Guerrilla History - Tea War w/ Andrew Liu

Episode Date: June 18, 2021

In this episode of Guerrilla History, we bring on Professor Andrew Liu to talk about his book Tea War: A History of Capitalism in China and India.  A fascinating discussion about capitalist development in the periphery through the story of a commodity, be sure to get the word out! Andrew Liu is an assistant professor of history at Villanova University, where his research focuses on China, transnational Asia, and the history of Capitalism.  His book Tea War is available from Yale University Press: https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300243734/tea-war.  The discount code he mentions during the interview is YAB99.  You can find Andrew's podcast Time to Say Goodbye wherever you get your pods, or at https://goodbye.substack.com/ and on twitter @ttsgpod. Andrew himself can be found on twitter @andybliu. Guerrilla History is the podcast that acts as a reconnaissance report of global proletarian history, and aims to use the lessons of history to analyze the present.  If you have any questions or guest/topic suggestions, email them to us at [e-mail]. Your hosts are immunobiologist Henry Hakamaki, Professor Adnan Husain, historian and Director of the School of Religion at Queens University, and Revolutionary Left Radio's Breht O'Shea.   Follow us on social media!  Our podcast can be found on twitter @guerrilla_pod, and can be supported on patreon at https://www.patreon.com/guerrillahistory.  Your contributions will make the show possible to continue and succeed! To follow the hosts, Henry can be found on twitter @huck1995, and also has a patreon to help support himself through the pandemic where he breaks down science and public health research and news at https://www.patreon.com/huck1995.  Adnan can be followed on twitter @adnanahusain, and also runs The Majlis Podcast, which can be found at https://anchor.fm/the-majlis, and the Muslim Societies-Global Perspectives group at Queens University, https://www.facebook.com/MSGPQU/.   Breht is the host of Revolutionary Left Radio, which can be followed on twitter @RevLeftRadio and cohost of The Red Menace Podcast, which can be followed on twitter @Red_Menace_Pod.  Follow and support these shows on patreon, and find them at https://www.revolutionaryleftradio.com/.     Thanks to Ryan Hakamaki, who designed and created the podcast's artwork, and Kevin MacLeod, who creates royalty-free music.

You don't remember Dinn-Vin-Vin? No! The same thing happened in Algeria, in Africa. They didn't have anything but a rank. The French had all these highly mechanized instruments of warfare. But they put some guerrilla action on. Hello and welcome to guerrilla history. the podcast that acts as a reconnaissance report of global proletarian history

and aims to use the lessons of history to analyze the present. I'm your host, Henry Huckimacki, joined, as always, by my co-hosts, Professor Adnan Hussein, historian and director of the School of Religion at Queens University in Ontario, Canada. Hello, Adnan. How are you doing today? I'm doing well, Henry. Great to be with you as ever. Yeah, it's always nice to see you. And I'm also, as always, joined by Brett O'Shea, host of Revolutionary.

Left Radio and co-host of the Red Menace podcast. Hello, Brett. How are you this fine morning? I'm doing great. And this work that we're going to cover today is a really interesting one, so I'm excited to dive into it. For sure. So as you alluded to the guest or the topic that we're going to have today is a book that's out, a relatively new book titled T-War, A History of Capitalism in China and India by Andrew Liu, who's an assistant professor of history at Villanova University. Now, Adnan, I'm going to pitch this over to you to begin the conversation, this intro segment, because you had flagged this book up for the two of us as being an interesting book, that one that you were going through and one that would make an interesting episode of guerrilla history.

Can you just talk about that, you know, at what point in this book you decided that this would make a good episode of guerrilla history and why? Why do you think that our show would be a good venue for a conversation about T-War? Well, I think one reason is, of course, we like to have global coverage and deal with non-Western histories as well. And this was a book that was dealing with both China and India. So it seemed like a good study to integrate large regions of, you know, the Asian continent into our historical understanding and analysis. And secondly, I think we understood how significant. the opium wars were the history of colonialism, but one thing that we may not have understood well broadly in our just general sense of history is how China and India may have fit into

a history of capitalism, which is the subject of this book. And I happen to be reading it because I'm interested in some of these new commodity histories and what they have to tell us about the development of capitalism. There's been new work, for example, Empire of Cotton by Sven Beckert, which is a history of capitalism using the study of cotton and the textile industries that use cotton that also looked at slavery

as part of the development of capitalism. That was quite intriguing. And I noticed that the Tea War was arguing as well that different labor regimes needed to be understood in non-Western cultures and societies as still being involved in the development of capitalism. So that seemed very intriguing as how to bring a non-Western perspective to the history of capitalism. And I noticed that Andrew Liu had written a couple of articles about how this would be, how his work and his research might contribute to a new theorization

of the history of capitalism. I thought that's perfect for us to be able to understand also today what's happening in the world with the expansion of the Chinese economy and soon to be the largest economy in the world and of course also changes that have been taking place in India. So I thought this would be a perfect work to talk about and Andrew Liu be a really wonderful guest since he was thinking about some of these theoretical issues as well as the historical context that many of our listeners might not be so familiar. with, but would be very interested to learn more about. I'll just pop in quick before I turn it over to you, Brett, to talk about whatever you want in this

introductory segment. But I'm just going to mention that, Adnan, I agree with you entirely that it's very interesting to look at a specific commodity and how that has influenced capitalism throughout the years. So I have a few books myself on specific commodities in the history of those commodities. I know I have one on Coca-Cola. I have one on coffee. I have one on coffee. But those were more of histories of the commodity itself, rather than a socioeconomic history of integrating the usage of that commodity within the global trade and global capitalist system, as well as how it contributed to the development of capitalism as a system. So this was really my first book that I've been looking at that has taken not just a look at

the commodity as such, but the commodity as intrinsic within the processes driving the development of capitalism. So the fact that you flag that, I find that particularly important because that really was one of the most interesting things to me when going through this work is how this commodity can be used as an explainer for the development of capitalism within the global system. And also, again, looking at these peripheral countries, as, you know, world systems theorists would call them, peripheral countries where when we're talking about the development of capitalism as a system, we tend to look at the industrialized. developed countries. But of course, countries like China and India that came to industrialization

much later in the game or to capitalism much later in the game, they, of course, were very innately involved in the development of capitalism in their own way. And so looking at these countries, I think is quite critical to understanding the development of capitalism as a system on the global stage. Brett, what are your thoughts? Yeah, I mean, I agree with all of that. I haven't really done a lot of research and reading into these sort of commodity histories. So this is one of the first texts I've ever had that really, you know, let me engage with that as a form of telling history. And I really, really enjoyed that and found it unique and really insightful. And then, you know, and he talks about this in his book as well, but mainstream historians, but also like

people on the left, when we think about the history of capitalism, there is a centering of of Western Europe and this sense that there's like this periphery and it's sort of secondary and it only makes sense in relation to Europe and in some sense that's true in the sense that everything is interconnected. But in another sense, focusing on how capitalism developed in these cultures, I think is a really interesting way and in a broadening of our understanding of the history of capitalism more broadly. And then I also like how he explores how certain narratives or even like ideological conceptualizations we're sort of in that that were being you know pushed out by these processes of capitalist development and accumulation we're sort of internalized

by thinkers within these countries themselves and I have a question specifically about time and how you know how how how the abstract conception of time was shifted in these countries due to the development of capitalism um so there's just a lot to cover and I'm sure we'll get we'll get into it as well as like Marxist influences and you know what Andrew takes and doesn't take from you know Marxist approaches to history but um just overall just a really interesting interesting read I agree wholeheartedly with with all of that and just one other thing that I want to flag up is the the idea of conceptualizing things within this book is very interesting because of course Andrew has his own conception of capitalism as such uh that I think that the

that's how I'm going to open the interview with him is, you know, explain his conception of capitalism. But, I mean, there's a lot of other conceptions that are looked at in this book in a very interesting way. So as you said, time, I think that the Comprador class and the changing conceptions surrounding that is a very interesting topic that was looked at in the book. And one that, of course, I had a very deeply ingrained thought on the Comprador class as such. but it turns out that, you know, that conception changed over time,

both in terms of what a comparador was, but also in terms of how they were viewed by others within the society. So I think that there's a lot of conceptual questions that can come up in this interview that will be relatively interesting to take. But I also think that just looking at these events themselves, these tea wars as such surrounding the opium wars in China, and then, of course, as India became involved in the tea trade as well shortly afterwards, these are all going to be very interesting questions to raise up with Andrew.

Adnan, anything else you want to add before we wrap up our introduction? No, I think we should get into it. I think this is a very innovative and imaginative work of historical analysis. As you were saying, there are a lot of conceptual dimensions that he rethinking on the basis of doing close, insightful, historical work in a non-Western society or two non-Western societies and their interrelation with one another that is so interesting and novel where Europe is only partially mediated through British colonialism, but that's not really the main story. So that'll be quite interesting how this helps clarify some of the

concepts we've inherited in the Marxist tradition about capitalism and how to understand it. So I'm very much looking forward to getting into it now. Brett, any final words before we get to the interview? No, I just echo Adon's sentiments there, and yeah, I'm really excited just to see where this conversation goes. Excellent. Well, in that case, listeners, we're going to go and wrap up our introduction and get right into our interview with Andrew Liu, author of T. War. And we're back, and we're joined by our guest, Professor Andrew Liu, who is, again, the author of Tea War, a history of capitalism in China and India. Hello, Andrew. It's a pleasure to have you on the show.

