ICI Co-Director Mark Frazier interviewed Professor Andrew B. Liu in May 2020 upon the publication of Dr. Liu’s new book. Dr. Liu is Assistant Professor of History at Villanova University. He studies modern China, modern South Asia, transnational Asian connections, and the history of political economy.

Andrew B. Liu
Tea War: A History of Capitalism in China and India
Yale University Press, 2020
Yale University Press link — use discount code YAB99 for 25% off

Mark Frazier: First of all, congratulations on the publication of Tea War. It’s a masterpiece that takes regions of India and China deemed as “marginal” in their economic histories and puts them in the forefront of 19th-20th century global capitalism through the commodity of tea. What drew you to this topic? Did people caution you against taking on a multi-sited India-China project for a dissertation topic?

Andrew Liu: Thank you, Mark, I appreciate it!

Let’s see: I entered graduate school simply looking to somehow connect Chinese history to the rest of the world. To be honest, I was reacting against my parents’ generation, who spoke about China in traditional, nationalist terms, which I found claustrophobic. My favorite course as an undergraduate had been South Asian history, as I felt the intellectual buzz of postcolonial theory and subaltern studies, with stirring writings about power, culture, and imperialism. I looked for ways to link China and India together, with one obvious connection the tea-for-opium trade that precipitated the Opium War (1839-1842). In my first year of graduate school, I experimented with a seminar paper about British officials circumventing the Qing tea monopoly by shepherding Chinese tea makers to Assam to create an Indian industry. I decided, let’s see where this story takes me, moving forward.

I was lucky to be placed in Columbia [University]’s International and Global History program. My adviser was the late Adam McKeown, whose books jumped around between three to six countries for archival work. If anything, he would’ve cautioned me against not taking on a multi-sited project! He was a real inspiration that way. Looking back, I was probably in a bubble at Columbia. Many within the department championed global history as if it were self-evidently the future of the discipline. Only later did I realize that not all historians and Asianists feel the same way. Some hold ideas about Chinese history, for instance, more in line with my parents’ generation. Now, I certainly sympathize with the concern that global history can encourage dilettantism. But if done thoroughly and carefully, exercises in multi-sited comparison and connection, I believe, can only enhance your capacity as a thinker, even if your focus returns to the original site in which you’re grounded. Anyway, we’ll see how the book is received!

MF: I would place this work’s importance alongside the recent contributions in the history of capitalism that have looked at cotton, sugar, and other commodities as primary drivers of capitalist production (and away from factories and industry). It also moves the discussion of capital flows and trade away from the common study of trans-Atlantic exchanges. However (and similar to the trans-Atlantic histories of capitalism), is it fair to say that 18th-19th century British capital (and British imperialism) is still a main protagonist in your story of tea?

AL: This is a great question. My answer is partly yes and partly no.

Yes, it is critical to acknowledge the centrality of Britain to the world economy in order to understand how Chinese and Indian tea fitted into it. One of my central claims is that Asian tea relied on forms of employment that have long appeared ‘precapitalist,’ such as independent family farms in China and indentured ‘coolies’ in India. These forms of labor had existed for centuries if not millennia around the world. It would be very difficult to explain how and why Asian tea became driven by the modern dynamics of accumulation then, unless we connect China and India to the broader global division of labor, centered on the most cutting-edge industrial sectors in the north Atlantic. If we were to stay solely in the Asian hinterlands, then peasant agriculture and unfree labor could only appear as simple, premodern holdovers, with their political-economic significance hidden from view.

But I also wish to reframe the idea of British capital as “protagonist,” because when we think about capital, agency is a weird thing. I think capitalism’s history is best understood as a process driven by the logic of capital accumulation itself. Nothing about accumulation is inherently loyal to this or that region, though it has been concentrated in certain sites, such as nineteenth-century Britain or twentieth-century US, and it has been territorialized by nationalist institutions. Thus, although British firms drove the Asian tea trade at first, by the twentieth century Indian and Chinese nationalists alike protested British capital as imperialist and exploitative, advocating for the “Sinicization” and “Indianization” of tea capital. Rather than accept the nationhood of capital at face value, then, this book historicizes how capital was claimed by Chinese and Indian nationalism over time.

