Tea: Addiction, Exploitation, and Empire

Rating:
Summary: A Thoroughly Fascinating Book
Review: I borrowed this book from my local library to read on vacation. Once I started it, I found it hard to put down. Mr. Moxham made even the mundane parts of tea's history fascinating. I felt as if I had gone back in time and witnessed the many incidents he relayed. I particularly enjoyed how he opened and closed the book with his own experience on a tea plantatation in Africa in the early 1960s. This book was a real historical eye-opener for me on many counts, as well as entertaining and well written. If you enjoy your tea and history, I highly recommend you read this book!

Rating:
Summary: A Highly Enjoyable Read
Review: Rox Moxham devotes the introduction and last chapter of his highly enjoyable new book Tea: Addiction, Exploitation, and Empire to his 5 year stint as a manager of a 500 acre and 1,000-plus workforce tea estate in Colonial Malawi during the waning years of the British Empire in the 1960's. Tea is above all a history of the imperial exploitation of this commodity by the British Empire. Tea was known more as a medicine than a beverage upon its introduction from China to Europe and America in the 17th century. What originally was a heavily taxed exotic import from the Far East, made only affordable to the wealthy, would gradually come to be known as the official beverage of the British nation. Moxham traces the development of the tea industry from its beginnings in ancient China to the 19th century British humiliation of the Chinese in the Opium Wars, wars fought in part to finance tea imports by growing opium.

Britain also decided during the 19th century to crop tea within its own empire, starting in India, then in Sri Lanka and finally Africa. No story of the exploitation of such an important commodity by the Empire would be complete without an overview of the exploitation of the intensive labor needed to crop and manufacture tea. Imported Asian laborers, a.k.a. "Coolies," would be get sent to the tea plantations, mostly under conditions of coercion, in the thousands over the decades. These labors usually died in the thousands as well, as they suffered under appalling conditions. Don't think the days of bad labor conditions for tea plantation workers are in the past either. As Moxham points out, today tea plantation workers are still low wage workers whose lot is in bad need of improvement. This book is a frank look at the tea industry at a time when the purported medicinal benefits of the product are once again being used in its marketing.

Rating:
Summary: 5 stars as narrative history, 4 for lack of closure
Review: this is a fascinating microhistory of tea, bookended with an unfortunately underdeveloped personal narrative. The historical content is superb and both detailed and aware of world events of the time, giving insights into trade agreements as well as growing conditions. Moxham's own year overseeing a tea plantation in Africa is embarrasingly brief in comparison, and ends the book so abruptly I searched beyond the glossary, hoping for at least an epilogue to explain the paucity. It's among some of the very good books on the historical lure of caffeinated products, and well worth picking up, provided you don't expect the boy's own adventure Moxham's opening pages seem to indicate

Rating:
Summary: 5 stars as narrative history, 4 for lack of closure
Review: this is a fascinating microhistory of tea, bookended with an unfortunately underdeveloped personal narrative. The historical content is superb and both detailed and aware of world events of the time, giving insights into trade agreements as well as growing conditions. Moxham's own year overseeing a tea plantation in Africa is embarrasingly brief in comparison, and ends the book so abruptly I searched beyond the glossary, hoping for at least an epilogue to explain the paucity. It's among some of the very good books on the historical lure of caffeinated products, and well worth picking up, provided you don't expect the boy's own adventure Moxham's opening pages seem to indicate