Yeah, thanks for having me on. Of course. So I guess to start off this interview, why don't I have you, I'll ask a two-part question to kind of get us worked into it. So in your book here, as you mentioned, it's a history of capitalism in China and India told through the story of this specific commodity through tea. Why don't you take a few minutes to kind of lay out the case that you present in this book, the central argument of this book, and in the process of doing so, can you lay out what your conception of capitalism that you're using in this book is? Because I think that it'll be important for all of the listeners to be on the same page of what you mean when you say capitalism, both in the book and throughout this discussion. Yeah, starting with the light questions. I think I should say

I've been kind of giving this spiel when I've talked about this book to others and it might be relevant that I use the word capitalism in the title I use the word capitalism throughout the book when I kind of first gave a draft of the book to the publisher and got through the reviews

one of the reviewers had said you know you use this word capitalism a lot but you never define it right you never give us the definition and so you might as well do that and so eventually I did that's in the introduction I think it was this kind of this thing I kind of painstakingly worked on just to make sure every word was

correct, right? But the point is like, there was the last thing I wrote. I wrote the whole book first, and I use the word capitalism and capital in different ways, but it wasn't until the end that I kind of forced myself to come up with a theory. And I've, you know, as historians are, you know, historians themselves tend to be allergic to theory, so it was something I was kind of uncomfortable with because you can always prove a counter-example and so on. The basic concept, how should I put this?

So the basic story, right, is about the tea trade of China and the tea industry of India. These are things people are probably relatively familiar with, the opium trade, you know, from India to China, orchestrated by the British Empire, leads to the opium war and the treaty port system. That is people are probably familiar with. And then alongside that you have the story, probably less well known, is that even though Chinese tea was by far, it was like the only producer of tea for the world market in the 18th and 19th century, pretty quickly, Indian tea overtakes it. And so when you go to your grocery store today and buy tea,

especially like cheap, you know, like a sort of mass-produced tea, if you're getting from like Lipton, you know, that's a British company. And that has a, the legacy is like that comes from their colonial operated plantations, probably in India or Ceylon. And then in the more recent years, East Asian tea has kind of made a comeback on the global market, but the sort of like cheap mass-produced Lipton kind of tea is, was kind of like the normal commodity of the 20th century. So there's no question that tea was profitable.

I think no one would contradict that. But the question that academics always sort of go back and forth over was like, what is capitalism? Are these countries capitalists? Just because you make a lot of money doesn't mean you're a capitalist. In fact, the kind of classic theory of imperialism would say something like the British profited off of having these tea plantations in India or this opium and tea. trade in China, but at the expense of the locals who were prevented from developing the

local economic conditions. So that would be a story in which you would have massive super profits for like the empire, but capitalist underdevelopment, right, in Asia and the analogy. And under development, obviously, also refers to Latin America as a famous example. So the argument, so in making my argument, I'm trying to sort of, I wind up basically directly confronting this kind of classic interpretation. It's in Chinese history, that's in Indian history, but that's actually basically this classic argument, I think, found author of historians and social science in the 20th century,

which is capitalism is fundamentally about a social situation in which you have the bifurcation between a doubly free wage worker. This comes from Marx in the capitalist class. The doubly free wage worker, if you've read Marx, he brings it up in like the fifth or sixth chapter, the classic example is basically workers who are not slaves or serfs unfree or workers who are not independent, meaning like the peasantry, people who are able to withdraw their labor from the land because they work at home or whatever. And the classic argument, the most classic

version of this argument probably comes from Robert Brenner, who is a historian at UCLA. He's riffing off of Maurice Dobb, famously from the Dobbs-Suizia to base of the 1950s. And their argument with something like, again, that in a place like India or China, where you have a peasantry that own land but are still producing things for the world market, they're not proletarianized, they're not completely market dependent. So they could be pressure to, like, say, grow tea for the world market. But because of their situation where they also own land, they can feed themselves by growing food on their own land, they will not, they cannot make the same sort of market demands upon, you know, the employers and the merchants to get paid extra, to get to get paid

a fair, quote unquote, a market share, right, compared to a free wage worker. They would be therefore super exploited. And the class example was always in England, the theory goes, in England you had a free wage worker. This is the famous right print of accumulation in England, where the English peasant gets dispossessed. And as a result, English peasant, you know, who is now an English proletarian, the sort of like Oliver Twist, kind of Charles Dickens' story, right? They are exploited.

You know, their life is shitty for sure. But at the same time, because they're completely market dependent, they're exerting pressure upon capitalists to either pay higher wages or develop the forces of production. In other words, innovate a steam engine, build a factory with dormitories for people to live in,

which is a much more rational and economic, efficient system than like peasant farms in the countryside. Right, right. So Dobb and Brenner, in the 50s and the 70s, had this very developmentalist take on Marxism, which is that free wage labor, only free wage labor is capitalist because only free wage labor leads to capitalist development. So it's a very developmentalist take. And I would say, I don't, I mean, I admire Brenner's work in a lot of ways, but I think that work was kind of inseparable from this mid-20th century Cold War context, where there was just this obsession with economic development. both by the capitalist world and the socialist world, right? And China and the USSR, they were very much all about developing their economies as much as they were about overcoming exploitation. Anyway, so that's all a big wind-up to say that. In this book, I think I'm trying to argue for a different interpretation of Marx,

a different interpretation of capitalism that is more premised upon, I think a certain rereading that has come out in the last few decades. For various reasons, I kind of think of it as like the rereading of Marx, that coincides with the crisis of capitalism in the 70s and coincides with your re-reading of like Hegel and the groomedress of Marx and all this is to say is that this isn't a story necessarily about development. It's a story about how capitalism is a story of just accumulation, accumulation of value, accumulation of profits and rent and all that stuff through all sorts of different forms.

They could be free wage workers. They could be peasants. They could be unfree workers. you'll see a kind of a version of this argument in the mainstream, most notably in the United States, in terms of this rethinking of slavery, right? Slavery in the classic sense would always be uncapitalist or pre-capitalist. But now it's like completely common sense to say that enslavement of African workers in the United States was part of the development of U.S. capitalism.

And that is kind of a radical departure from the mid-20th century interpretation. I'm not sure people realize that. And so I'm kind of making the same argument where in India, tea was grown under very unfree conditions. There wasn't slavery, but it was comparable to. Slavery was called adventure. And in China, tea was grown and produced under the conditions of, again, sort of like independent, you could call them like footloose or part-time or seasonal workers who probably owned a little bit of land, but then we're also working half the year in a work in a factory or something.

these are both and the narrow classic interpretation would be kind of excluded from the history of capitalism and my broader argument is something like if you look at basically the world outside of England the sort of classic archetype that Brenner and Bob set up you need this more flexible, stretchable, nimble interpretation of capitalism to make sense of places like the colonies and Asia and probably all sorts of places I'm not even familiar with but just kind of As I was kind of reading comparatively and horizontally across these different formations, it seemed pretty clear to me that what was that stake was honestly like a sort of non-neurcentric, more globally oriented interpretation of the history of capitalism. Yeah, I think that's really well said and a really great point. And really interesting, too, to see how that developmental approach was sort of broken with and how these other forms of extracted labor are brought into your analysis.

I think a great way to dive into the meat of the work itself is to perhaps start with the opium war. So if you could talk a little bit about the opium war, I know some people are vaguely familiar with it because we all kind of learn it in high school and college, at least touch on it. But just talk a little bit about it, how it unfolded and then shifted into its direct effect on like Chinese tea exports and how you do in the work. Yeah. So the opium where I think of it as, it's basically the culmination of this gradual process. So the Opium War, the official dates is 1839 to 1842. The buildup to that was in the 1700s, there was a couple of things, a lot of things going on, but among them was a lot of Europeans and then ultimately primarily British or British merchants,

actually Scottish merchants, who were going to southern China, this place called Canton or Guangzhou today, one of these massive cities in China today and buying a lot of these kind of sort of like well-known like they were known as shingwasry like fashionable Chinese goods for European markets silk porcelain and then tea eventually is the most profitable and these become wildly popular

in Western Europe in the 1800s in the 1700s this was a time when China was not looked down upon but actually admired by a lot of European sort of like bourgeoisie and literati and so on at the same time the British are kind of establishing their foothold in India, in Eastern India in particular in Bengal. And, you know, there's a lot of debate in the literature about was this intentional,

was this a quote-unquote accidental empire, right? But whatever the case was, from 1760 onwards, the British kind of increasingly expand their presence from basically tax collectors in Eastern India to graduate administrators in Eastern India, which was a very, well, anyway, the point is, to make all this work, We have to kind of figure out a way to make India pay for itself. You know, they can't just kind of extract taxes from the Indian peasant and then do nothing with all that money, right?

And at the same time, the other thing that was happening was the British were getting so addicted to tea from China that they were actually, and the Chinese market, you know, infamously, you know, infamously a lot of Chinese merchants said, we don't need to buy anything from the English. We have everything we have here, right? So the British were sending silver, the sort of valued currency at the time, which is, of course, finite to China. And there's a lot of hand-wringing among the British. Like, eventually we're going to run out of silver if we just keep buying all this tea, right? So eventually this thing called the opium for tea trade emerges in which the British, the basic pattern is the British would either send like maybe finished cotton textile goods to India and sell them for a profit, or they would just collect taxes in India for a profit, use that money to buy opium from Indian peasants who they kind of had. forced, conscripted them to grow opium for them. Bring that opium to China to Canton, sell the opium,

and this is the history of the British kind of enabling this Chinese addiction to opium in the 18, 1900s. And then take the profits from opium, buy tea, bring it back to England. And all along the route, the sort of the trade differential, the sort of difference between buying price and selling price was like, you know, three times, 10 times, 20 times. Basically, you could probably convert like a dollar or I guess a pound of a pound of your assets of capital in London. And after this whole circuit, it turned to like 30 pounds, right, because of all the difference in prices. And so they were benefiting off of price differentials and also obviously the British.

