THE TWO TEA COUNTRIES: COMPETITION, LABOR, AND ECONOMIC THOUGHT IN COASTAL CHINA AND EASTERN INDIA, 1834-1942 Andrew B. Liu Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2015 © 2015 Andrew B. Liu All rights reserved ABSTRACT The two tea countries: competition, labor, and economic thought in coastal China and eastern India, 1834-1942 Andrew B. Liu This dissertation explores how the tea-growing districts of China and colonial India were integrated into the global division of labor over a formative century of boom-bust expansion. I explore this history of competition by highlighting two dimensions of economic and intellectual change: the intensification of agrarian labor and the synchronous emergence of new paradigms of economic thought. As tea exports from China and India soared and competition grew fiercer, planters, factory overseers, peasants, and government officials shifted their attention from the wealth-creating possibilities of commerce to the value-creating potential of labor and industrial production. This study also historically situates two older, teleological assumptions in the field of Asian economic history: the inevitability of industrialization and of proletarianization. Both assumptions emerged from social and economic transformations during the nineteenth century. In particular, periodic market crises compelled Chinese and colonial Indian officials to seriously question older “Smithian” theories premised upon the “sphere of circulation.” Instead, both regional industries pursued interventionist measures focused on the “abode of production.” In India, officials passed special laws for indentured labor recruitment. In China, reformers organized tea peasants and workers into agrarian cooperatives. Finally, colonial officials and Bengali reformers in India agreed that they needed to liberate the unfree “coolie” from the shackles of unfree labor. And in China, reformers articulated a critique of rentier “comprador” merchants and moneylenders who exploited peasant labor. Thus, although the “coolie” and “comprador” became twentieth-century symbols of Asian economic backwardness, they were each, as concepts, produced by profound social and economic changes that were dynamic, eventful, and global in nature. TABLE OF CONTENTS Tables, Maps, and Illustrations iii Acknowledgments iv Part I Themes and background Chapter One Introduction Compradors and coolies 1 Chapter Two The two tea countries An overview of two-thousand years of tea 40 Part II Nineteenth-century competition Chapter Three Adam Smith in Assam? Liberal political economy and the original Assam tea experiments, 1834-1863 60 Chapter Four Incense and industry Strategies of labor intensification in the tea districts of Huizhou and the Wuyi Mountains 105 Chapter Five The rise of indentured labor policies in eastern India Tea mania, the labor question, and the managing agency 169 Chapter Six No sympathy for the merchant The nineteenth-century tea crisis and late Qing political economic thought 221 Part III The aftermath of competition Tea at the turn of the century 280 Chapter Seven Free labor and idioms of freedom Ramkumar Vidyaratna’s Kuli Kâhinî (The Tale of the Coolie) 281 i Chapter Eight Competition, compradors, and cooperatives Wu Juenong and the agrarian question, 1905-1942 333 Chapter Nine Conclusion: capitalist development and anachronism 393 Works Cited 397 Appendix The legend of Qimen red tea 412 ii TABLES, MAPS, AND ILLUSTRATIONS Figure 1. Tea exporting and importing map by Ukers. 41 Figure 2. Robert Fortune’s map of the “Principal Districts for the cultivation of the Tea-Plant” spanning eastern India and coastal China. 43 Figure 3. Total tea exports out of China, 1700-1937. 53 Figure 4. Tea exports from China and India compared. 59 Figure 5. Tea production map by the British Royal Geographical Society. 114 Figure 6. A basic illustration of the incense stick timekeepers. 141 Figure 7. “Drying tea leaves, circa 1885.” 143 Figure 8. Indian Tea Association advertisements. 171 Figure 9. Total size of the labor force in the Assam tea districts and figures for the annual migration of recruited workers by year. 202 Figure 10. Two images from Barker. Top caption: “Coolie lines.” 212 Figure 11. An image captioned “Clearing the ground” from Barker. 217 Figure 12. The fall in overall value and quantity of sales from the port of Fuzhou and across all of China. 223 Figure 13. The share of Chinese exports relative to India and Ceylon on the British market. 224 Figure 14. Tea experiment station, Makinohara, Shizuoka. 350 Figure 15. Charts taken from surveys conducted in Tunxi, Huizhou and the Wuyi districts in Fujian. 358 Figure 16. Photographs from the Pingli, Qimen tea cooperative. 373 Figure 17. A 1941 staff photograph from the Pingli tea cooperative. 374 Figure 18. Labor survey form from Chasheng Banyuekan. 