A Thirst For Empire

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A Thirst for Empire

Author : Erika Rappaport
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 0691192707
Total Pages : 568 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (911 download)

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Book Synopsis A Thirst for Empire by : Erika Rappaport

Download or read book A Thirst for Empire written by Erika Rappaport and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2019-03-05 with total page 568 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "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 ..."--Jacket.

A Thirst for Empire

Author : Erika Rappaport
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 1400884853
Total Pages : 567 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (8 download)

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Book Synopsis A Thirst for Empire by : Erika Rappaport

Download or read book A Thirst for Empire written by Erika Rappaport and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017-08-28 with total page 567 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

A Thirst for Empire

Author : Erika Diane Rappaport
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 0691167117
Total Pages : 568 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (911 download)

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Book Synopsis A Thirst for Empire by : Erika Diane Rappaport

Download or read book A Thirst for Empire written by Erika Diane Rappaport and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 568 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduction: A soldiers' tea party in Surrey -- Part I. Anxious relations -- "A China drink approved by all physicians" : setting the early modern tea table -- The temperance tea table : making a sober consumer culture in the nineteenth century -- "A little opium, sweet words, and cheap guns" : planting a global industry in Assam -- Packaging China : advertising food safety in a global marketplace -- Part II. Imperial tastes -- Industry and empire : manufacturing imperial tastes in Victorian Britain -- The planter abroad : building foreign markets in the fin-de-siecle -- "Every kitchen an empire kitchen": the politics of imperial consumerism -- "Tea revives the world" : selling vitality during the Depression -- "Hot drinks means much in the jungle" : tea in the service of war -- Part III. Aftertastes -- Leftovers? : an imperial industry at the end of empire -- "Join the tea set" : youth, modernity, and the legacies of empire during the swinging sixties

Empire of Tea

Author : Markman Ellis
Publisher : Reaktion Books
ISBN 13 : 1780234643
Total Pages : 328 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (82 download)

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Book Synopsis Empire of Tea by : Markman Ellis

Download or read book Empire of Tea written by Markman Ellis and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2015-06-15 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although tea had been known and consumed in China and Japan for centuries, it was only in the seventeenth century that Londoners first began drinking it. Over the next two hundred years, its stimulating properties seduced all of British society, as tea found its way into cottages and castles alike. One of the first truly global commodities and now the world’s most popular drink, tea has also, today, come to epitomize British culture and identity. This impressively detailed book offers a rich cultural history of tea, from its ancient origins in China to its spread around the world. The authors recount tea’s arrival in London and follow its increasing salability and import via the East India Company throughout the eighteenth century, inaugurating the first regular exchange—both commercial and cultural—between China and Britain. They look at European scientists’ struggles to understand tea’s history and medicinal properties, and they recount the ways its delicate flavor and exotic preparation have enchanted poets and artists. Exploring everything from its everyday use in social settings to the political and economic controversies it has stirred—such as the Boston Tea Party and the First Opium War—they offer a multilayered look at what was ultimately an imperial industry, a collusion—and often clash—between the world’s greatest powers over control of a simple beverage that has become an enduring pastime.

Green Gold

Author : Alan Macfarlane
Publisher : Random House
ISBN 13 : 1448116201
Total Pages : 303 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (481 download)

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Book Synopsis Green Gold by : Alan Macfarlane

Download or read book Green Gold written by Alan Macfarlane and published by Random House. This book was released on 2011-11-30 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Apart from water, tea is more widely consumed than any other food or drink. Tens of billions of cups are drunk every day. How and why has tea conquered the world? Tea was the first global product. It altered life-styles, religions, etiquette and aesthetics. It raised nations and shattered empires. Economies were changed out of all recognition. Diseases were thwarted by the magical drink and cities founded on it. The industrial revolution was fuelled by tea, sealing the fate of the modern world. Green Gold is a remarkable detective story of how an East Himalayan camellia bush became the world's favourite drink. Discover how the tea plant came to be transplanted onto every continent and relive the stories of the men and women whose lives were transformed out of all recognition through contact with the deceptively innocuous green leaf.