You see a company becomes a monopoly where they kind of use military and political force to kind of squeeze out their competitors. Fast forward to the 1830s or so, the Chinese, you know, the Qing Empire at the time, it was the empire of China, it was not ethnically Manchu Empire. They decide to enforce this ban on opium for a lot of reasons. You know, one was they just were kind of wary of the presence of foreigners, greater foreign presence. They were obviously worried about this opium addiction, although, to be honest, a lot of Qing emperors and Qing officials, including the emperor. was an opium addict. So, you know, it's a little hypocritical. I don't think that wasn't their sincere belief. But there was basically this fear that they were buying too much opium. And,

and of course, they also got so addicted to opium that they were actually sending silver back to the brand. So this was another economic factor. They basically tried to enforce this ban on opium. The British Royal Navy, the British government sends a military expedition. And the interesting thing is it was not actually authorized out of London where the parliament, it was authorized by the sort of the franchise, the British government in India was the one that authorizes. So it's like the colonial second headquarters in India was not authorized the war with China. And it was a very anti-climatic war. It was pretty obvious early on. The Royal Navy had much better technology than the China, like China has never needed, at the time they never needed a Navy. They weren't good at

water battle. So that was quickly over, and the consequence was the beginning in Chinese history, which was always seen as the beginning of this era of modern China or the treaty port era, where places like, you know, Hong Kong is turned into a British colony. Ports like Shanghai or Shaman are turned into treaty ports where the British and then the French and eventually like Russian and Japan, they all have rights, extraterritorial rights in China. And in the historiography of the canon of the Communist Party, they would say that China suffered a century of humiliation, roughly from 1842 to 1949. And it was upon this legacy of this colonial imperial legacy that the Communist Party kind of stake their claim as the liberators of China in 1949.

So the opium war was in a lot of ways really symbolic in the history of China's kind of inaugurating the modern period, the colonial period. and so on. As far as tea is concerned, the really basic story is that tea was already being traded to the rest of the world and it just kind of skyrockets after that. And even though a lot of people are familiar with the history of tea leading up to the opium war as the main cause of the opium war,

what my book does, mainly because everyone has already written about the opium war, was kind of the fall of the story after that, what happens after that. And there is, you know, as I show, the sort of intensification of social relations, intensification of economic pressures, in the countryside in China to grow more tea for this global market.

Well, that brings me to, I think, the consequence of that is something that I wanted to ask you to discuss a little bit more is what changes. Since you're talking about different labor regimes than wage labor, which is why they've not been integrated into an understanding of the history of capitalism, but you're also arguing that things do change, obviously. This isn't just the continuation of previously existing social relations. I'm wondering if you could tell us a little bit more about those labor regimes and how they changed and were exploited such that they could still be integrated into the commodity form of labor. Even if they're not selling their labor as free wage labors, how do you piece that together?

So how's that fold? Yeah, so let me, you know, I didn't want to talk too much for the first. answer, but I think the other, the other crucial part of what I'm trying to argue in terms of what is the theory of capitalism working with. And, you know, I also spell this out in that Spectre article. I think that the argument that Marx is making or the argument that Marxists that I respect are making, Javis Banaji in a history in India kind of made this argument most compellingly, was that this broad conception, this theoretical, the historical theory is something like wage labor was central to the development of capitalism, not.

necessarily because wage labor leads to all this development, but also because in Marx's conception, the commodity form, when labor becomes a commodity itself, that kind of closes the circle such that everything, what's the word, unleashes the possibilities for everything else to become a commodity, in the sense that in the old days, you know, if all of us were like, I'm a baker, you're a butcher, you know, the other person's a brewer, but we all are selling this, but we are not like wage workers, right? We might be buying and selling stuff for the sake of simply consuming it at the end of the day. And so things are briefly a commodity, but they're ultimately things that we consume for their

own, you know, use value is the term. But when the production of these goods actually gets mediated by a commodity, which is that you buy a worker's time and combine it with the raw materials to make bread, to sell it for a profit, to reinvest it, to buy more workers, and then everything becomes a commodity all of a sudden. And the theory goes then, well, if everything has a commodity, what differentiates? What makes the basic, how do you determine

how valuable a commodity is? And the answer, Mark said, the one thing that all commodities have in common, right, is that labor went into them. And so for Marx, the basic theory was, once wage labor gets introduced and becomes predominant, not just like one person's a wage worker in society, but the majority of people are wage workers

society, the pressures of assigning value to different commodities based on how much labor goes into them begins to take over. And it takes over to extent such that even those people who are not themselves wage workers, like peasants, unfree work, and so on, they begin to feel the pressures of valuating their labor along the same line. So I know this is all very abstract, but just, again, the basic example would be something like, if I'm a peasant growing tea on my own land. And I traditionally sold it for like, I don't know, 20 bucks for a pound. But then I'm suddenly in a society where everyone else who grows tea is using a wage worker system, which is increasingly putting all the pressure to become more and more efficient. And they grow tea for like and sell tea

for like $10 a pound. As an independent producer, I'm basically faced with a choice to either sell it at the same rate as everyone else or go out of business. Right. So the point of this is to say that what we see in China, what we see in India, was we have wage workers who don't, we have workers who I think are not the classily free wage worker, but as they get integrated in this global system, you know, of the British Empire as the kind of centerpiece of the system, and the United States has wage labor, and all sorts of urban industries have wage labor all throughout the world, right? You see a situation where, you know, I think what Marx would call it, like so-called pre-capitalist, pre-existing, traditional social forms, get reappropriated,

taken out of their earlier context of pre-capitalist societies and then plugged into a global capitalist system. And so the key was always to kind of distinguish between the appearance and the essence, right? The appearances, the farmers, the farmer, the slave is a slave, and, you know, they look unchanged from ancient society. But the essential relations of being employed to produce a commodity for surplus value, etc. and so on, right? That is what's distinctive. So to kind of bring this into some sort of empirical, like nitty-gritty, the thing I kind of hone in on is the fact that the sense of time, the sense of timing, and especially the sense of productivity, does seem to be heightened as these Chinese tea

producers and its Indian plantation workers are plugged into a global market where they're competing against each other for competitive prices. And so I look into, you know, the example I bring up in, and when I look at specifically at the Chinese tea peasants and the Chinese tea workshops is, again, they're using very, what would appear to be basically primitive technology. They just like burn some, burn some, they roast tea by burning like logs over a walk and they stir the tea leaves with like non-electronic, non-steam engine technology. And they actually keep time of how long it takes to, you know, roast things. the tea leaves, roll the tea leaves, package the tea leaves. They use this very, what seems to us, like very primitive timekeeping device, which is incense sticks, the kind of incense sticks you would see in like a, you know, at a temple in Asia. And it's the same principle as like an hourglass,

which is to say you don't really know how long an incensedic burns. I think we kind of guess now it's about 40 minutes. But what they use is, what they do is they use that incensed stick as a basic measure for how quickly the average worker can work. And then from that, they basically use that and push the workers, you have to, your wage that you're going to be rewarded with is based upon how quickly you worked relative to the average time as measured by this incensedic. And I argue that is a very modern, there's a very industrial notion of time premised upon the forces of competition in the marketplace, and that is very modern. And the contrast couldn't be more striking, right, that you had this very primitive, thousand-year-old technology

of incensedic timers, which have been traced to like 6th century China and Japan, but being plugged into very, plugged into a sort of industrial sense of time that would not be unrecognizable to like a factory worker in Manchester at the same moment. So that one of the, I guess one of the key arguments I'm trying to make is, again,

distinguishing between like how do things appear on the surface versus what are the sort of underlying social relations and I think that's something that, Yeah, and that's something that... Paying attention to the technology that's being used for timekeeping and regimenting workers, then you miss the fact that something in the actual practice of how labor is being monitored and organized has changed. That has to do with changing social relations, according to you. Yeah, and so, yeah, this is...

I would say that this is my kind of pushback against what I would think is a kind of a technological fetishism, which just to say, like, the history of capitalism is about, you know, basically like burning logs to steam engines to iPads, right? And that is that is the way to understand. Like, well, you know, you can also have people in the world who have new electricity whatsoever or to completely immerse within capitalist competition and pressures and all that stuff. And yeah, so, yeah, I would say that. Can you briefly really quick just touch on the analog in India that you mentioned in your book to the incense stick?

I think it's interesting. Are you talking about the gongs or the? Yeah, I mean, I couldn't do. too much with this, but it was interesting that they, again, like the timekeeping devices, I mean, I don't know how much listeners are aware of this, but the kind of modern notion of time we take for granted today is only about 100 years old, right? This idea that, you know, right now it's 133 on my computer and, you know, something 33 for you all, right? That was all standardized at the turn of the century to basically, my understanding is to make railroads

run on time and all that stuff. Before that time was just like all over the place. It was basically like where was the sun and where you lived and all that stuff. So what they did in the Indian tea gardens was they had this basic sense of like in India, you know, when the sun rises, it's a certain hour or whatever, but they actually would move it back and forth on the tea plantations such that they would, I'm trying to remember now, they moved that they moved like instead of being saying in quote quote in reality quote unquote at 6 o'clock, they would say it was five o'clock.

