Tea has been one of the most popular commodities in the world. Over centuries, profits from its growth and sales funded wars and fueled colonization, and its cultivation brought about massive changes—in land use, labor systems, market practices, and social hierarchies—the effects of which are with us even today. A Thirst for Empire takes a vast and in depth historical look at how men and women—through the tea industry in Europe, Asia, North America, and Africa—transformed global tastes and habits and in the process created our modern consumer society.
As Erika Rappaport shows, between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries the boundaries of the tea industry and the British Empire overlapped but were never identical, and she highlights the economic, political, and cultural forces that enabled the British Empire to dominate—but never entirely control—the worldwide production, trade, and consumption of tea. Rappaport delves into how Europeans adopted, appropriated, and altered Chinese tea culture to build a widespread demand for tea in Britain and other global markets and a plantation-based economy in South Asia and Africa. Tea was among the earliest colonial industries in which merchants, planters, promoters, and retailers used imperial resources to pay for global advertising and political lobbying. The commercial model that tea inspired still exists and is vital for understanding how politics and publicity influence the international economy.
An expansive and original global history of imperial tea, A Thirst for Empire demonstrates the ways that this fluid and powerful enterprise helped shape the contemporary world.
Awards and Recognition
- Winner of a 2018 Gourmand World Cookbook Award, U.S. National Winner in “Tea”
- Winner of the 2018 PCCBS Book Prize, Pacific Coast Conference on British Studies
- Co-Winner of the 2018 ASFS Book Award, Association for the Study of Food and Society
- Winner of the 2018 Jerry Bentley Prize in World History, American Historical Association
"[Rappaport] tells with authority how tea and the culture of tea drinking has influenced the greater history of the British Empire and the British-influenced world beyond. . . . [Her] description of the ways in which tea has been marketed over the years is entirely absorbing."—Simon Winchester, New York Times Book Review
"Meticulously researched, [A Thirst for Empire] showcases materials from archives scattered across the globe to illustrate how one product's flow across borders was knitting the world together long before the term ‘globalization’ was coined. . . . Ms. Rappaport’s book is one of relevance to us all."—Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Wall Street Journal
"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."—Publishers Weekly
"The result of prodigious research and full of flavoursome detail, A Thirst for Empire will certainly stimulate."—John Keay, Literary Review
""Lively, thoughtful and highly engaging. . . . Elegant and authoritative. Rappaport's command of scholarship and eye for detail are formidable. She is a subtle and scrupulously attentive user of sources. Yet she also knows how to make these academic qualities and requirements serve the broader demands of informative and vibrant storytelling. On almost every page there is an arresting detail, a surprising observation, a fascinating anecdote, a collectible nugget of trivia."—Matthew Adams, The National
"A sweeping and richly detailed history of tea. . . . A Thirst for Empire is an authoritative and exhaustive work of scholarship. . . . A rich trove of paintings, engravings and photographs beautifully illustrate her themes. Rappaport's treatment of her subject is refreshingly apolitical. . . . Rappaport is clearly motivated by truth-telling rather than case-making."—Pietra Rivoli, Financial Times
"[Rappaport] provides interesting explorations of the health-giving powers attributed to tea, and how it came to be seen as a wholesome and vital drink."—Katrina Gulliver, The Spectator
"This remarkable synthesis of imperial and consumer history concludes that, even after the end of empire, the tea trade survived as a major force in the post-colonial world."—A. W. Purdue, Times Higher Education
"A Thirst for Empire takes a profound view of how people through tea's industry and plantations transformed habits and customs to create our modern consumer society."—The Statesman
"For Rappaport, tea provides a framework for examining subjects ranging from the Depression and the World Wars, to advertising and decolonization. Her book is tremendously detailed and clearly the result of painstaking research. . . . The patient reader will find A Thirst for Empire provocative and thought-provoking."—Justin Zaremby, The New Criterion
"Rappaport depicts the history of tea as one of opportunism and economics and, often, exploitation of primary producers."—Alan Attwood, Sydney Morning Herald
"A thoroughly-detailed, scrupulously-researched volume."—Aram Bakshian Jr., Washington Times
"Drawing deeply on the historiographies of empire and consumption, [Rappaport] extends these fields with a wealth of primary source material from private, national, and imperial tea marketing ventures. Rappaport masterfully combines gender, commodity, and food studies analysis to reveal the intricate networks and conflicting interests that made tea the lifeblood of the British empire."—Jeffrey M. Pilcher, World History Connected
"A Thirst for Empire stands out as one of the best, serving as a poignant reminder of how important the genre can be to our understanding of cultures and economies."—Troy Bickham, Journal of British Studies
"In Erika Rappaport's big, beautifully illustrated book, we have the first global history of how tea became a universal beverage. Rappaport accomplishes this feat by circling the world created by British imperialism, connecting tea pickers, plantation owners, traders, retail shop owners, chain stores, teetotalers, workers on their breaks, and ladies that lunch. Exploring the tea leaf's transformation from plant to drink, Rappaport tells a rigorous, vivid story of the workings of modern capitalism."—Victoria de Grazia, Columbia University
"In this remarkable book covering several centuries and reaching across many continents, Erika Rappaport explores the production, marketing, and consumption of a simple plant and familiar commodity, one that people had to be taught to want. She demonstrates tea's key role shaping colonial and postcolonial worlds, consumerism, politics, and, above all, the cultural, trading, and power relations that made and unmade the British Empire. Ambitious analytical breadth, meticulously researched case studies, and evocative images combine to make this essential and compelling reading."—Geoffrey Crossick, University of London
"This is commodity history at its best. Tea provides a window into a global economy that flourished for many centuries—long before the globalization of our own age. We meet the producers, workers, marketers, and consumers connected to the tea that underpinned empire and postcolonial societies. Rappaport ambitiously takes us from the tea plantation to the metropole and back, capturing a big story in a teacup."—Lizabeth Cohen, author of A Consumers' Republic
"A Thirst for Empire is an appealing and wide-ranging new history of tea in the modern world, with a particular emphasis on imperial networks and the role played by marketing and advertising. Sitting at the intersection of imperial history, consumer culture, and the processes of globalization, this book speaks to readers interested in world history as well as those who love their tea."—Frank Trentmann, author of Empire of Things
"Positioning tea as the commodity at the heart of this compelling story, A Thirst for Empire demonstrates the ways in which a mass consumer culture emerged between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries in dynamic relations to the rise and fall of the British Empire. This book is monumental in its reach across time and space, and focused in its investigation of how tea was produced, sold, and consumed."—Nadja Durbach, University of Utah
"There are lots of histories of tea out there—none, however, offer a similarly sophisticated interpretation and skilled weaving together of such diverse themes, actors, and places. Relying on enormous archival work at sites around the globe, this ambitious book offers an important contribution to understandings of empire, globalization, the rise of consumer culture, and consumer desires."—Abigail McGowan, University of Vermont
