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

Abstract

Reviewed by: Tea War: A History of Capitalism in China and India by Andrew B. Liu Elizabeth Joy Reynoldsereynolds@wustl.edu Andrew B. Liu. Tea War: A History of Capitalism in China and India. Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020. 344 pp. $50.00 (cloth). Andrew B. Liu's Tea War transforms our understanding of the dynamics of global capitalism in China and India. Through an analysis of the competition over the tea trade, Liu rethinks the definition and scope of capitalism as we know it. The narrative structure of the book situates the work equally in both Chinese and Indian historiographies, as Liu presents a back-and-forth between the tea industries of China and India beginning with the First Opium War (1839–1842) and ending with the outbreak of the Second World War (1937–1945). Over the course of seven chapters, Liu traces the rise of the Chinese tea industry into the 1880s and shows the response of the colonial Indian tea industry in Assam, which overturned China's success by the 1890s and catalyzed a new mode of political economic thought among the Chinese reformers and intellectuals. Liu's work engages directly with the growing body of scholarship on North Atlantic histories of capitalism but does so from the perspective of the colonial and postcolonial contexts of China and India. Weaving a Marxist approach into a deep understanding of classical economy, he offers a groundbreaking work that must be required reading for any scholar seeking to understand the integration of China and India into a global capitalist market. Competition and labor are Liu's windows into the inner dynamics of capitalism. Competition in particular provides readers with a coherent method by which to understand the entangled nature of the tea trade in China and India. Specifically, it helps us locate the social and economic pressures placed on tea producers and laborers across interconnected geographies. Liu shows how China and India, despite not being at the center of Wallersteinian "cores," nonetheless engaged with globally competitive forces of capitalism. And, at a societal level, these pressures created the need for greater labor productivity in the marketplace. Through a history of the labor-intensive tea industries that were transformed by the global competition over the tea market, Liu demonstrates that the logic of capital accumulation was already present in China and India by the nineteenth century. Chapter 1 presents a longue durée narrative of tea cultivation and trade, while chapter 2, one of the most exciting for China scholars, focuses on the nineteenth-century tea industry in Anhui and Fujian, showing how global competition drove tea producers to increase productivity by relying on extant technologies. Factories in Anhui, for instance, used incense sticks that burned at a regular rate to create a regimen of fixed, abstract "timed labor," resembling the systems of work discipline recognized by E. P. Thompson (48). Though using incense sticks as timekeeping devices has a long history, Liu argues that their repurposing to increase labor productivity, and even to serve as a basis for remuneration, was an innovation that took place in the midst of China's integration with a global capitalist economy. "The rise of Industrial capitalism," as he puts it, "coincided with qualitative changes in the perception and consciousness of time" (66). In chapters 3 and 4, Liu shows how labor indenture in Assam emerged out of a crisis of political economic principles in colonial India. Originally holding fast to doctrines of classical political economy (embodied in the ideals of free market and free labor), the British could not make tea profitable (and could not effectively compete with the Chinese) without creating a system of indentured labor. The success of the tea industry in colonial [End Page E-34] Assam (and in China too), therefore, directly challenges the notion that capitalist production must rely on free labor and technological innovations. In Liu's words, "mechanization cannot stand in for the history of capitalism as a whole but rather is best resituated within the broader social compulsion toward rising productivity" (118–19). In other words, instead of defining capitalism through industrial technologies...