Historians familiar with Victorian tea history will be acquainted with the rise of the tea industry in India, which decisively surpassed China as the world's leading tea exporter. The Indian tea trade was integral to British expansion, even providing advertising opportunities for the benefits of British rule. Indian tea was naturally superior, claimed the empire's tea merchants, when explaining why Western consumers now much preferred the drink's charms. This appeal to nature in fact masked deliberate political, socio-economic, geographical and environmental manoeuvrings, which brought about this significant change, often with detrimental consequences for Asian labourers in the tea trade.

Andrew B. Liu's Tea War: A History of Capitalism in China and India interrogates the interactions between Chinese and Indian India tea production, in the context of British imperialism, to develop a more nuanced understanding of capitalism from a global-history perspective. Importantly, Liu refutes standard narratives of Asian economic stagnation to argue instead that the story of the global tea trade in fact reveals the ‘history of emergent capitalism in modern China and India’ (p. 5). He argues that Chinese and Indian producers, merchants and planters experienced shared pressures to intensify production in common with the rest of the industrial world, even despite popular perceptions of Chinese and Indian societies as fundamentally ‘backwards’.

Ambitious in scope, Tea War covers a broad period from the 1830s to the end of the Second World War. It aims to ‘decentre the privileged role of the North Atlantic in histories of capitalism’ (p. 7) by unearthing experiences of labour and the movement of capital across Asia. This is a useful approach that builds upon recent works such as Erika Rappaport's monumental A Thirst for Empire (2017), which primarily focused upon British Empire perspectives. In contrast, Liu seeks to ascertain what those living on the edges of European empires thought about the relationship between tea and capital accumulation (p. 14). A core argument is that Chinese and Indian participants in the tea war increasingly adopted abstract capitalist notions of value, production and labour to make sense of a new, alien type of global marketplace. In turn, Asian reformers began to think of their own societies in terms of evolutionary frameworks of economic and industrial progress. In this account, capitalism was not simply exported to Asia after being invented in Europe. According to Liu's conceptual framework, it emerged there in taking its own unique forms.

Tea War is split into seven chapters. Commencing with a brief overview of ‘the two tea countries’, Liu follows by detailing why and how Chinese tea producers adopted capital-intensive, mechanical methods from the 1800s onward. However, by the 1890s they were unable to compete with the Indian tea industry supported by colonial interests. The Indian tea trade also benefited from regional industries settling into distinct market niches. In the 1880s and 1890s, the Chinese tea industry spiralled into crisis. However, Liu suggests that this crisis inspired a change in consciousness in China to think in capitalist terms as a means of escaping the situation. A key aim of Tea War is to challenge Anglo-centric perspectives that place Britain at the centre of the global tea trade. Closing chapters help achieve this by examining coolies and compradors. They also examine how Indian and Chinese observers made sense of the dramatic changes in tea production around them around the turn of the twentieth century.

Overall, Liu's impressive Tea War convincingly demonstrates that tea's modern history was not one of global homogenization or simply the spread of capitalist ideas from West to East. Instead, world competition produced localized forms of capitalism and complex engagements with relatively new Western ideas.