Shopping for Pleasure

Author : Erika Rappaport
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 1400843537
Total Pages : 338 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (8 download)

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Book Synopsis Shopping for Pleasure by : Erika Rappaport

Download or read book Shopping for Pleasure written by Erika Rappaport and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-06-08 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Shopping for Pleasure, Erika Rappaport reconstructs London's Victorian and Edwardian West End as an entertainment and retail center. In this neighborhood of stately homes, royal palaces, and spacious parks and squares, a dramatic transformation unfolded that ultimately changed the meaning of femininity and the lives of women, shaping their experience of modernity. Rappaport illuminates the various forces of the period that encouraged and discouraged women's enjoyment of public life and particularly shows how shopping came to be seen as the quintessential leisure activity for middle- and upper-class women. Through extensive histories of department stores, women's magazines, clubs, teashops, restaurants, and the theater as interwoven sites of consumption, Shopping for Pleasure uncovers how a new female urban culture emerged before and after the turn of the twentieth century. Moving beyond the question of whether shopping promoted or limited women's freedom, the author draws on diverse sources to explore how business practices, legal decisions, and cultural changes affected women in the market. In particular, she focuses on how and why stores presented themselves as pleasurable, secure places for the urban woman, in some cases defining themselves as instrumental to civic improvement and women's emancipation. Rappaport also considers such influences as merchandizing strategies, credit policies, changes in public transportation, feminism, and the financial balance of power within the home. Shopping for Pleasure is thus both a social and cultural history of the West End, but on a broader scale it reveals the essential interplay between the rise of consumer society, the birth of modern femininity, and the making of contemporary London.

Eating the Empire

Author : Troy Bickham
Publisher : Reaktion Books
ISBN 13 : 1789142458
Total Pages : 286 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (891 download)

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Book Synopsis Eating the Empire by : Troy Bickham

Download or read book Eating the Empire written by Troy Bickham and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2020-04-13 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When students gathered in a London coffeehouse and smoked tobacco; when Yorkshire women sipped sugar-infused tea; or when a Glasgow family ate a bowl of Indian curry, were they aware of the mechanisms of imperial rule and trade that made such goods readily available? In Eating the Empire, Troy Bickham unfolds the extraordinary role that food played in shaping Britain during the long eighteenth century (circa 1660–1837), when such foreign goods as coffee, tea, and sugar went from rare luxuries to some of the most ubiquitous commodities in Britain—reaching even the poorest and remotest of households. Bickham reveals how trade in the empire’s edibles underpinned the emerging consumer economy, fomenting the rise of modern retailing, visual advertising, and consumer credit, and, via taxes, financed the military and civil bureaucracy that secured, governed, and spread the British Empire.

Tea

Author : Roy Moxham
Publisher : Constable
ISBN 13 : 9781841199177
Total Pages : 271 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (991 download)

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Book Synopsis Tea by : Roy Moxham

Download or read book Tea written by Roy Moxham and published by Constable. This book was released on 2004 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The British were slow to take to tea, lagging behind the Portuguese and Dutch, and even the French. When they finally took it to their hearts, however, it became a national obsession. They covered their kingdom with tea gardens and tea shops. The taxation of tea led to massive smuggling, and the loss of their American empire.

Fur, Fortune, and Empire: The Epic History of the Fur Trade in America

Author : Eric Jay Dolin
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN 13 : 0393079244
Total Pages : 494 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (93 download)

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Book Synopsis Fur, Fortune, and Empire: The Epic History of the Fur Trade in America by : Eric Jay Dolin