And then so that the workers would, I guess, because they're in northeast India in Assam, which is far away from like Delhi and Calcutta, right, the sun would rise and fall at a different hour. So they would adjust the time to basically maximize as much work time as possible for the work. It's not that different than daylight saving times, you know, that we have today that we, that, you know,

we should, we know, it's like basically a productivity plan is to make sure we all work as much as possible during the daytime. So, yeah, like time was bendable and malleable and used in order to maximize productivity out of its workers in both China, India. And in both cases, we don't have, like, stop clocks or, you know, iPhones to keep track. It's just whatever existing technology is lying around, it gets appropriate and plugged into, I think, in my view, very industrial work discipline kind of regimes.

before I ask my my question there's what you're talking about here is reminding me of like a proto version of that efficiency theory where you increase efficiency at every single point within production in order to increase overall efficiency but I'm forgetting the term for that anybody anybody up the top of like Taylorism or Taylorism that's right thank you very much yeah yeah okay so it's like proto Taylorism that you're that you're talking about here and that you discussed in the book and I think that's a very interesting thing because that of course is thought of is more of a more modern concept, but really this is something that has been, I mean, used all the way back into antiquity, but was in very stark relief right here. But a follow-up question that I have for you. So we're talking about workers right now. And of course, this is a proletarian history program. So I would be remiss to not have us discuss material conditions for the workers, as well as material conditions for the society as a result of the tea industry. So, when you have the tea industry before perhaps, you know, British capital, British imperialism really started to stamp its foot on things and did that change once the British imperialism

really kicked off in the tea industry. What were material conditions like for the workers within the industry and how did the industry affect the material conditions of society more broadly? That's a good question. I think I'm trying to think back to what I can say about life before. I mean, the thing is, I think the what I would say is before the opium war, before the real kind of intensification of all this, you obviously have tea producers in these market towns across China,

and they would basically from like April to June or April to August, they would grow tea and transported to the treaty ports, which are like in Guangzhou basically, in Canton in the south. My understanding, so I'll just say that our evidence of what life was like is very scattershot at that moment because the sources are basically whatever can be found among like Chinese merchants, the literati didn't go very in-depth.

The beginning of really in-depth evidence is actually when an English traveler named Robert Fortune begins to kind of travel through China in the 1850s or so. And then eventually we have some piece of evidence not until the 1930s. do we have a really clear piece of evidence of really what life was like because that's when you have social scientists, like people who would, you know, like university researchers in Shanghai

and they would travel out to the country, like, oh, what was life like and actually documented it down? My sense is that the argument, the narrative I'm kind of telling is that there was, you had workers who were kind of casually working every few seasons, and it would be a myth to say something

like China was pre-commercial or that there was no sort of like commodity commercial society before the British came. There actually was for several centuries. Now, there is debate about to what extent that was, to what extent that or to what degree the average Chinese peasant was selling the labor on the market versus like producing for themselves. There's a lot of literature now that suggests that I think more broadly, things were not that bad in 18th and 19th century. And the average Chinese family probably was, you know, they were opting.

Like this was like an opportunity for them to grow stuff for themselves, but then also sell some, like do some cotton weaving on the side or sell some silk on the side. And T represented, quote, unquote, another opportunity along those lines during the good years, right? And then the thing I kind of wanted to emphasize was T-booms from 1840 to 1880s or 90s or so. it's around the bus around 1890s into the 1930s where you kind of get these surveys that things begin to really rapidly deteriorate

for the tea industry and for the Chinese peasant as a whole. And the story I tell for tea is really parallel to, one can tell the same story about the silk trade of China, the cotton trade of China, the kind of major commodities where things were pretty good

economically speaking for the sort of average peasant because we're getting good prices around the world. But once competition kicks in, and you have, in the case of tea, Indian competitors, in the case of silk, Italian, and Japanese competitors, in the case of cotton, of course, you have the British textile industry, and then you have the U.S. sort of raw cotton industry of the South, right? That's when things get really bad, because prices begin to fall. And you have all sorts of peasants who are

going into debt in order. They basically, you know, for them, their issue is that they are completely at the mercy of these merchants and money lenders. The average tea peasant lived, you know, in a province called Anhui or in the Yangtze Delta, which are, I don't know, hundreds of thousands of kilometers away from Shanghai. And they basically have to make a decision in like March. Are they going to grow tea that year? And then it's not until like June, do they enter through the note what the prices for tea are going to be. And what happens eventually is because of the falling price of tea due to global competition,

the first you have the sort of the foreign merchant at the treaty port, paying less money than the year before. those losses get passed onto the Chinese middleman. They were all men, basically. Also undercutting the person they were talking to all the way up down to the peasant. So the peasants, through all these indirect links in the supply chain, eventually discover months after their initial investment to grow tea for that year that they're going to probably lose money for the year. And so it's competition, it's the falling rate, the falling prices for these goods,

and it's also the opacity that, that merchants take advantage of and peasants are the victims of. That by the turn of the century, it's like, I don't know, peasants basically are, a lot of these household peasants we discover are, you know, living from season to season. They take out loans just to survive the winter. I don't think anyone ever accumulated the savings or gradually losing their land or falling into debt to the sort of local village money lenders.

And by the 1920s, 1930s, a lot of Chinese, economists and researchers are saying, like, the real scourge of the Chinese society is, you know, imperialism and this British trade, but it's also these sort of, sort of like parasitic middlemen. And the term in Chinese history was always known as the Comprador. I don't know if you know you all have heard that term, right, which gets used all around the world in Latin America and India, right? But it comes from Chinese history to refer to the Chinese merchant that did trade with overseas and becomes by the 20th century kind of, targeted as this kind of burden upon the rest of the Chinese peasant, by extension the rest of the Chinese, the nation, because they're the ones who are, they are making money off the tea trade, but it's at the expense of the peasant whose conditions are getting worse and worse. By the 1930s, there's a famous line by the observer, R.H. Tawny, that something is like, the peasant in China is basically like up to their neck and water, and one wave is going to make them drown. And that is kind of the condition that I think describes.

the tea peasant by the 1930s and all sorts of peasantry around the around the country yeah across all sorts of industries yeah so I have I have a question that's related to that and related to subsequent questions I know Henry has a question about the term compradour Adon has a question about commodities more broadly and I have one related to conditions so and we know that tea as you've mentioned here and in the book was related in complex ways to other commodities one of which was sugar so I'm wondering sort of how tea was not only tied up with slavery and an indentured servitude in Asia, but as well

as in other places around the world, like in the Caribbean, and as you mentioned a little bit before, in the U.S. So if you could just sort of broaden out those dimensions, I'm really interested in that. Yeah, I think this is something that, to kind of step back for a second, when this might be useful for a lot of listeners who are not in history departments, that one thing that's been going on for historians since basically the OA crisis has been this rediscovery of this category called History of Capitalism. There is famously an article in New York Times in 2013 about how history departments were looking at capitalism again. And what that's really referring to is historians of the United States, re-examining the history of capitalism. And as I kind of

mentioned earlier, one of the big objects of research has been rethinking slavery as capitalistic rather than this kind of. And obviously there's political implications like this. This is kind of part of the national reckoning with the legacy of slavery, how it's still with us today, and how much of the United States is built upon slavery. And one of the kind of takeaways from a sort of economic historian's perspective is not just that slavery was bad and oppressive, which it was, right? And this is how we learn in high school. But it also was productive of all these profits that still live with us today, like in all sorts of institutions that were built on slave money. And so I think what I'm, what I was kind of trying to tap into, you know, I kind of speculate about this at the

beginning of the book, if you just kind of read the secondary literature on the global market, there were a handful of these major commodities that really touched everyone. And sugar was the big one, I think, of the 16 to 1800s or so, especially it was the Western European planters all across the Caribbean growing sugar. And that's kind of the big, booming fortune of the world. And then by the 1800s, it becomes cotton, right, in the Western world. But this is a a global market. And I think Asia's contribution to this was T in the 1700s. Now, later on, it might be something else. And obviously, all these commodities today are profitable, but not that valuable. They're not, nothing compared to like Tesla's or iPhones, right? But they had their

moment as the B commodities driving global trade. And so the famous kind of treatise on this is Sydney Mintz, Suenis and Power, writing about the history of the modern world, but especially the world of sugar and slavery in building it. And he talks about how, I mean, what was fueling sugar consumption in the 1800s and then 1800s in Western Europe? In England, you know, I mean, it's in everything we eat. But in particular, there was, you know, this ritual called tea time that gets established, which is, you know, we all know, like two o'clock or four o'clock, whatever it is. Everyone stops and drinks tea with milk and sugar and they eat sugary snacks along with that tea. And so I think it missed himself, even though he's just writing a book

about sugar, it kind of says very clearly that these things are inseparable from each other. And people at the time in England were saying things like, it's very weird that the English, they live in this cold European country, are every day dependent upon these tropical commodities that come from the West Indies and the East Indies or the Caribbean and East Asia, right? Tea and sugar cannot be grown in England, right? They have to come from like the tropical temperate parts of the world. But because of global trade, they became dependent on it. And I think from extrapolation, I think it's probably true that, I mean, I don't know how, I'm not, I don't have the econometric or statistical expertise to prove anything. But I think tea was central to the growth of the, was central to keeping the slave-driven sugar trade going in the 1800s. Now, maybe they would have found a different drink to combine sugar with, probably coffee, right, which is also coming from a colonial situation. But the