MF: Can you talk a little about the primary sources you found most illuminating? I see you collected archival materials in West Bengal, New Delhi, Beijing, Taipei, London, Cambridge, and even a family archive in Anhui province. Amazing. Did you originally intend to cover so much territory, or did one archive lead you to another?

AL: I jumped into research rather blindly, making plans to visit archives without ever spending much time in these places and without ever doing real archival research before. It turned into a real ethnographic adventure, as I experienced firsthand distinct national ‘cultures’ of archive keeping. The archives in the UK, in the British Library and various universities were straightforward to use and physically comfortable. A bit soporific even. India and China, though, were a mixed bag.

In India, colonial records had been collected assiduously from the 1700s onward, and I could find much of what I needed in the National Archives in Delhi and the state archives in West Bengal. But these archives face limitations, with history recorded exclusively through the eyes of the colonial and postcolonial state. Here my historian superego, fostered by years of reading social theory, told me to look for non-state sources. On the other hand, my East Asian-studies superego told me to look for something written in an Asian language, by non-European actors. My dissatisfaction with English-language state sources drove me to explore and write about Bengali-language literary depictions of the Assam tea industry (in Chapter 6). At the time, I felt like I had only begun to scratch the surface of this direction, and I hope others will continue in this direction in the future.

The Chinese archives were far more chaotic. Pre-PRC archives at the local level are very thin, sometimes non-existent, but I had committed myself to a local history of tea in northwest Fujian and southern Anhui. This became a real interpersonal adventure. I relied upon a series of informal conversations, small notebooks of scribbled leads and phone numbers, and the endless generosity of local students and scholars willing to talk for hours over food and drink.

My China research came together after tracking down the story of the Jiang family in southern Anhui, as you mentioned. I was originally based in Xiamen University finding very little. One night, I stumbled upon an article about the Huizhou (southern Anhui) tea trade and was amazed at what scholars at Anhui Normal University in Wuhu had discovered from the Jiang tea merchants of Shexian 歙縣. I mentioned this to a Xiamen University Master’s student who happened to be from Anhui. He put me in touch with his friend at Anhui Normal [University], and I hopped on a plane for Wuhu. There, four more Master’s students — about my age yet studying under very different circumstances — accompanied me to the Huizhou villages to look at the Jiang family house and track down the descendants. We piled into buses, stayed in a packed motel room without hot water, and took a small boat across the Xin’an River to inspect abandoned village neighborhoods (note: the Peabody Essex Museum in Massachusetts has reconstructed a house from Huizhou, Anhui, which I visited later and found more or less identical to the ones I explored on this trip). For me, a spoiled American, this was really roughing it. But for my Chinese peers who had grown up in villages, this was nothing unusual. I wound up meeting the Jiang descendants, too, now living in an anonymous apartment complex in town.

Through these adventures I got a brief, firsthand taste of the physical and material conditions of the nineteenth-century trade. The conversations with local students and scholars also led me a trove of materials available only locally. Chapter 2, which became the foundation for my larger argument, would have been impossible without those students’ generosity, and I’ll be forever grateful.

MF: I was quite struck by an obvious fact that urban factory-focused scholars of Chinese labor history (myself included, in my first book) seemed to have overlooked, which is that tea production was the largest employer in China in the 1930s, accounting for 3 million jobs. And tea was the leading employer in India during the same decade (over 500,000 people). Can you describe the typical “workplace” of someone employed in the tea sector at this time? Were there strikes and protests of the sort found among textile workers in cities at this time, and did communist and nationalist parties in both places view tea workers as politically important?

