For All the Tea in China (book review)

For All the Tea in China (book review)

by | Jun 22, 2021 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History, Politics, Power and inequality, World history

profitable, powerful, vicious…

 

 

Book review:

For All the Tea in China:

How England Stole the World’s Favorite Drink

              and Changed History

 

by Sarah Rose

New York: Viking, Penguin Group, 2010

 

This is a credible account of how tea from China became a worldwide drink.

With commanding competence, Rose relates the intrepid life of Robert Fortune, and the depressingly familiar tale of a giant corporation running amok.

The East India Company in England was an extremely vicious, extremely powerful, and extremely profitable company for more than two hundred years. It was tea from the East India Company that got dumped into Boston harbor on December 16, 1773. After a bloody 1857 war of its own making in India, the company was abruptly dissolved by the British Parliament. Rose says: “…the company had amassed possessions to rival Charlemagne’s and created an empire on which the sun never set; it was the first global multinational and the largest corporation history has ever known. Yet it failed spectacularly at one significant task: to govern India in peace.” No surprise there.

For my taste, the greater value of For All the Tea in China is the examination of how the commerce and consumption of tea shaped worldwide politics, warfare, and society. Tea reduced famine in Europe. Tea taxes financed Britain’s imperial expansion. Increased tea drinking—and increased sugar consumption—made the British sugar colonies important in British commerce and politics. Centuries of monopoly in tea production and engagement with Europeans altered the political and cultural development of China.

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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2021 All rights reserved.

 

Book review: American Colonies

So many and so much

    came before the Pilgrims

by Alan Taylor

click here

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Writing Rainbows: Poems for Grown-Ups with 59 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”

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How the Irish Became White (book review)

How the Irish Became White (book review)

by | Jun 5, 2021 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History, Human Nature, Politics

…the Irish weren’t the only ones…

 

 

Book review:

How the Irish Became White

 

by Noel Ignatiev (1940-2019)

American author and historian

New York: Routledge, 1995

 

Ignatiev offers enough detail and context to satisfy historians of every stripe.

For the less ambitious reader, there may be a bit more than she cares to know in How the Irish Became White.

Of course, I certainly don’t presume to summarize the author’s careful exposition in 233 pages.

If you really want to know more about how non-black immigrants allowed and persuaded themselves to buy in to the systemic racism that flourished in America since the 17th century, dig in to How the Irish Became White.

One sure point is: don’t pick on the Irish exclusively. They certainly weren’t alone in their transgressions.

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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2021 All rights reserved.

 

We Were Soldiers Once…and Young

…way too much death (book review)

Lt. Gen. Harold G. Moore (ret.)

         and Joseph L. Galloway

click here

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Above all: Poems of dawn and more with 73 free verse poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”

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