For All the Tea in China (book review)
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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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)
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