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About
"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" Erika Rappaport is professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author of Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London's West End (Princeton) and coeditor of Consuming Behaviors: Identities, Politics and Pleasure in Twentieth Century Britain (Bloomsbury).
How the global tea industry influenced the international economy and the rise of mass consumerism
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. "[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." "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
How the global tea industry influenced the international economy and the rise of mass consumerism
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. "[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." "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