Download or read book Fur, Fortune, and Empire: The Epic History of the Fur Trade in America written by Eric Jay Dolin and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2011-07-05 with total page 494 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Seattle Times selection for one of Best Non-Fiction Books of 2010 Winner of the New England Historial Association's 2010 James P. Hanlan Award Winner of the Outdoor Writers Association of America 2011 Excellence in Craft Award, Book Division, First Place "A compelling and well-annotated tale of greed, slaughter and geopolitics." —Los Angeles Times As Henry Hudson sailed up the broad river that would one day bear his name, he grew concerned that his Dutch patrons would be disappointed in his failure to find the fabled route to the Orient. What became immediately apparent, however, from the Indians clad in deer skins and "good furs" was that Hudson had discovered something just as tantalizing. The news of Hudson's 1609 voyage to America ignited a fierce competition to lay claim to this uncharted continent, teeming with untapped natural resources. The result was the creation of an American fur trade, which fostered economic rivalries and fueled wars among the European powers, and later between the United States and Great Britain, as North America became a battleground for colonization and imperial aspirations. In Fur, Fortune, and Empire, best-selling author Eric Jay Dolin chronicles the rise and fall of the fur trade of old, when the rallying cry was "get the furs while they last." Beavers, sea otters, and buffalos were slaughtered, used for their precious pelts that were tailored into extravagant hats, coats, and sleigh blankets. To read Fur, Fortune, and Empire then is to understand how North America was explored, exploited, and settled, while its native Indians were alternately enriched and exploited by the trade. As Dolin demonstrates, fur, both an economic elixir and an agent of destruction, became inextricably linked to many key events in American history, including the French and Indian War, the American Revolution, and the War of 1812, as well as to the relentless pull of Manifest Destiny and the opening of the West. This work provides an international cast beyond the scope of any Hollywood epic, including Thomas Morton, the rabble-rouser who infuriated the Pilgrims by trading guns with the Indians; British explorer Captain James Cook, whose discovery in the Pacific Northwest helped launch America's China trade; Thomas Jefferson who dreamed of expanding the fur trade beyond the Mississippi; America's first multimillionaire John Jacob Astor, who built a fortune on a foundation of fur; and intrepid mountain men such as Kit Carson and Jedediah Smith, who sliced their way through an awe inspiring and unforgiving landscape, leaving behind a mythic legacy still resonates today. Concluding with the virtual extinction of the buffalo in the late 1800s, Fur, Fortune, and Empire is an epic history that brings to vivid life three hundred years of the American experience, conclusively demonstrating that the fur trade played a seminal role in creating the nation we are today.

Visualizing Empire

Author : Rebecca Peabody
Publisher : Getty Publications
ISBN 13 : 1606066684
Total Pages : 202 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (6 download)

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Book Synopsis Visualizing Empire by : Rebecca Peabody

Download or read book Visualizing Empire written by Rebecca Peabody and published by Getty Publications. This book was released on 2021-01-19 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of how an official French visual culture normalized France’s colonial project and exposed citizens and subjects to racialized ideas of life in the empire. By the end of World War I, having fortified its colonial holdings in the Caribbean, Latin America, Africa, the Indian Ocean, and Asia, France had expanded its dominion to the four corners of the earth. This volume examines how an official French visual culture normalized the country’s colonial project and exposed citizens and subjects alike to racialized ideas of life in the empire. Essays analyze aspects of colonialism through investigations into the art, popular literature, material culture, film, and exhibitions that represented, celebrated, or were created for France’s colonies across the seas. These studies draw from the rich documents and media—photographs, albums, postcards, maps, posters, advertisements, and children’s games—related to the nineteenth- and twentieth-century French empire that are held in the Getty Research Institute’s Association Connaissance de l’histoire de l’Afrique contemporaine (ACHAC) collections. ACHAC is a consortium of scholars and researchers devoted to exploring and promoting discussions of race, iconography, and the colonial and postcolonial periods of Africa and Europe.

Empire of Cotton

Author : Sven Beckert
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0375713964
Total Pages : 642 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (757 download)

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Book Synopsis Empire of Cotton by : Sven Beckert

Download or read book Empire of Cotton written by Sven Beckert and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2015-11-10 with total page 642 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER OF THE BANCROFT PRIZE • A Pulitzer Prize finalist that's as unsettling as it is enlightening: a book that brilliantly weaves together the story of cotton with how the present global world came to exist. “Masterly … An astonishing achievement.” —The New York Times The empire of cotton was, from the beginning, a fulcrum of constant global struggle between slaves and planters, merchants and statesmen, workers and factory owners. Sven Beckert makes clear how these forces ushered in the world of modern capitalism, including the vast wealth and disturbing inequalities that are with us today. In a remarkably brief period, European entrepreneurs and powerful politicians recast the world’s most significant manufacturing industry, combining imperial expansion and slave labor with new machines and wage workers to make and remake global capitalism.

