Narrating the history of Japanese green tea, once commonly consumed by Americans with “milk and sugar,” Robert Hellyer masterfully describes processes of transnational mercantile exchange spanning the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, where East Asian and Anglo-American capitalistic practices neatly intersected. Green with Milk and Sugar shines with vivid descriptions of individual American and Japanese merchants heavily invested in commerce and buffeted by vicissitudes in US-Japan relations during a volatile century of interactions. Illuminating photographs, descriptive advertisements, and product labels paint a striking picture of the brokers and marketing practices for Japanese green tea. Hellyer found inspiration in his great-great-grandfather Frederick, who profited from Chicago's centrality in the 1880s tea trade. Creating a US market for green tea mobilized transpacific and transatlantic networks of tea dealers, transporters, and producers; the text thus employs a “commodity chain” approach to “illuminate the intertwined domestic and international story of how Japanese green tea became...

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