Abstract
‘Is there tea in China, too?' (2) This is a question that Chinese scholar Wu Juenong (1897–1989) received in Japan during the early twentieth century. A century later, this bizarre question inspired Andrew Liu to write Tea War to examine one of the most important commodities in Asia's maritime trade and to challenge the portrayal of ‘precapitalist’ tea production in China and India.
Maritime history itself is therefore not Liu's focus, but maritime historians may still find Tea War relevant. It is built on the Great Divergence literature. While the Eurocentric scholarship attributes the rise of the West to market factors and technologies, Kenneth Pomeranz's The Great Divergence, through comparing Europe with China, highlights the importance of Britons’ maritime activities and colonialization in the New World, which supplied resources, such as coal, to fuel the Industrial Revolution. 1 Liu continues the comparative approach to reconsider the Eurocentric interpretation of capitalism. The first four chapters conceptualize tea production in China and India as labour-intensive accumulation, rather than capital-intensive industrialization, to dismiss technological sophistication and free labour as the defining features of capitalism. Challenging the involution theory, which asserts that the ‘pre-capitalist’ Chinese rural economy grew only in quantity rather than in efficiency, Liu shows that efficiency, productivity and economic rationality could be achieved through traditional time- and labour-discipline approaches, such as burning incense and worshiping mountain gods. After China lost the maritime tea trade to India, British Indian companies and some scholars depicted the Indian tea industry as more industrialized, mechanized and thus civilized than Chinese manual-labour production. Liu nonetheless contends that Assam's tea economy had arisen before the wide use of labour-saving machines in the early twentieth century, and Indian workers under the slavery-like penal labour laws were the true driving force. The last three chapters shift the focus from production to maritime trade's influence on the political economy. The decline of China's maritime tea trade prompted Chinese reformers to abandon the mercantilist notion of wealth, criticize the parasitic capital of merchant brokers (compradors and warehouses), and emphasize the value created by labour productivity. The expanding labour market in an increasingly industrialized and commercialized India also rendered the indentured labour system obsolete and prompted Indian nationalists to adopt the free-labour system. Therefore, intellectuals in Asia not only understood but also utilized the western political economy of labour and market to achieve their political ends.
Liu's research thus adds a must-read title to capitalism studies. The recent surge of the new history of capitalism, which employs the concept ‘capitalism’ without a clear definition, revives the interest and contention in this field. Disagreements on the definition have long featured in capitalism studies. Thus, Allan Kulikoff and Gary Hamilton placed scholars into different camps to explain the pattern of the discussions. Researchers following Adam Smith equate capitalism with market economy, while those embracing Karl Marx anchor the concept in capitalist–labour relations. Adopting a simplified version of Max Weber's Protestant ethic, another group places the ‘spirit of capitalism’, such as economic rationality, at the core. 2 Deploying a few of these components, some scholars seek to prove the existence or absence of capitalism outside the West, such as the ‘sprouts of capitalism’ debate about Ming–Qing China. The Cambridge History of Capitalism also extracts four elements – private property rights, contracts enforced by third parties, markets with responsive prices and supportive government – to incorporate world economies into the framework of capitalism. 3 Adding more complexities to the field are the ever-growing varieties of capitalism (agrarian, commercial or state capitalism), and industrial capitalism often becomes the standard to gauge non-western economies.
Liu's research revisits most of the concepts that are key to the field and integrates capitalism with the Asian context, thus contributing to the ‘sprouts of capitalism’ debate. Liu clarifies that his book is not designed to ask ‘whether or not China had capitalism or Assam was capitalist’, but to understand ‘in what ways these regions participated within’ global production and circulation (275). However, seeking to write a history of ‘emergent capitalism in modern China and India’ (5), Liu tacitly takes the affirmative side. This stance enables Liu to use labour-intensive accumulation to challenge the English model of industrial capitalism. Liu understands capitalism ‘not as a particular set of technologies or class relations’ (169), which he assumes as the ‘canonical historical interpretation’ (189), ‘but instead as a general social dynamic shared across commodity producers’ (275). The dynamic is interpreted as ‘the underlying drive to endlessly accumulate profit for its own sake’ (15), located in the tendency to increase labour productivity, which cheapens commodities and workers (15–18). This definition justifies the theoretical framework of the book but, like other theories, invites more questions. Is labour intensification for profit's sake a sufficient, or only a necessary, condition of capitalism? If being ‘non-capitalist’ is not simply equated with being ‘primitive’, is it still necessary to place the labour history of tea production into the category of ‘capitalism’?
Maritime historians may also require more explanations in relation to some minor questions. For instance, it is open to debate whether the anti-comprador criticism should be readily applied to warehouse merchants. Zhuang Weimin's book on China's hangzhan system takes pains to distinguish the two groups of middlemen who were important to China's maritime trade. 4 After all, not all warehouses were opened by compradors. Tang Qiaoqing (or the Tang Yaoqing in Liu's book), who founded the largest tea warehouses in Shanghai and Hankou, appears not to have been a comprador. To substantiate the assertation that capitalist competition in the maritime tea trade led Chinese thinkers to economic laws and the labour theory of value, it is necessary to provide more economic essays from the pre-Qing and late Qing periods (169). Readers also need to go beyond H. T. Huang's piece and read the works of other scholars, such as Huang Shijian and Chen Zongmao, to understand the differences between black and oolong tea (30). 5
This short review does no justice to the sophistication of Tea War. Maritime historians interested in capitalism studies will find it rewarding to read Liu's brilliant (re)interpretations of political-economy theories.