AL: I don’t think it’s ‘obvious’ at all! When writing this book, I became aware of how much the world I grew up in — with the 1990s buzz of globalization and hand wringing over sweatshops and exploited Asian labor — differed from the optimistic models of domestic urbanization and industrialization that dominated twentieth century politics and scholarship. Most economic histories were focused on whether other countries could ever develop into nineteenth-century England. For labor historians, Mike Davis recently wrote, the “classical proletariat” was the working classes of the North Atlantic from 1838-1921. These modular assumptions jump out when you flip through the classics of Asian economic and labor history, almost always focused on some sort of textile industry (silk, cotton, jute) and in cities such as Shanghai, Osaka, Bombay, Calcutta. By contrast, I was really inspired by a field pioneered by South Asia scholars known as “global labor history” — especially the work of Jairus Banaji — which has been critical of the centrality of urban industry in economic history. Instead, these scholars reconsider labor in light of our current world of late capitalism, including transportation workers, agrarian families, servants, and unfree and coerced labor. These activities have enabled global capitalism to function smoothly for centuries but were overlooked because they did not share the spectacular novelty of the steam-powered factories of urban Europe, US, and Japan.

As far as how tea production worked: in simple terms, Chinese tea was a segmented trade and Indian tea was centralized in plantations known as ‘tea gardens.’ The Chinese trade relied on independent family farms, workshops in market towns, and porters ferrying tea to the coastal ports: Guangzhou (Canton) then later Fuzhou and Shanghai. By contrast, British officials and planters built Indian tea from scratch in Assam, which had not been nearly as commercialized as coastal China or Bengal. They first tried to replicate the ‘natural’ Chinese model of local agriculture and trade, but frustrated British planters ultimately decided to undertake all of the tasks themselves, from clearing the land to packaging the finished leaves.

Both at the time and in subsequent scholarship, observers remarked upon the vast differences between Chinese and Indian tea production. Chinese tea seemed disorganized and incapable of modernization; Indian tea was championed as futuristic and mechanized. From my comparative approach, though, I concluded they actually shared much in common. Both industries relied on migrant labor recruited through ethnic ties; both operated through a gendered division of labor; both used time measurements to regulate and reward labor productivity; and both remained equally labor-intensive through the early twentieth century.

As far as politicization, both tea industries crossed paths with left-wing politics but in the end were subsumed under anti-imperialist movements to nationalize capital. In China, the people most interested in the tea peasants and workers were left-wing agronomists, led by Wu Juenong, featured in Chapter 7, who analyzed the countryside through a social-scientific class-based lens. They were Marxian technocrats but not Communist Party members. Wu Juenong worked in Nanjing government but also later served as Vice Minister of Agriculture in the PRC state, which tells you he was ideologically flexible. He was ultimately ousted as a “capitalist roader” in the 1960s.

In India, by contrast, the tea industry’s penal labor contract became one of the original cause célèbres of the nationalist movement in the 1880s. The plantations later became a site for strikes and hartals, the most famous occurring in the Chargola Valley in 1921. But even though tea workers chanted, “Gandhi Maharaj ki jai” at the time, Gandhi himself had allegedly visited Assam and declined to see the workers, meeting instead with British planters to assure them they were safe. While Indian nationalists had politicized indenture in Assam tea, their main complaint was the racialized split between British capital and Indian labor. Their remedy was not to liquidate the tea gardens but to diversify ownership over them. The cause of labor was subordinated to the nationalist struggle.

MF: The book’s title draws on a comment from an English tea planter in India in the 1890s, who terms the economic rivalry between China and British India over tea production and exports as a “tea war that has been and is still being waged.” A famous Qing dynasty official at the same time wrote of “commercial warfare.” Of course, today it’s common to hear of “trade wars” and “technology wars.” Is this framing of economic competition as warfare simply part and parcel of geopolitical competition? Were the old mercantilists right, and the liberal economists naïve about the mutual benefits of trade and transnational production?

AL: You are right, I am arguing that antagonistic economic competition is built into the modern world; in fact, I think it lies at the heart of the history of capitalism.

My thinking was clarified by the work of your New School colleague, economist Anwar Shaikh, who has criticized the way competition is taught in most economics classrooms. In neoclassical theory, ‘perfect competition’ tends towards a tranquil equilibrium, with market signals bringing prices into harmonious alignment. But that is a mythology, Shaikh argued. The goal of ‘real competition’ is not collaboration but capturing a rival’s market share through whatever measures can be found, from technological innovation to marketing and propaganda to state protection and monopoly. The warlike nature of accumulation has certainly been mollified in times of expansion, such as the mid-twentieth century. During downturns, however, the Darwinian, zero-sum character of the market economy has frequently revealed itself in ugly ways. Such was the state of the global tea trade from the 1880s onward.

