Tea Parties: Britishness, Imperial Legacies and Global Consumer Cultures

FAIN: FA-55083-10

Erika Diane Rappaport
University of California, Santa Barbara (Santa Barbara, CA 93106-0001)

Tea Parties examines the creation and significance of global markets for Indian tea from its earliest history in the 1820s through the formal end of the British Empire in the 1960s. It does so to consider what role imperialism played in the development of global forms of mass consumption. Even as the Victorian economy divided the world into producing and consuming nations, it also created structures and ideologies that broke down those divisions and imagined much of the world as potential consumers. Though economic historians have long acknowledged the significance of non-western markets, recent scholarship has failed to consider how imperialism shaped the cultural, social and political history of global consumer cultures. A focus on how Indian teas were sold in markets as diverse as North America, Europe, Africa and South Asia, illuminates how imperial and racial ideologies were critical to creating and conceptualizing transnational economic relationships and cultures.

Associated Products

A Thirst for Empire: How Tea Shaped the Modern World (Book)
Title: A Thirst for Empire: How Tea Shaped the Modern World
Author: Erika Rappaport
Abstract: Tea has been one of the most popular commodities in the world. Over centuries, profits from its growth and sales funded wars and fueled colonization, and its cultivation brought about massive changes—in land use, labor systems, market practices, and social hierarchies—the effects of which are with us even today. A Thirst for Empire takes a vast and in depth historical look at how men and women—through the tea industry in Europe, Asia, North America, and Africa—transformed global tastes and habits and in the process created our modern consumer society. As Erika Rappaport shows, between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries the boundaries of the tea industry and the British Empire overlapped but were never identical, and she highlights the economic, political, and cultural forces that enabled the British Empire to dominate—but never entirely control—the worldwide production, trade, and consumption of tea. Rappaport delves into how Europeans adopted, appropriated, and altered Chinese tea culture to build a widespread demand for tea in Britain and other global markets and a plantation-based economy in South Asia and Africa. Tea was among the earliest colonial industries in which merchants, planters, promoters, and retailers used imperial resources to pay for global advertising and political lobbying. The commercial model that tea inspired still exists and is vital for understanding how politics and publicity influence the international economy. An expansive and original global history of imperial tea, A Thirst for Empire demonstrates the ways that this fluid and powerful enterprise helped shape the contemporary world.
Year: 2017
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780691167114
Copy sent to NEH?: No

Prizes

The Jerry Bentley Prize
Date: 1/3/2019
Organization: American Historical Association
Abstract: The Bentley prize is awarded annually to the best book in each calendar year in the field of world history.

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