- Title: Conceptualizing China's tea history in the 19th century: Incorporation into the capitalist world-economy
- Author: Sung Hee Ru
- Journal: Journal of Agrarian Change 22(2)
- Publication Date: December, 2021
- Abstract
Recent historical accounts of the 19th century China's tea history have been presented without adequate attention to global capitalism's dynamics, despite the fact that researchers have explicitly or implicitly accepted the idea that China experienced a massive and unprecedented change in tea cultivation during the period, prompted by the penetration of capitalist logics. By analysing China's capitalist incorporation process, I show why and how tea growing areas in southern China drove export-oriented process of tea cultivation, increasing the number of seasonal workers—including Chinese tea growers migrating to British India's tea plantations—and experiencing ecological degradation and economic underdevelopment. In addition, I reveal how analysis of China's incorporation process helps to investigate the relationship between China's tea industry and its early industrialization. By allowing us to examine China's tea history and the dynamics of the capitalist world economy in the long 19th century in tandem, concept of China's incorporation process elicits macrolevel, global, and historical narratives of the 19th century Chinese tea history.
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