Book description
Few commodities are as synonymous with any civilization as tea with China. This book analyzes the multifaceted influence of tea production and the tea trade upon Fujian, a premier tea-growing region, illuminating the economic, social, fiscal, and environmental ramifications of China's involvement with a dynamic world economy. Today, as contemporary…
Why read it?
1 author picked Harvesting Mountains as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
A classic work of global political economy written just before the genre became fashionable. I constantly return to this book to think about the role of China in producing, shaping, and being altered by global capitalism in the nineteenth century. Gardella does not romanticize the Chinese economy as an alternative to Atlantic world slaved-based capitalism, but rather he considers how Chinese practices could be deeply exploitative. At the same time, he shows how the Chinese worked with and against the colonizing forces of Euro-American imperialism right up until the 1930s. I also love Gardella's amazing footnotes!
From Erika's list on The best books to understand tea and other Chinese things.
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