Many historians have argued that such attacks reflected the persistence of traditional productive relations, but Liu counters that such social tensions were rooted in changes in the global political-economic context.

In sum, Tea Time is a tightly argued book that represents a valuable contribution to a growing literature on the history of global networks of capital and trade. By examining the competition between the respective tea industries in China and India during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the text impressively reveals the “unevenness” of capitalist development. That is to say, this history is “more flexible and globally” oriented than the persistent classical interpretation of the industrial revolution happening in a spatially distinct region, and only with mechanized production and a proletarian workforce. As Liu emphasizes, the salient point is to understand “in what ways these regions participated within, and were also being shaped by, transnational circuits of production and circulation, with their attendant social logic of intensive accumulation” (p. 275).

In addition, Tea Time challenges orientalist labels of “tradition” and “backwardness.” By the early twentieth century, Chinese and India political actors “embraced the timeless ideals of political economy . . . new ideological forms and economic realities were unfolding together, intertwined, and indissociable” (p. 277). Going a step further, Liu speculates that his findings may support “the hypothesis that putatively backward and marginal social formations were at times more predisposed to industrial production than their metropolitan counterparts” (p. 275). An idea well worth exploring further!