In the early 1880s a disastrous plant disease diminished the yields of the hitherto flourishing coffee plantation of Ceylon. Coincidentally, world market conditions for coffee were becoming increasingly unfavourable. The combination of these factors brought a swift end to coffee cultivation in the British crown colony and pushed the island into a severe economic crisis. When Ceylon re-emerged from this crisis only a decade later, its economy had been thoroughly transformed and now rested on the large-scale cultivation of tea. This book uses the unprecedented intensity and swiftness of this process to highlight the socioeconomic interconnections and dependencies in tropical export economies in the late nineteenth century and it shows how dramatically Ceylonese society was affected by the economic transformation.

In the early 1880s a disastrous plant disease diminished the yields of the hitherto flourishing coffee plantation of Ceylon. Coincidentally, world market conditions for coffee were becoming increasingly unfavourable. The combination of these factors brought a swift end to coffee cultivation in the British crown colony and pushed the island into a severe economic crisis. When Ceylon re-emerged from this crisis only a decade later, its economy had been thoroughly transformed and now rested on the large-scale cultivation of tea. This book uses the unprecedented intensity and swiftness of this process to highlight the socioeconomic interconnections and dependencies in tropical export economies in the late nineteenth century and it shows how dramatically Ceylonese society was affected by the economic transformation.

This volume focuses on the procedures for determining the geographical indicator labels for globally traded goods in the Asia-Pacific region. The book is also available as Open Access.

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.

"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.

Slavery and Bonded Labor in Asia, 1250–1900 is the first collection of studies to focus on slavery and related forms of labor throughout Asia. The 15 chapters by an international group of scholars assess the current state of Asian slavery studies, discuss new research on slave systems in Asia, identify avenues for future research, and explore new approaches to reconstructing the history of slavery and bonded labor in Asia and, by extension, elsewhere in the globe. Individual chapters examine slavery, slave trading, abolition, and bonded labor in places as diverse as Ceylon, China, India, Korea, the Mongol Empire, the Philippines, the Sulu Archipelago, and Timor in local, regional, pan-regional, and comparative contexts. Contributors are: Richard B. Allen, Michael D. Bennett, Claude Chevaleyre, Jeff Fynn-Paul, Hans Hägerdal, Shawna Herzog, Jessica Hinchy, Kumari Jayawardena, Rachel Kurian, Bonny Ling, Christopher Lovins, Stephanie Mawson, Anthony Reid, James Francis Warren, Don J. Wyatt, Harriet T. Zurndorfer.

19th-century British imperial expansion dramatically shaped today's globalised world. Imperialism encouraged mass migrations of people, shifting flora, fauna and commodities around the world and led to a series of radical environmental changes never before experienced in history. Eco-Cultural Networks and the British Empire explores how these networks shaped ecosystems, cultures and societies throughout the British Empire and how they were themselves transformed by local and regional conditions. This multi-authored volume begins with a rigorous theoretical analysis of the categories of 'empire' and 'imperialism'. Its chapters, written by leading scholars in the field, draw methodologically from recent studies in environmental history, post-colonial theory and the history of science. Together, these perspectives provide a comprehensive historical understanding of how the British Empire reshaped the globe during the 19th and 20th centuries. This book will be an important addition to the literature on British imperialism and global ecological change.