Green with Milk and Sugar

Author : Robert Hellyer
Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 0231552947
Total Pages : 187 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (315 download)

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Book Synopsis Green with Milk and Sugar by : Robert Hellyer

Download or read book Green with Milk and Sugar written by Robert Hellyer and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2021-10-29 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today, Americans are some of the world’s biggest consumers of black teas; in Japan, green tea, especially sencha, is preferred. These national partialities, Robert Hellyer reveals, are deeply entwined. Tracing the transpacific tea trade from the eighteenth century onward, Green with Milk and Sugar shows how interconnections between Japan and the United States have influenced the daily habits of people in both countries. Hellyer explores the forgotten American penchant for Japanese green tea and how it shaped Japanese tastes. In the nineteenth century, Americans favored green teas, which were imported from China until Japan developed an export industry centered on the United States. The influx of Japanese imports democratized green tea: Americans of all classes, particularly Midwesterners, made it their daily beverage—which they drank hot, often with milk and sugar. In the 1920s, socioeconomic trends and racial prejudices pushed Americans toward black teas from Ceylon and India. Facing a glut, Japanese merchants aggressively marketed sencha on their home and imperial markets, transforming it into an icon of Japanese culture. Featuring lively stories of the people involved in the tea trade—including samurai turned tea farmers and Hellyer’s own ancestors—Green with Milk and Sugar offers not only a social and commodity history of tea in the United States and Japan but also new insights into how national customs have profound if often hidden international dimensions.

Empire of the Summer Moon

Author : S. C. Gwynne
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 1416597158
Total Pages : 394 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (165 download)

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Book Synopsis Empire of the Summer Moon by : S. C. Gwynne

Download or read book Empire of the Summer Moon written by S. C. Gwynne and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2010-05-25 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: *Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award* *A New York Times Notable Book* *Winner of the Texas Book Award and the Oklahoma Book Award* This New York Times bestseller and stunning historical account of the forty-year battle between Comanche Indians and white settlers for control of the American West “is nothing short of a revelation…will leave dust and blood on your jeans” (The New York Times Book Review). Empire of the Summer Moon spans two astonishing stories. The first traces the rise and fall of the Comanches, the most powerful Indian tribe in American history. The second entails one of the most remarkable narratives ever to come out of the Old West: the epic saga of the pioneer woman Cynthia Ann Parker and her mixed-blood son Quanah, who became the last and greatest chief of the Comanches. Although readers may be more familiar with the tribal names Apache and Sioux, it was in fact the legendary fighting ability of the Comanches that determined when the American West opened up. Comanche boys became adept bareback riders by age six; full Comanche braves were considered the best horsemen who ever rode. They were so masterful at war and so skillful with their arrows and lances that they stopped the northern drive of colonial Spain from Mexico and halted the French expansion westward from Louisiana. White settlers arriving in Texas from the eastern United States were surprised to find the frontier being rolled backward by Comanches incensed by the invasion of their tribal lands. The war with the Comanches lasted four decades, in effect holding up the development of the new American nation. Gwynne’s exhilarating account delivers a sweeping narrative that encompasses Spanish colonialism, the Civil War, the destruction of the buffalo herds, and the arrival of the railroads, and the amazing story of Cynthia Ann Parker and her son Quanah—a historical feast for anyone interested in how the United States came into being. Hailed by critics, S. C. Gwynne’s account of these events is meticulously researched, intellectually provocative, and, above all, thrillingly told. Empire of the Summer Moon announces him as a major new writer of American history.

A Local History of Global Capital

Author : Tariq Omar Ali
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 0691202575
Total Pages : 266 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (912 download)

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Book Synopsis A Local History of Global Capital by : Tariq Omar Ali

Download or read book A Local History of Global Capital written by Tariq Omar Ali and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-31 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Before the advent of synthetic fibers and cargo containers, jute sacks were the preferred packaging material of global trade, transporting the world's grain, cotton, sugar, tobacco, coffee, wool, guano, and bacon. Jute was the second-most widely consumed fiber in the world, after cotton. While the sack circulated globally, the plant was cultivated almost exclusively by peasant smallholders in a small corner of the world: the Bengal delta. This book examines how jute fibers entangled the delta's peasantry in the rhythms and vicissitudes of global capital. Taking readers from the nineteenth-century high noon of the British Raj to the early years of post-partition Pakistan in the mid-twentieth century, Tariq Omar Ali traces how the global connections wrought by jute transformed every facet of peasant life: practices of work, leisure, domesticity, and sociality; ideas and discourses of justice, ethics, piety, and religiosity; and political commitments and actions. Ali examines how peasant life was structured and restructured with oscillations in global commodity markets, as the nineteenth-century period of peasant consumerism and prosperity gave way to debt and poverty in the twentieth century. A Local History of Global Capital traces how jute bound the Bengal delta's peasantry to turbulent global capital, and how global commodity markets shaped everyday peasant life and determined the difference between prosperity and poverty, survival and starvation.