Empirical fact is that all that tea that were buying out of China and then eventually India was primarily purchased in order to be combined with sugar, which is coming from either slave or a post-slave, but obviously like very exploitive conditions in the Caribbean in the late 19th century. And then, you know, the links with cotton are something I'm sure someone could still figure out, but I just kind of speculatively look at, you know, again, if cotton is this major commodity that circulates and drives the global economy up by the 1800s, and one book, two books on this are Sven Beckert and then Georgia Rehalla wrote like kind of reinterpretations of the global history of cotton recently. You know, the opium trade was, as I mentioned before, British sending stuff to India for opium, for tape. I think eventually the stuff that the British were sending to India and eventually the stuff they want to sell the China are textile goods. Textile goods made in England that are, of course,

made from raw materials grown in the U.S. South, right? So, you know, when you trace these things, when you think about these in purely national terms, you only hear about tea and China, opium in India, but when you kind of trace the connections across national and continental divisions, like they're all kind of plugging into each other. And the way I kind of conceptualize it was, is basically, this is just value, right, like capitalist value traveling the world and taking on these earthly forms of sugar and tea and cotton or whatever, right? But we're really just talking about numbers, right? That could circulate and accumulate and pile up in larger and larger amounts. And then eventually it's like the sugar, very famously, it's like the Western European families

that made so much money off sugar would eventually become one of the key investors into cotton eventually. Or the families in the United States, you know, the, I mean, I can give you a list, like the Delanoes, the Aster's, and here in Philadelphia, the Girard family, they all made money off of opium, right? And then that goes into like the Astor Hotel, that goes into, you know, FDR's family in Boston that goes into Girard College in Philadelphia. So opium money, tea money, cotton money, like I think are very much the foundation of the bourgeoisie of Western Europe, the United States.

Bombay was built on opium money and so on and so forth. Well, I think you've perhaps answered my question was going to be historiographically on how these commodity histories like Sidney Mintz and Sven Beckert's Empire of Cotton have changed the picture of global capitalist development or at least the history of global capitalism and how you saw your commodity history fitting into that. So that's great. It shows that trans-regional global network of these flows of value as you're pointing out. And I guess maybe one thing that I would have added or that some of your work on these intensifying regimes of labor that can be slave labor, they can be indenture, they can be, you know, small peasantry, just really having to work much harder in order to fit into the global economy. That one thing I was thinking about also was the plantation complex, you know, Philip Curtin's idea that that's what really changes is the organization of it. And so that's why I was very interested in these techniques that you've mentioned about how they did intensify and increase productivity

and the fact that there was competition from other non-wage labor regimes that are interacting with one another that's the whole story of India and China is that they don't have the same form of labor or organization but so maybe I'll switch it up because you talked wonderfully about all those networks and connections so but it's just to ask a little bit about the breakdown of the system and about the way in which there was a kind of global sort of resistance to thinking about these things that are also trans-regional. So since we were talking about the Atlantic world and abolition and the end of the slavery system, how that one thing that's wonderful in your book is talking about how local elites,

these compradors, you know, or others or these theoreticians. And that's something maybe I would want to ask you a little bit more about also these wonderful political, economicistic thinkers. Maybe we can get into that. But just maybe tell us a little bit about this resistance and how they seem to borrow from changes that are happening globally. Tell us about that story. Yeah. So I think maybe what you're, it sounds like what you are perhaps pointing towards is I talk about the end of what the unfree indenture system in India. Yes, Chapter 6, right. Right, yeah.

So I kind of explained the origins of this system as kind of really untimely in the sense that if we think about global abolitionism and the end of slavery, in the United States, 1865 is actually really late. It's actually starting 1807, 1830s around the rest of the world. United States, I think maybe Brazil. Brazil is the last. Yeah, exactly, right. So Americans think we're so progress.

sober, actually, the latest. But at the exact same moment that the world is getting rid of slavery, they're also using indenture, which, and they're also using this in the Caribbean as the transition away from slavery to free labor. And so there's something weird is happening in Assam India, where they tried a free, quote, free market system to get local peasants to grow tea for British planters, and it wasn't working. And so they said, you know what, the Indians, you know, they're not as civilized as we are,

So we're going to start using indenture as a temporary bridge. And then maybe we'll go to a free market system later on, and eventually they do. And a lot of the reason they did was, I think ultimately the argument I'm making is it's a little bit perhaps kind of a downer, a little bit pessimistic, which is to say that there is resistance. There is this campaign by Indian nationalists to really make a big campaign against indenture in Assam, especially nationalists in Calcutta, which is sort of the major metropolis, it was temporary. it was the imperial capital at the time of the government of India and Assam is sort of like this sub-imperial colony of the colony in northeast India. The Indian nationalist make this big protest against indenture, but what I'm kind of also showing is that the grounds for their complaint about indenture was not that like wage labor itself is bad. They're actually saying

wage labor is good. It is unfree. wage labor that is bad. And for this point, I think this is not a controversial statement for historians of slavery. One person I drew a lot from was Thomas Holt's book on Jamaica, where he was pointing out that, you know, getting into slavery is obviously like something to be, to cheer and to be, think like that was a positive development. But what grounded it was a naturalization of political economy of Adam Smith's idea that the slave is not going to work as hard as a free wage worker because they don't have material incentives to work harder, right? And so it was from a sort of kind of dispassionate Marxian perspective,

it's really about sort of the bourgeois, bourgeois liberal forms overtaking pre-capitalist liberal forums. But that still keeps us with like bourgeois capitalistic social forms. And so a lot of the arguments that the Indian Nationalists would make were on behalf of workers, but they themselves were not workers, right? They were like the intelligentsia of Calcutta. A lot of them were landlords or lawyers and barristers who were really thinking about the political freedom, the political freedom that they were being denied underneath the colonial system, projecting it onto the workers, which is, you know, fair enough. They eventually, this eventually leads to the end of indenture, but by the 30s and 40s, what we see is there's actually a lot of labor protests among the workers themselves in these plantation systems.

And the Indian nationals are kind of like, they're not really into that so much, right? And there's a famous anecdote, I don't know if it's apocryphal or not, that Gandhi was visiting Assam at the time of a lot of these protests and walk out some of these plantations, and he declined to meet with the workers. And instead he met with the British planters and kind of told them, like, he's not looking to, like, end the tea industry and capitalist industry. He's just, you know, wants, you know, to, I mean, I think Indian nationalism is not controversial to say. It was really about the transfer of power and wealth from British hands to the hands of the Indian bourgeoisie. That's long been the critique. And I guess what I'm trying to show is kind of there's a political dimension, there's also the economic dimension. That by the 1960s or so, we basically see the preservation of the Indian tea industry, as it is today, in its colonial form, except the ownership is Indian now instead of being British in a lot of ways.

And if you just kind of Google like T worker conditions and, you know, in 2021, you'll see all sorts of articles about how there's still like controversy in India about the working conditions of workers. I've went out, I've been to the plantations and, yeah, they look like you're, it's like taking a time, it's like time traveling back to the 19th century. It's like, oh, this is a, this is a plantation. This is what it looked like back then and still does. Before we get into talking about political economy thinkers, which I know is where Adnan wants to head to, and I do as well. I just briefly want to have you explain to us, and it was in the book, and it was very interesting, that's why I want to make sure that we get this for the listeners, the conception of the confrador class. So I guess perhaps can you start off by introducing what the confrador class is for listeners who are unaware,

but then in the book it's very interesting because the conception by the public of the comprador class changes over time. where at the beginning it was a, you know, a relatively positive outlook on the Comprador class. And then, of course, it swings very, very negative as time goes on. And, you know, the listeners of this show are mostly going to have very, very negative connotations of the Comprador class in itself. But can you tell us about how this conception of the class changed them in those societies that the Comprador class was active in the T industry? Yeah. And honestly, I would actually be kind of curious to throw it to you all, because I have no perspective. I'm in this Chinese history bubble.

To what extent do you ever hear the term Comprador? And what parts of the world do you hear it get used? Latin America for me. I mean, I do a fair amount of study on Latin America, and particularly in the 60s and 70s, there was a lot of discussion of the Comptor class there. Yeah. Yeah, it's all in that dependency theory world system stuff.

So, you know, from reorient, under Gundar Frank. But, you know, I've seen it also applied when you look at any of these post-complored. colonial situations where the elite seems to take over, you know, they were, you know, the bourgeois elite that become nationalists are very often the same kinds of people who were shut out a little bit, but still collaborate with the, you know, with the colonial administration. So they're the natural ones to end up taking over the post-colonial state. Yeah. I will add in, it's used pretty frequently in pan-Africanist studies as well, which I've been getting more and more into these days.

Yeah, yeah. I think it tends to be a political term about collaborationism. And I think what I was interested in was, I wasn't naturally interested in the category, but what I eventually tried to show is, like, A, the historical origins of it and B, the sort of economic basis, that becomes a political argument. And the historical origins is interesting because, you know,

what it literally means is the Chinese merchant, who was selling goods to overseas, to eventually British or European companies, you know, if there was a real-life comprador, what they were selling was probably T. Right? So I was like, oh, well, you know, I've actually just talked about,

I'm actually just like running into real compradors in my research. So the basic empirical history is something like, again, the Canton system of the 1800s, all sorts of Europeans were doing trade at Canton. Eventually the British went out, but early on it was Dutch and there was also Portuguese, and Comporador, you know, sounds like a Spanish where it's a Portuguese term that means like literally buyer.

