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...
