A Thirst for Empire: How Tea Shaped the Modern World

Rappaport (Shopping for Pleasure), professor of history at UC Santa Barbara, leaps onto the commodity-history bandwagon in this diverting but overstuffed history of the “civilizing force” that was supposed to heal “bodies, nations, and world problems.” She traces tea’s rise as a global commodity in the 17th century and the empire of consumption, taste, and commerce that grew up around it. As Rappaport duly notes, the history of tea is intertwined with the history of capitalism and of modernity itself; as the ultimate imperial product, tea linked diverse peoples across vast swaths of space and time. The book moves from the coffeehouses of London to the muggy plantations of Assam to the advertising firms of Madison Avenue, revealing the technologies and marketing techniques that were instrumental in achieving tea’s global popularity. Along the way, Rappaport touches on the temperance movement, commodity chains, Americans’ famous dislike of tea, and the sociocultural sphere inhabited by the planter class in Southeast Asia, among many other topics. Exhaustively researched and winningly recounted, the book is nevertheless overambitious in scope and its focus on the beverage makes it unavoidably mundane on occasion—an impressive achievement, but perhaps not everyone’s cuppa. (Aug.)