Like I know I took Spanish in high school. Comprour means to buy, right? And it was just the term that was given from Portuguese and it becomes just like the term that circulates, I think even in English, as the Chinese merchant that is like the outward facing merchant that sells the tea in its last stage. And behind them was all the production and all that stuff, right? And then it kind of shifts in meaning over time. but the other thing to kind of note is in Chinese historiography and for those who studied like world history you've probably heard of this group in the Canton system there was this kind of monopoly

known as the Kohong system and those were 13 merchants 13 big merchant houses that were designated as the only 13 merchant houses in China that could do business with the outside world and then they would eventually, they eventually attain the sort of like famous status and there's kind of famous like portraits,

watercolors where they kind of look like They're trying to be, like, European bourgeoisie, and they become, like, the richest people in all of China. And they're sort of the Chinese analog to, like, Aster and Delano and all that stuff. So they're kind of, and if you look at, like, Chinese history in the 18th, 19th century, those merchants are almost, I don't know, I don't want to go overboard and say that they were celebrated, but they're kind of portrayed, especially today, as, like, vanguards of business. And like, you know, like, oh, you, 21st century globalization, there was always globalization. And these merchants in the 18th century, they were just as, you know, they were just as sophisticated as any English merchant, et cetera. So they're almost kind of this point of national pride eventually. And trade overseas was not necessarily seen as a bad thing.

It was just like an extension of trade domestically, which was kind of being positively portrayed at the time in the Qing Empire. And then eventually you have these nationalist projects in the late 19th century where the Qing, which at this point is falling apart, they really rely upon these privately rich individuals to take up projects like building a railroad or developing a coal mine or developing a steamship system. And so for a brief moment there, these sort of like Elon Musk types or they're sort of like the national heroes, like, oh, you're going to like rise up the nation when the government itself is falling apart. Oligarchs. Yeah, exactly. They're oligarchs, but they're also like have national pride. and so on. So I would say that's sort of like the high watermark.

And then what it was really striking for me, going through the historical archive is like, let's say like 1880 or so, they're part of this thing in China called the self-strengthening movement, this nationalist economic nationalist movement that relies upon Comfort or Capital. Pretty quickly by 1910, 1920, they become demonized and using these metaphors of parasitic,

and they're the scapegoats, and they're the people holding back China. And then you fast forward to the 1940s and 50s with the victory of the Communist Party and Mao was thought by the 50s and 60s, that's where I think Comprador, that gets analogized to Latin America and Africa and the Middle East and so on,

that's when it really begins to circulate in the mid-20th century of this political category of collaborationism in an analogy with sort of like communist historiography. And I think the kind of thing that I think I'm trying to add to this, if we look at the history of this, is it is true that Comprador,

these merchants are demonized along anti-imperialist lines, that they're collaborating with foreign merchants, and this is a byproduct of nationalism in the 30s and 40s, especially. But empirically speaking, Comprador, the idea of the Comprudor had already, the reputation had already been flipped around about 10 or 20 years earlier. And at that point, Comptor had stopped being a description of, you know, these like 100 or 200 business people in the treaty ports,

it became this metaphor. And it was being applied to all sorts of individuals in China and all sorts of, it wasn't just like the business person. You could just be an employee in a Japanese bank in Shanghai. They would call you a Comprador. And what I was kind of showing was there was an economic basis for this. And there's something actually interesting about this, which is that there was this, I argue, right? In the ups the 19th century, the idea of what the economy was and what it means to make money,

where does value and profit come from in China was really kind of based upon like the merchants, who are the richest people in China, obviously are the ones who are keeping the economy. economy going. By the early 20th century, you have in China, like much of the rest of the world, new conceptions of the economy, which is that economic wealth and value is a product of labor or as a product of producers, right? And this could be, you know, this could be used in a sort of neutral term in terms of like we need to industrialize the country. It could also be used in sort of leftist ideology as it is the labor that produces the value in society and they deserve the fruits, the fruits of their, the spoils of the fruits of their labor and so on. But whatever

the case this this idea that the productive labor in society is done by the workers themselves for the producers of tea producers of silk and not the merchants of silk right that idea becomes ascendant rather quickly by the 19 teams of 20s and from that point on the merchants instead of being seen as productive of economic value are seen as unproductive and eventually parasitic right and that that happens so I think that is that is that that very technical economic difference, I think eventually becomes what undergirds this much more widespread commonly encountered political category of collaborationism. And you hurt the country because you work with the foreign powers instead of the indigenous population. And that stuff, you know,

there might be a lot of truth to that stuff. And by the 60s and 70s, every communist official who is like on the bad side of Mao, it gets called the Comprador. It's just like another category that you use, right? And it's kind of meaningless at that point. But what it's really referring to is this older history of rewriting the history of the Chinese trade as these merchants who exploited and took advantage of the nation, when in reality that view was actually kind of new only in the 19th or 20s did that view really become popular. Right, right. Well, well, I find interesting here is how those social and political and economic ideas are changing. locally that are also reflective of these broader ideas of political economy and that typically

in the history of ideas and the global history of ideas, people have seen this as Western influence upon, you know, Indian or Chinese thinkers. But what you were showing, I think, is so fascinating is that something deeper is happening that allows for their reception. So you said, I think, in your essay for Specter Journal, I think you said something about, you know, what these respective trajectories illustrated was not that Asian economic thought was derivative of an European original, rather political economy originally seen as a foreign body of ideas, gradually attained widespread plausibility in Asia and as a set of universal and natural principles fund to the ongoing expansion and wage employment into new territories worldwide so that was

your conclusion i'm just wondering if you want to elaborate a little bit on this kind of point about how socioeconomic and political thought is changing in relation to these you know changed conditions yeah so another aspect of the book is you know there's a there's a lot of different ways to like tell the history of capitalism and the traditional ways, you know, you know, like money went here and there and these workers were mobilized and, you know, all these profits were made and these commodities and so on. Those are sort of like materialist histories of capitalism. I think the other tradition I was kind of interested in kind of doing at the same time was something that, you know, Marx is doing in his writing of capital, which is he's tracing the development of capitalism

in Western Europe by looking at the, with the thinkers of his time, how they were conceptualized in a world in a different way. And I think what I concluded was, you know, you could do something similar with thinkers in India, thinkers in China, that their conceptualization of the world, in the specific context of the T-Trade, was changing over time in a way that kind of mirrored that of Adam Smith. So, for instance, very famously, Adam Smith would say he argued that these old conceptions of economic value were wrong, right? The one old one was the mercantiless idea that value is just the byproduct of merchants

making money in the marketplace. Well, you can make money by being a merchant, but that is not necessarily where value comes from. The other idea was this physiocratic idea that value comes from only the land, which is to say, farmers make value, but someone who, like, makes shoes in a factory do not make value because they're not producing value out of nature, right? And Smith had said, no, all labor is the basis of value. And Marx's argument for what that says about the history of capitalism was Smith landed upon this general notion of labor because labor was becoming generalized in Glasgow, in the UK at the time, which is to say labor was becoming commodified. And so a worker is not just a cobbler or a farmer, a worker is just a worker who gets hired in all sorts of different situations. That is reflective of a wage labor society.

Similarly, in China, for instance, I look at this thinker, his name is Chan Shi in Chapter 5, I believe, who is reading Smith, and he's really compelled by this notion of value. And he finds, like, he can use this theory of value from Smith in translation to explain what's going on in China. And his examples, he's pulling from, again, he's not pulling from the traditional farmer growing grain on his land. He's pulling from, you know, tea workers. He's talking about cotton production.

He's talking about importing coffee and wine production to China. Basically, whatever it takes to employ the sort of itinerant available working class of China to make commodities for sale in the global market. And this is a conception of capitalism that is, I think in Chinese, in the history of economical in China, was relatively distilled. Right. Previously, they had kind of mercantilist ideas that profit comes from trade or physiocratic ideas that profit is exclusively the result of growing value on the land. So the fact that there are thinkers in China in the 1980s or so who can, who find the Smithian idea of value resonant to me tells me that even though China on the surface was not a wage labor society, the idea of the dynamics of wage labor, which is to say that people were

available to be hired to do anything that Capital wanted it to do, that dynamic was becoming more and more widespread in society, such that these Western European ideas about political economy resonated just as much with thinkers in Asia itself. And the ultimate kind of punchline is that I don't think this is a story of Western ideas coming to Asia and Asian's thinking like Westerners. I think it's really about the conditions, the material conditions of possibility for these ideas were shared in common. And in that sense, capitalism is not inherently Western or non-Asians, just like capitalism is just capitalism wherever.

