Tea War: A History of Capitalism in China and India by Andrew B. Liu (review).

Abstract

Reviewed by: Tea War: A History of Capitalism in China and India by Andrew B. Liu John B. Lourdusamy (bio) Tea War: A History of Capitalism in China and India By Andrew B. Liu. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020. Pp. 360. This is an ambitious and fairly successful attempt to use the case of Chinese and Indian tea production and trade to tell yet another, different, story of capitalism. It joins the emerging literature—for instance, Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton (Penguin Books, 2014); Prasannan Parthasarathi, Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not (Cambridge University Press, 2011); and Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence (Princeton University Press, 2000)—that challenges conventional histories of capitalism as the notion of a modernizing West pitted against a static Other steeped in tradition. The book's uniqueness lies in its enunciation of the histories of tea in India and China in a conjoint manner, unlike much scholarship in the field, which focusses not just on one of them but within it, on one geographical area or aspect/issue, such as labor or gender. Also, while being a slice of economic history, the work draws much from the history of economic thought too. From a history of technology point of view, this work rightly challenges the tendency to place disproportionate emphasis on machinery at the expense of other social and economic factors. The central argument is that India and China were not contradistinctive with the Western world vis-à-vis the emergence of capitalism but were instead constitutive of it. This argument as such is not novel, but it is enunciated very effectively using a specific commodity and its changing fate across boundaries with mutual and broader inflections. More important is the point that many of the key ideas of capitalism as embodied in classical political economy—such as production for market, practices of labor that could, in appropriate contexts, be commodified or available for exchange as general and productive labor—were already embedded in Chinese and Indian social economic set ups. The work persuasively elucidates how native intelligentsia in China and India, for all their struggle against imperialism's ills, had internalized the basic premises of classical political economic thought and saw many of their abstracted forms resonating in their own backyard, awaiting practical and full realization. This congruence informs their subsequent embrace of the basic structures of capitalism, except that in India, indigenous capital had to replace alien capital and indentured labor yielded to free labor—at least nominally—thus bringing it closer to the notion of labor as envisaged in classical political economy and as understood by elite nationalists. In the case of China, merchant capital, seen as unproductive capital, was to be replaced by more productive capital. This was because the comprador class was not directly involved in the production process—thus minimizing the possibilities of innovations in the organization of production and in machinery. [End Page 1231] In bringing out the nuances through a well-researched narrative, the work also highlights a set of important ironies. One was how the colonial state selectively interpreted political economy. On the one hand, the colonial commercial enterprises were presented as extensions of the principles of free trade, and of the benefits of modernity, to the wider world. Yet, the theory of value centered on productive and free labor was deemed inapplicable to the non-Western context, which was not yet considered ready for such treatment. The book also captures the irony of how at the heart of such a widespread global capitalist enterprise as the tea trade lay such supposedly pre-modern features like unfree and cruelly exacting forms of labor in the Indian case, and the preponderance of comprador merchant capital in the Chinese case—both of which in fact propelled the tea trade to a great extent. The author's arguments are convincing, and the special merits of telling the story of Chinese and Indian tea together—particularly highlighting the element of competition that dictated particular forms of mobilization and extraction of labor and other resources—are clear. With regard to technology, while the work is right in flagging the need to look beyond innovations in machinery, there seems to be...