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This chapter describes how, in the late nineteenth century, Indian tea initially thrived not because of its adherence to the ideals of civilization and freedom but precisely due to its reliance on an exceptional system of labor indenture. Behind the curtain of marketing campaigns focused on flavor and hygiene, British planters themselves attributed the rise of Indian tea to lower production costs from indenture. Starting in 1865, officials in India devised a system of regulated labor recruitment and penal contract employment for the Assam tea industry. It featured the restriction of worker movement, constant surveillance, and wages fixed by law rather than by the market. Penal contract laws provided planters both a subordinated migrant workforce and the legal impunity to intensify the production process. By the turn of the century, Indian tea exports had surpassed those of their Chinese rivals, and the industry had become the leader in world production. The chapter thus challenges historiography that has argued capitalist production must, by definition, rely upon free labor and technological innovations. Instead, it resituates the mechanization of Indian tea production within the social dynamics of escalating labor productivity. The chapter then draws out key similarities between the work regimes of Chinese and Indian tea.

This introductory chapter provides a background of Chinese and Indian tea. It was in early imperial China where tea was first ritually imbibed as a medicinal and religious drink, and it was eighteenth-century Chinese merchants who helped popularize it as a global commodity, enabling it to become the most consumed commercial beverage in the world today. And yet, over the course of the next century, the Indian tea industry—operated by British colonial planters and based in the northeast territory of Assam—suddenly overtook China as the world's top exporter. British and, later, Japanese propagandists seized upon this inversion in the global division of labor. Propagandists dismissed Tang- and Song-era (618–1279) records of tea in China as unreliable, asserting instead that the true “birthplace of tea” must have been in India or Japan. This book presents the histories of Chinese and colonial Indian tea as a dynamic, unified story of global interaction, one mediated by modern capitalist competition. Their implications challenge many of the conventional assumptions about capitalism in China and India—or its absence thereof—and in so doing, they provocatively contribute to a more global conception of capitalism's history as a whole.

This chapter traces the history of tea cultivation and consumption in imperial China, its popularity in Euro-American markets, and experimental colonial projects to transplant cultivation to eastern India. For these regions in East and South Asia, participation in the global tea trade entailed a transformation from an early modern luxury trade to a decisively modern competition between capitalist industries. This competition between Chinese and Indian tea simply marked the next chapter in an ongoing story of expansive world trade featuring the exchange of tea, opium, sugar, cotton, and silver. As commodities, their exchange also connected countless systems for employing, organizing, and disciplining producers. In the “tea countries” of Huizhou, the Wuyi Mountains, and Assam, it was during the nineteenth century when falling prices and productivity pressures asserted themselves upon local populations.

This concluding chapter synthesizes the various stories from the Chinese and Indian tea war into a handful of observations about history and historiography. First, this book has given substance to a reconceptualization of capitalism's history more flexible and globally oriented than past approaches. Second, this view from two marginal sites in rural Asia also illuminates new conclusions about the rise of the modern economy. In particular, there is evidence to support the hypothesis that putatively backwards and marginal social formations were at times more predisposed to industrial production than their metropolitan counterparts were. Third, beyond challenging the Orientalist categories of economic backwardness and tradition, this book has sought to account for their emergence through a critical history of political-economic thought. Finally, this book can only speculatively gesture in the direction of another major question, namely, the historical relationship between transnational competition and national ideology.