And it takes on specific forms, you know, but there is something that's kind of shared in common that could be kind of discerned by this kind of this sort of approach to reading economic thought historically. Before we get into our final question, let me just hop in here with a kind of tangential. related follow-up and feel free to tell me if I'm an idiot for thinking this. But as we're talking about this, this previous question, as well as when looking at your

book, you know, I definitely see the influences of Marx in your analysis. But I also see, and you know, I'm not as well read as I'd like to be. After all, you know, 26-year-old immunobiologist talking about history. So, you know, I have quite a bit more reading to do myself. But I'm seeing some inklings of Emmanuel Wallerstein's World Systems Theory in your work. here. Can you just briefly talk about whether or not you're picking up influences from World Systems Theory in your analysis or whether you reject that? No, for sure. I think Wallerstein, World Systems Theory, that stuff was this remarkable work

of scholarship from the 70s, basically until his death in the 2011, 2000s or so. He was very influential, and I think if we were to think, you know, I mentioned Robert Brenner before, as this very influential thinker in the 70s, if we think of the Brenner versus Wallerstein, as these sort of two paradigms of thinking about the history of capitalism, I think Wallerstein is a lot more useful, personally. Now, there are some, you know, there's a lot of criticisms of Wallerstein that I think are still valid. So Wallachstein came up with this idea of, like, you know,

there's a world system and it's centered upon Western Europe and in the peripheries, which is where he would put China in India, with the semi-peripheries, they are sort of just this kind of passive receptor of these dynamics that are happening in London. And there's probably some truth of that, right? But it also really just gives us very few tools to actually understand what's going on in China and India on its own terms. You know, Wallachian was very much like – but at the same time, Wallerstein would say things like, you know,

he would really challenge Brenner's argument that only wage – that capitalism is only descriptive of wage labor – like free wage labor societies. And he would talk about how, you know, slavery, like peasantry, all that stuff. Like, that's relatively, for capital, it's a matter of indifference, right? Capital is just interested in finding raw materials and any kind of labor that they can put to work and profit off of. And I think from the standpoint of the logic of capital, that's true and it's also useful for us. Now, that also means, like, as a historian, I'm interested in, well, what does that life actually like for the Chinese worker or for the Indian worker? And that's a different question than what does capital want. But I think it provides a more, you know, as I said, at the very beginning,

a more flexible way of looking at the rest of the world. And yeah, so I was, you know, some people have actually asked me why I don't cite more Wallerstein in the book. And it might have been accidental, I guess, in the sense that my advisor, the late Adam McKeown was very much a Wallerston, I wouldn't say adherent, but he, like, he taught it to us as what he viewed as the best attempt to write a good world history up until then for all of its flaws. And I, maybe as a sort of like edible thing, I didn't like want to say.

cite the author of my advisor that he really liked or whatever. But it was certainly like in the, in the ether of my, in the back of my mind. And in my view, I found thinkers who were of the same vein, but perhaps more useful than I would cite those. And, you know, I didn't want to like bore the reader with the bagelion citations. But yeah, well, all the scene, I think, is under, who went from overrated to maybe underrated, I'd say. Yeah, very interesting. Andrew, this whole, the book and this whole conversation has been really wonderful. We really, I think I speak for all of us when I say, we appreciate you bearing with us through some tech difficulties. A way to maybe wrap this conversation up is a final question.

And I'm going to, it's going to be a sort of big question, but I'm leaving it broadly open so you can take it in any direction that you want. But how can understanding this really interesting history help us to understand India and China today and their role in the global market? And if you want to touch on this as well, how does the T industry specifically today continue to inform us? about 21st century capitalism. Yeah, thanks. That's something I thought about a lot as I was ending in the project and thinking about my next project.

And I think what I kind of, I kind of came to this realization that I was interested in the tea trade. You know, I'm not a tea connoisseur. I actually like coffee more than tea. But what I was interested in this topic was I think subconsciously I was interested in all these contemporary debates

about China today and in Asia today. And if you just look up the numbers, right, like there's more GDP or whatever, like generated in Asia than any of these continents around the world. Also there's more people in Asia, of course. And I think I was like the, and I think what I kind of concluded was, you know, there's all this talk about neoliberalism today and neoliberalism is really the 21st century return of the 19th century. Obviously it's different in a lot of ways, but it's relative to like the core of the 20th century, the 21st and the 19th actually looks more closer, more alike. And I think that's what I was kind of, that's kind of, that's kind of

unicorn I was hunting down in the historical archives. And by the end, I sort of kind of came to this realization, you know, if I'm interested in what happened in China since the 1980s or Asia since the 1980s, why don't, why don't I just like look at that itself instead of looking for historical analogies? So now I think I am, my next project is to look at, it's very early, but I'm thinking of, you know, kind of retelling the story of China's reintegration into the global market from the 70s and these onwards. And you'll see a lot of these patterns. that I think were helpful for me to understand the 19th century. One example is, in the history of neoliberalism literature,

there's a very famous concept that the Marxist geographer David Harvey came up with called flexible accumulation, which is to say that rather than the sort of tried and true for this model of full employment and mass production and large-scale workforces that we associate with the golden age of capitalism in the 50s and to the 70s, especially the United States, since then we have, you know, things we are familiar with like flexible labor regimes, so subcontracting, smaller units of economic production, but wider networks of, you know, distribution and transportation and so on and so forth.

And I think that model that Harvey comes up with to describe what was happening in the 80s and has only intensified since then, that is a better description of the 19th century world of global capitalism than the, you know, big car factory in Detroit is, right? And the more I thought about, you know, Harvey, if you read like Harvey or the other big thinkers of kind of this neoliberal moment, Giovanni Regi is another one, like all these thinkers who are based in the U.S. or based in Western Europe, and they're trying to figure out what is this thing called neoliberalism, what is happening around the world. They always start off in the U.S. and Western Europe, But by the end of their story, they wind up in Asia, inevitably.

And they don't know Asian languages. They can't do research in Asia. So that's kind of like this black box in their story. But it's like this unavoidable part of the story of capitalism by the end of the 20th century. And so I think what I'm trying to figure out is to what extent is, you know, for instance, like the subcontracting networks for shoes and clothing and electronics, et cetera, that we know that come from China today, to what extent is this a return to that 19th century world? of subcontracted factories and network-based production in the tea trays of China. To what extent is it a conscious revival of it, to what extent is it different? Very famously, for instance, the Chinese government in the 80s,

they open up these five special economic zones. These are actually the exact same locations of the treaty ports of the 19th century, but having been burnt by the experience of colonialism, the Chinese government, you know, enacts all these restrictions to make sure that it won't be, I mean, they know it's going to be exploitative of Chinese workers, but they just want to make sure that the Chinese government, the Chinese bourgeoisie benefits at the same time. So they're kind of borrowing from the colonial period

to rebuild China in the 19th and 20th century, or the late 20th, the early 21st century. So it's not so much tea. Like tea itself is just kind of this placeholder for what is the classic example of an export-oriented kind of economic formation in Asia that has been replaced with Nike shoes or Foxcon laptops in the 21st century that I think I was always interested in and now I'm thinking it's worth it's worth looking at Asia today as another example of 19th century globalization

that is mobile right in my story starts in China, goes to India it also goes to Ceylon and Japan and Taiwan. Same thing, like you think about all the other. the manufacturers or the big industries of stuff made in China, like blue jeans or electronics, well, they actually started in Japan and Korea, and then they moved to China, and now they might be moving to Vietnam, they might be moving to Bangladesh, or they might be moving to inland China, right? So this kind of mobility, this network-based mode of export-oriented production, and finally, this something I highlighted in the book is that, you know, in 19th century Asia,

you didn't have necessarily technological innovations driving driving productivity gains. It was like labor intensification, the example I mentioned with the incense sticks earlier. Similarly, a lot of people are saying, you know, what has helped Asia get ahead with flexible accumulation, flexible production methods in the 20, 21st century,

innovation eventually plays a role, but a lot of it is just kind of old-fashioned labor intensification, making workers work 24-7 for lower wages, as low as possible. and making them like build things on their own in their own houses without having to rent out property and so on and so forth. So all that stuff, I think, you know, there's a real uncanniness between the 19th century world and the 21st century world of capitalism. So again, our guest was Andrew Liu, who is the author of T. War, a history of capitalism in China and India. I highly recommend everybody to pick up that book.

It's available from Yale University Press. is an excellent conversation, Andrew. Thank you very much for coming on the program, and thank you for writing this work. How can the listeners find you and the work that you're continuing to put up online as well as elsewhere? Yeah, so if you just Google me, probably,

Andrew Liu, History, Villanova, you'll probably find my personal page where there's all this information or my faculty page. You'll also find a link probably to a podcast I've been doing with the journalist Jay King and Tammy Kim called time to say goodbye, which is not a historian podcast. It's like politics, culture, Asia, Asian

American stuff. So yeah, you all can find me there too. How about on Twitter? Oh, and my Twitter handle is at Andy B as in Boy, L-I-U. So Andy Blue is how I pronounce it. Excellent. Thank you again for coming on the program. We'll be sure to keep in touch. I really want to, I'm looking forward to that new project that you're working on for the future. Meets too, yeah. Listeners, we'll be right back with the wrap-up. So we're back on guerrilla history. We just wrapped up our conversation with Andrew Liu on T-war,

a history of capitalism in China and India. Let me just say, first off, it was a very, very interesting conversation that we just had. And it was a very interesting book that looked at two parallel threads of the development of capitalism in these two different countries, China and India, through the lens of a commodity, which I thought was a very interesting way to look at it. it's something that I personally haven't seen before. I've had books that are on commodities as such, histories of commodities, but not really where they've been the driving force in explaining economic development of the large region or globally.