386 iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My committee has been tremendously valuable in my intellectual formation. From the beginning, my advisor Adam McKeown has been my strongest supporter and most honest critic. I knew I was onto something when I could convince him of my ideas. Madeleine Zelin has been a generous and patient teacher, providing me with a priceless foundation for researching, teaching, and navigating the Chinese history field. Rebecca Karl boasts an unparalleled acuity with Chinese history and social theory, and this project is in many ways my attempt to follow in her footsteps. Harry Harootunian has been an intellectual inspiration and an equally sharp storyteller. His lifelong passion for history and politics lifted my spirits during times of self doubt. I stumbled into Anupama Rao’s Intro to South Asian History course as an eighteen-year old interested in “theory” but without a major. Her powerful intellectual energy convinced me that I should study history, and she has been a teacher and friend ever since. My primary dissertation research, from 2010 to 2012, was made possible by support from a American Institute of Indian Studies Junior Fellowship, the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad program, a Social Science Research Council-International Dissertation Research Fellowship, and a Stanford East Asia Library Travel Grant. Prior, my language training was facilitated by several Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships for Bengali, Chinese, and Japanese, as well as a year at the International Chinese Language Program at National Taiwan University funded by a Blakemore Freeman Fellowship Language Grant. I thank all of these programs for their crucial support. Overseas archival work was facilitated by many scholars, both professors and students, who clarified for me many details of Chinese and South Asian history. In China, I was affiliated with the Xiamen University History Department, and from my experiences there, I thank Dai Yifeng, Rao Weixing, Shui Haigang, Wang Jun, Xiao Kunbing, Zhang Kan, Zheng Li, and Zheng Zhenman. Among the scholars of Huizhou scattered across Anhui and Shanghai, I thank Kang Jian, Liu Meng, Ni Qun, Wang Tingyuan, Wang Shihua, Wang Zhenzhong, and Zou Yi. Finally, I was very fortunate to speak to a handful of tea families from Anhui and Fujian, and I thank Huang Xiangeng from Wuyi Shan City and Jiang Chiyu, Jiang Haoran, and all the members of the extended Jiang family from Huangshan City for sharing with me their time and their stories. In Delhi and Kolkata, I was greeted by a coterie of scholars who invited me into their academic and, equally important, social circles. In particular, Rana Behal and Prabhu Mohapatra, whose pioneering research on Assam tea labor left an imprint visible throughout this work, offered me their time and opinions without reservation. Boddhisattva Kar not only guided my research on Assam but also brought me into the community at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, my official affiliation. I also thank Aparna Balachandran, Prathama Banerjee, Anisha Bordoloi, Piya Chatterjee, Rahul Govind, Sujata Hajarika, Chitra Joshi, Samita Sen, and all my teachers at the American Institute of Indian Studies, Kolkata. I accumulated many debts from the trove of Asia specialists in the New York region. Dorothy Ko helped me conceptualize this project early on and never failed to offer her time advising me on my ideas and career. Carol Gluck boosted my confidence my first year of graduate school, and I frequently returned to her for guidance. Eugenia Lean provided exacting comments on my project and pushed me in new directions. Greg Pflugfelder helped improve my writing as I made the leap from undergraduate to graduate study. Andrew Sartori provided sympathy and intellectual direction over lunches and coffees. And way back in Seattle, Tani Barlow and the positions project gave me hope that a critical approach to east Asia is possible. iv In graduate school, I made many friends whose ideas shaped my own world outlook. At Columbia, Adam Bronson and Buyun Chen have become two of my closest friends. And for their support and camaraderie, I thank Ramona Bajema, Kate Baldanza, Joel Bordeaux, Rosie Bsheer, James Chappel, Sayaka Chatani, Kaijun Chen, Christopher Craig, Anatoly Detwyler, Aimee Genell, Arunabh Ghosh, Gal Gvili, Abhishek Kaicker, Sara Kile, Yumi Kim, Liza and Collin Lawrence, Bill McAllister, Jenny Wang Medina, Olivia Nicol, Meha Priyadarshini, Chelsea Schieder, Miryong Shim, Nate Shockey, Rich So, Liz Sperber, Simon Taylor, Stacey Van Vleet, Stephen Wertheim, Tim Yang, and Yurou Zhong. I also encountered great friends from years of travel for research, of whom I would like to single out Emily Baum, Debjani Bhattacharyya, Uday Chandra, Ariel Fox, Navyug Gill, Alex Hsu, Ken Kawashima, Zachary Levenson, Peiting Li, Durba Mitra, Viren Murthy, Dwaipayan Sen, Seng Guoquan, Seiji Shirane, Matt Shutzer, Ben Siegel, Jonathan Tang, Moneyball disciple Philip Thai, Anand Vaidya, Jake Werner, and Orlando Magic fan Albert Wu. I am also grateful to comrades from the Columbia and NYU writeup group: Selda Altan, Maggie Clinton, Mirela David, Jeongmin Kim, Jenny Lee, Soonyi Lee, my co-blogger Max Ward, and Qian Zhu.