Knowledge and the Ends of Empire

Author : Ian W. Campbell
Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 1501707892
Total Pages : 418 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (17 download)

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Book Synopsis Knowledge and the Ends of Empire by : Ian W. Campbell

Download or read book Knowledge and the Ends of Empire written by Ian W. Campbell and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-07 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Knowledge and the Ends of Empire, Ian W. Campbell investigates the connections between knowledge production and policy formation on the Kazak steppes of the Russian Empire. Hoping to better govern the region, tsarist officials were desperate to obtain reliable information about an unfamiliar environment and population. This thirst for knowledge created opportunities for Kazak intermediaries to represent themselves and their landscape to the tsarist state. Because tsarist officials were uncertain of what the steppe was, and disagreed on what could be made of it, Kazaks were able to be part of these debates, at times influencing the policies that were pursued.Drawing on archival materials from Russia and Kazakhstan and a wide range of nineteenth-century periodicals in Russian and Kazak, Campbell tells a story that highlights the contingencies of and opportunities for cooperation with imperial rule. Kazak intermediaries were at first able to put forward their own idiosyncratic views on whether the steppe was to be Muslim or secular, whether it should be a center of stock-raising or of agriculture, and the extent to which local institutions needed to give way to imperial institutions. It was when the tsarist state was most confident in its knowledge of the steppe that it committed its gravest errors by alienating Kazak intermediaries and placing unbearable stresses on pastoral nomads. From the 1890s on, when the dominant visions in St. Petersburg were of large-scale peasant colonization of the steppe and its transformation into a hearth of sedentary agriculture, the same local knowledge that Kazaks had used to negotiate tsarist rule was transformed into a language of resistance.

Empire of Signs

Author : Roland Barthes
Publisher : Macmillan
ISBN 13 : 9780374522070
Total Pages : 132 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (22 download)

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Book Synopsis Empire of Signs by : Roland Barthes

Download or read book Empire of Signs written by Roland Barthes and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 1982 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This anthology by Roland Barthes is a reflection on his travels to Japan in the 1960s. In twenty-six short chapters he writes about his encounters with symbols of Japanese culture as diverse as pachinko, train stations, chopsticks, food, physiognomy, poetry, and gift-wrapping. He muses elegantly on, and with affection for, a system "altogether detached from our own." For Barthes, the sign here does not signify, and so offers liberation from the West's endless creation of meaning. Tokyo, like all major cities, has a center--the Imperial Palace--but in this case it is empty, "both forbidden and indifferent ... inhabited by an emperor whom no one ever sees." This emptiness of the sign is pursued throughout the book, and offers a stimulating alternative line of thought about the ways in which cultures are structured.

Tea and empire

Author : Angela McCarthy
Publisher : Manchester University Press
ISBN 13 : 1526123398
Total Pages : 382 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (261 download)

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Book Synopsis Tea and empire by : Angela McCarthy

Download or read book Tea and empire written by Angela McCarthy and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2017-07-21 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book brings to life for the first time the remarkable story of James Taylor, ‘father of the Ceylon tea enterprise’ in the nineteenth century. Publicly celebrated in Sri Lanka for his efforts in transforming the country’s economy and shaping the world’s drinking habits, Taylor died in disgrace and remains unknown to the present day in his native Scotland. Using a unique archive of Taylor’s letters written over a forty-year period, Angela McCarthy and Tom Devine provide an unusually detailed reconstruction of a British planter’s life in Asia at the high noon of empire. As well as charting the development of Ceylon’s key commodities in the nineteenth century, the book examines the dark side of planting life including violence and conflict, oppression and despair. A range of other fascinating themes are evocatively examined, including graphic depictions of the Indian Mutiny, ‘race’ and ethnicity, migration, environmental transformation, cross-cultural contact, and emotional ties to home.