A Thirst for Empire: How Tea Shaped the Modern World by Erika Rappaport (review)

Deep historical examinations of everyday commodities are no longer the new kind of scholarship that they were in the latter decades of the twentieth century. Nonetheless, they can still surprise, especially when the commodity in question is ordinary enough to be mostly invisible and undifferentiated enough that we do not have to think about where it comes from. Tea fits this description perfectly, and Erika Rappaport's exhaustive recent study of tea production, distribution, and consumption across the so-called British World from the seventeenth century to the present is a welcome addition to the genre of commodity histories. It opens with an image taken in 1941 on English soil featuring Indian soldiers, the Imperial British army they worked for, the background mosque in which they practiced their alien religion, and the ubiquitous cup of tea that normalized the otherwise possibly incongruous multicultural scene. How did this slice of world history come to be? What was its connection to the over two thousand-year old history of a plant first (and long) cultivated only in China? What might it tell us about the by now well-studied rise of European consumer culture, the making (and persistence) of nineteenth-century "Britishness," the nature of empire, the functioning of labour markets and global trade systems, and the development of modern advertising? All these questions, and some intriguing answers too, find their way into this deeply researched and compelling book.

This is a book rich in narrative detail and correspondingly sparse on theory, whether economic or cultural. For someone looking for a quick and dirty explanation of the mechanisms that facilitated a Chinese plant coming to symbolize the essence of being British, this book will disappoint. However, if you want to follow the many twists and turns involved in getting tea consumption (and to a lesser extent production) out of East Asia and into virtually every corner of the world in four eventful centuries, complete with a cast of characters so voluminous as to defy even this historian's imagination, A Thirst for Empire is likely to be the definitive reference for a long time to come. As the title suggests, the inner and outer workings of empire is the one constant theme across the pages, whether the author's focus is at the moment on planters, pickers, packers, opportunists, local elites, retail sellers, wholesalers, blenders, advertisers, hucksters, corporate boards, working-class consumers, middle-class housewives, Victorian moralists, native southern Africans, Red Cross volunteers, Indian nationalists, bohemian intellectuals, or even, with a bracing improbability, Frank Sinatra. And this list is far from exhaustive. In all this panoply of actors, Rappaport is less interested in what she calls "the sociology of markets" than in the development and perseverance of "deeply embedded and long-lasting ideologies" (p. 10). Not surprisingly, then, her source material is overwhelmingly textual and visual—from boards of trade records, letters, diaries, pamphlets, policy documents, and advertising—rather than quantitative. The book touches on a number of economic questions, but it is not an economic history or even really a business history, although it usefully draws insights from both of those fields. It is definitely a history of globalization, however, and an especially poignant one as tea (exotic, rare, and a genuine puzzle to most of the world initially) really did grow in only one place for well over a thousand years, before relatively quickly, starting in the nineteenth century, becoming both ubiquitous and, to the chagrin of the newly independent twentieth-century tea growers and the British tea industry alike, boring.

Rappaport shows us convincingly that tea, or perhaps the ideology of tea, is a chameleon. It has been an inspiration for and tool of war, but also a highly effective instrument of free market economics, an oppressor of the conquered and the laborer, while also bringing comfort or even liberation to the working masses. It is a feminine drink that can make men strong. It...