EP 06: Tea and Capitalism with Andrew B. Liu

The global tea trade served as a primary engine for 19th-century capitalism, fundamentally reshaping economic relations between Britain, India, and China. To circumvent reliance on Chinese silver, British colonial interests established an opium-based trade triangle, forcing the cultivation of tea in Assam through coercive penal labor contracts. This transition, driven by the need for mass-market commodities, prioritized caffeine extraction and industrial efficiency over traditional agricultural methods. While Indian nationalists eventually sought to reclaim this industry to retain wealth within India, the underlying capitalist structures—and the exploitation of labor—remained largely intact. This history reveals that the rise of modern global markets relied less on the natural spread of free-market ideals and more on the systemic extraction of labor and the strategic manipulation of trade routes to secure dominance in the international commodity market.