Author Description

Few commodities have been as synonymous with any civilization as tea with China. Robert Gardella's book describes and analyzes the multi-faceted influence of tea production and the tea trade on Fujian, one of China's premier tea-growing regions, over the past two centuries. Based on extensive archival research, this study illuminates the economic, social, fiscal, and environmental ramifications of China's involvement with a dynamic world economy. As contemporary China increasingly opens up to foreign trade and investment, the long-term historical experience documented here takes on a renewed importance. China's tea trade showed moderate growth before the Opium War, rapid expansion in the mid to late nineteenth century; and volatile market dislocations and decline thereafter as competition from colonial plantations in India and Ceylon coincided with the effects of structural flaws in China's political economy. This case study of Fujian addresses central themes in modern Chinese economic history - foreign trade as an engine of growth or a tool of imperialist oppression; the role of foreign trade beyond China's urban coastal enclaves; and the relationship of China's premodern economy with the global market.