Andrew Liu - Tea War

Lekh

In the second episode of Lekh, I speak to Andrew Liu, Assistant Professor of History, Villanova University on his recent book Tea War: A History of Capitalism in China and India. Tea War tells the story of how tea, the world’s most popular commercial drink today, drove competition between China and colonial India in the 19th century and how these competitive pressures compelled Chinese and Indian tea producers to adopt various strategies to support tea exports.

Through the book, Liu challenges prevailing economic histories centred on the technical divergence between the West and the East, instead arguing that the experiences of China and India through tea should be regarded as central to capitalism and capital accumulation. The book is not just a history of capitalism and of China and India but also a history of political economy that influenced how the experiences of Chinese and Indian tea were understood and used by nationalist groups looking to use tea commerce to service specific political causes.

The conversation begins by probing how Liu came to situate his work within several disparate fields of inquiry before moving to understand the prevalence of ideas and discourses of capitalism that have generally elided China and India. Near the end, our discussion explores whether competition between China and India in the 19th century could have extended to the 21st as both Asian powers jostle for power in a volatile regional security environment.