More broadly, a goal of mine is to foreground competitive accumulation as a historical method. Historians have long debated what distinguished the last few centuries of unprecedented economic growth: was it culture? the state? class relations? Competition helps to explain the underlying dynamism of capitalism by locating it in concrete, impersonal social pressures. Chinese firms economized on tea production to outlast their rivals; colonial Indian plantations fixated on lowering costs because profits were falling. No single agent was in charge, yet everyone contributed to the broader dynamic. In the tea trade, I show, competition really began to matter in the mid-nineteenth century, as price differentials disappeared and more firms entered the fray.

The geographical implication is that capitalism’s history can be most usefully located not within individual firms and industries but rather in the antagonistic relationships between them. British colonial planters undermined Chinese tea through different innovations. In response, Chinese reformers pushed for the nationalization of the trade. These were not independent processes but parts of a larger story. I follow this unfolding, back-and-forth dynamic by interweaving chapters on Chinese and Indian tea throughout the book.

Competition, then, serves both as this book’s framing and as its argument for how best to understand the historical dynamics of modern capitalism.

MF: You bring the “tea war” up to the present in the Conclusion. Could you offer us a brief view of tea production and consumption today, and discuss what it reveals about 21st capitalism?

AL: As of a few years ago, China and India became, once again, the top two tea producers globally, and tea remains the most popular commercial beverage in the world. This is the same picture as the turn of the twentieth century, but much has changed in the interim. Whereas tea was still being introduced to new markets in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it has now reached something of a saturation point: something one could say about the global economy as a whole, too. Under these conditions, global producers have looked to invent new ways to remain profitable. I’ll provide two examples.

First, rather than simply selling tea to Euro-Americans, Asian producers now also aim to find new consumers in Asia itself. People in East Asia have drunk tea for centuries, of course, but companies are now adapting to the rising incomes of the burgeoning middle classes across Asia by offering expensive artisanal teas — there was a massive bubble in Yunnan Pu’er [tea] at the turn of the millennium — in addition to mid-tier and cheaper teas. Many of the newly-invented varieties I describe in the book, from Qimen black to Fujian and Taiwanese oolong, have been rebranded as classy, traditional beverages for the East Asian connoisseur, while the tea districts invite tourists to experience local history. Meantime, low-grade teas are produced for beverages marketed to younger consumers, such as tea lattes and bottled tea drinks.

In India, falling overseas demand after the 1950s was cushioned by selling tea to Indian consumers themselves. The main innovation was the invention of masala chai, a working-class drink that first became popular in northern and eastern India in the 1970s and is now sold worldwide of course. The key development, Philip Lutgendorf has written, was cut-tear-curl (CTC) tea, leaves shredded by machine in order to release an even stronger oxidized flavor. Though less subtle in flavor than whole leaf tea, CTC packs more flavor and caffeine to be mixed with milk and sugar. Chai thus served the same purpose for the Indian working and middle classes classes as black tea had for European workers a century earlier: a cheap source of calories and energy in lieu of home cooking.

Further, the old model of giant plantations has started to look outdated, anthropologist Sarah Besky reports in her new book [Tasting Qualities]. Some Indian firms are trying to devolve to a type of segmented network of cultivation and production not dissimilar to the putatively “traditional” techniques of nineteenth-century China.

All this points to dimmed prospects for the industrial model of increasing vertical integration and escalating output of cheap goods. The postmodern taste for different varieties and classes of commodities reflects an economic reality wherein we are beyond the point of scarcity, at least for many goods. In consumption, firms try to manufacture demand through new market niches. In tea production, the newfound interest in smaller, “flexible” units parallels the downsizing of manufacturing across the world, as firms try to profit off of turnover and faster transportation rather than investment into economies of scale: temporal condensation rather than spatial expansion.

Tea still remains highly industrialized, of course, but its economic future has never looked as optimistic as during the nineteenth-century “tea war.” That was truly a golden age for tea, when it became introduced into so many corners of the globe for the first time.