So it was a very, very interesting book to me and a very interesting conversation that we had. Adnan, why don't I turn it over to you for, you know, get us underway with our parting thoughts here? Well, I just really enjoyed this conversation. I think it was showed really the range of the work, and I really encourage people to get a hold of and read this book, and apparently we will be putting in the show notes,

a discount code for people who want to order it from Yale University Press. And it's really a sophisticated analysis of non-Western history of a South-South, global South, relations to one another while fitting within the broader emergence and development of a world capitalist system. And that's a unique perspective that you don't usually get. Usually it's some colonial powers, relation to the, you know, center to the periphery. And what he's really doing is re-centering China and India in the world economy

and in the history of capitalism in a very fascinating way. So there's so much to be learned from here. And what I especially also really appreciated is that unlike a lot of historians who get focused just on the evidence and the details and telling a particular story and analyzing what's happening in that local context, he's able to do that with great research, but connect it with these larger problems of history and larger problems of political and economic theory that gives a very, very different perspective and view on how to define and understand capitalism, not through. you know, wage labor, but through this commodity form, it has all kinds of implications as well, theoretically, for how people on the left and Marxists would understand capitalism and its adaptations and its effects globally. So I think there's more, I'm hoping that he will continue to work in this vein, because I'm looking forward to more work. He's a really interesting thinker. Brett White, what are your thoughts on the conversation that we had

in the work more generally? Absolutely. I agree with Adnan. It was a pleasure to talk with Ander. Some things that stuck out to me is this exploration, which we did in the discussion of the interconnected nature of different commodities. So, you know, tea is also needs to be understood in relation to sugar and to cotton and how all of these things intertwine to create a global network of trade that was really dependent upon trading other commodities. So I thought that was interesting. And the interconnection between, these commodities and the legacies of certain elites in certain countries in China and in Europe and the U.S., the generational wealth that was handed down. So, you know, this is common with history, but, you know, the wealth garnered through things like colonialism, through extractivism, through slavery itself gets passed down and there are people right now alive today who are fabulously wealthy and their wealth ultimately gets traced back to these brutal forms of domination and exploitation and it's institutional as well. Andrew mentioned in our conversation how so many

American institutions are rooted in and built upon slavery and if there's not a recognition of that some form of reparations for that our society literally cannot move on in a positive direction. It's an albatross around our neck, socially, politically, economically. So I thought that was interesting. Moreover, the century of humiliation. This is a crucial concept in the Chinese communist revolution of overcoming the century of humiliation. And it's all rooted again back in the Opium War, but then at the end of the Opium War in the whole tea industry, as Andrew so brilliantly covers. And so to understand, Maoist movement in the Chinese Communist Party and its rhetoric and its appeal to the Chinese masses,

we have to understand this preceding century of colonialism, imperialism, domination, extraction, etc. And then the last thing, this is only tangential, but interesting, Andrew was talking about commodities and he was saying, you know, what do all commodities have, you know, sort of echoing marks, what do all commodities have in common? And it's that labor went into them. And these, he mentions workers themselves are commodities under capitalism. But what labor, if it's true that all commodities have the common nature that labor went into them and workers themselves are commodities, well, what labor went into making the worker? And that's where we get back to reproductive and domestic labor.

And so that's why that whole concept, totally uncompensated work, mind you, right? That concept of reproductive and domestic labor often bared by women historically produce the worker. who has then commodified under capitalism to produce more commodities for their exchange value. So again, rooting all that into patriarchy and gender oppression as well as class and colonial oppression. So those were just some of my thoughts and I really enjoyed this conversation. Yeah, and I'll just give my final thoughts before I let you each have a final word if you would like before we wrap this up is that one of the things that I think is the most important about this work and other works like this is that they help you understand how these, again, using the world systems term

peripheral countries are inextricably tied and integral to the development of global capitalism as a system. When we read works or when we're taught in school, economic development, economic systems development, we always have a very Western, heavy, Eurocentric, American-centric view of how capitalism as a system was developed. You know, we're typically taught capitalism first came up in the United Kingdom, and then it spread elsewhere in continental Europe before being exported to the United States. And the United States really then took over the mantle,

and then you have some people these days saying, well, China now is with their own brand of capitalism, you know, driving how capitalism is developing in the current day. You have some people that look at it from that perspective, but we really don't have nearly as many works talking about how these countries due to the industries within them, as well as the exploitation of their resources, were integral to the development of capitalism as a global system, as well as capitalism within those societies more specifically. So this is something that I think this book and works like this book are very important for us to read and understand how these countries,

they really were critical for the development of the system that we all live under today in the global economy. Adnan, any final words before we wrap up? Well, just when Andrew was talking about where he's going with his work and the relationship between current issues in understanding the global economy and the position of India and China in it, he mentioned that he found that there were a lot of analogies between the 19th century era of capital. and our 21st century, or late 20th and early 21st century, period. And that's something that I found very interesting because we've been finding that in weekly Marx, a weekly Marx reading group that convenes and reads different. We started with Capitol and we've moved to other works of Marx.

And we've been finding that in a lot of ways, the conditions that he's talking about in the 19th century, with lots of other changes, of course, have a little bit more similarity with this neoliberal period. And it's a little bit different from the era of the welfare state and so on in the post-war period. And so I think it's very useful to be studying these histories. And I like that he's thinking about how that history helps us interpret and understand changes to capitalism that have taken place in our own neoliberal era that helps us

understand maybe the direction that it's going. And I think what he's done in some ways is also recovering a different reading of Marx that has been, you know, the modernist era, the, you know, World War II, post-World War II interpretations of Marx during the era of the Soviet Union and so on, emphasize certain elements of development, which he talked a little bit about, and how he didn't see that as the intrinsic definitional characteristics of capitalism, that it didn't necessarily stimulate or lead to. to technical innovations all the time, but that there might be other ways in which capitalism could adapt and exploit workers through the intensification of labor that didn't lead to technological innovation, but just with a new particularly oppressive regime, but that it required some companion cultural and ideological changes in the techniques that were used. And that's very important for us to remember, because we don't know what directions capitalism is going to develop.

in our day and going forward, and we have to be attentive that it might not look like what we've thought Marx was describing. We have to be very aware to the changes that are happening in our own time, and a historical perspective like his can really help us in that. So it's a very fruitful discussion, and I encourage people perhaps to look for his essay in addition to his book, notes toward a more global history of capitalism, reading Marx's capital in India and China that he published in a journal called Specter that you can find online, and that's just from 2020. I encourage people to read that very interesting essay as well.

Brett, you get the final word. Yeah, I really like this. It's important, I think, to remember that capitalism is not this linear march of human moral progress, but it is more of a death spiral sort of formation and its repetitiveness. not only the smaller boom and bus cycles, but these broader trends where the inequalities of capitalism a century and a half ago are now repeating themselves with new technological form is sort of, again, proof that this is not a march in the right direction,

but a sort of spiral. And to break out of that spiral requires the transcendence of capitalism. So it's always important to remember that. And then it's also kind of interesting that I just realized throughout this entire conversation I'm sipping on ginger tea as we do this deep dive into the history of that. that particular commodity. So it's ubiquity and the fact that I didn't even connect the two for half the conversation. Just added an interesting element. Last thing I'd say, just to repromote,

he has that podcast called Time to Say Goodbye. I'm going to go check that out. Andrew is a very articulate, interesting, insightful person. I'm sure his co-hosts are as well. So I'm excited to go look up more of his work. Yeah, I ditto that. And you also weren't the only one drinking tea during this conversation is I did have my own cup going as well. So listeners, that was a guerrilla history for this episode. Adnan, Brett, thanks as always for taking part in this recording. It's always a very fun and insightful doing anything with you guys, whether we're interviewing a guest, or just chatting amongst ourselves and our text messages, whatever. It doesn't matter. I always learn a lot from both of you. So Adnan, why don't I turn to you now?

How can the listeners find you on social media and the other podcasts that you're working on? Thanks, Henry. And likewise, of course, really enjoyed this conversation. and working with you all. Well, listeners can find more of, they can follow me on Twitter at Adnan-A-Husain, H-U-S-A-I-N. And if people are interested in Middle East, Islamic world, Muslim diasporas, and related issues, they should check out my other podcast called the M-A-J-L-I-S. And you can find that on all the platforms, and we have an upcoming episode, look for it in early, the first week of June. where David Schmidt from the University of Buffalo, who's a literary scholar,

and I will both talk with Timothy Brennan, who's the author of Places of Mind, a Life of Edward Said, which has gotten a lot of attention, and I think should be a very interesting conversation. Excellent. And Brett, how can the listeners find you in all of the work that you're continuously putting out? Yeah, I talk too much. I'm sorry to get sick of my own voice. But you can find my work at Revolutionary Left Radio.com. as Gorilla History, Red Menace, and Rev Left Radio are all on that website and everything associated with it. Excellent. As for me, listeners, you can find me on Twitter at Huck-1995.

You can subscribe to me on Patreon, where I write about science and public health at patreon.com forward slash Huck-1995. And you can find our show, Gorilla History, on Twitter, at Gorilla underscore pod. That's G-E-R-R-I-L-A-U-Square-Pod. You can support the show at Patreon at patreon.com forward slash Gorilla-Haw-Haw-Haw-Haw-S-G-E-R-R-R-R-S-G-R-R-S-GAR. history. Again, two R's. And we now have a Instagram page at, I guess not at, it's just guerrilla underscore history because gorilla underscore pod was unavailable. You can also find our videos on YouTube now, just audio only, but they're on the Rev Left Radio YouTube channel. So for people that you know that like to listen to things on YouTube and don't use podcast apps,

feel free to go there and send them those links. It's another way to help support the show, is just to spread the word about it. So that'll do it for this time. Listeners, we'll be back again very soon with another episode of guerrilla history. Until then, take care and solidarity. Thank you.