This book deals, in panoramic fashion, with the history of tea as a consumer product, an international trade item, and a source of taxation. Rappaport’s ability to disentangle multiple factors and their dynamics over two centuries and across Asia, Europe, Africa, Australasia, and North America is truly remarkable.

The dense text has three parts. Part I, by far the best part of the book, has four chapters that trace the origin of tea production and consumption in East Asia, as well as the spread of the plant and the taste for it in Asia and beyond. Rappaport hints that although tea was exotic, it filled a gap in the human diet as a portable, less perishable, and always-ready drink that could also serves as a nontoxic stimulant with some advantages that other beverages, such as beer (less portable) and coffee (less ready), did not have. The demand for tea thus...

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