World History Connected Home    
 
 
Home List journal issues Table of contents
Printer-friendly format  Article citation        
   

From World History Scholarship to the Scholarship of Teaching World History: Using the 'China in World History Forum' to Advance both the Field and Classroom Instruction

Marc Jason Gilbert

 

     The following introduces a new feature of World History Connected, an essay that analyzes "forum" articles both in terms of the expanding knowledge of the field they offer and also their value for classroom instruction in world history. It will be written by a variety of contributors, but always by those as familiar with the nexus between Advanced Placement and College instruction as well as within the non-Advanced Placement classroom environment. It will summarize the value of the articles for all practitioners of world history, offer related on-line or other readily available teaching resources, provide guides to on-line lesson plans and, ideally, offer an original lesson plan ready-made for classroom use. Your feedback regarding this new section is encouraged and most welcome.

The Big Picture

     The articles that comprise this issue's forum on China in World History deepen our understanding of world history and translate well into the classroom setting. They all address issues that offer evidentiary material for subjects often addressed in courses on world history, such as globalization, the environment, trade routes, and the exchange of ideas and commodities across time and space.

     All of the Forum's contributors highlight the benefits of addressing cultural issues when directing student examinations of political economy, trade patterns, globalization or the relationships of humans with their environment.

     James A. Anderson offers a spirited lesson in the necessity to both avoid old scholarship when addressing even familiar topics such as the ancient Silk Routes—it isn't about just about Central Asia. Students can usefully compare the historical trajectories and trade content (items, destinations, exchanges) of the Central Asian Silk Roads (north and south of the Tarim Basin) with the Southern Silk Road, and both can be compared with Maritime Silk Route even further south (see Internet Sources below).

     Alice-Catherine Carl's study of the New Silk Road in Central Asia offers additional classroom applications. Students can profit by engaging in change-over-time examination, as well as tracing similarities and differences between the Old and New Silk Roads in Central Asia in terms of commodities, the identities of traders, technologies, global reach, the role of state and non-state players and other factors. They can also benefit by tracing the legacies of Cold War rivalries in the region and by finding in the New Silk Road proofs of the multi-polarities of the post-Cold War world.

     Carls evokes images from the Greek world (Gordian Knot and Pandora's Box). One aspect of the Greek World that lies close to Micah Muscolino's study of Chinese attitudes towards the environment is that China holds the potential for standing alongside the Greek example of how a development strategy can lead to the destruction the environment (the Greek's degraded much of the Mediterranean via their olive trade, which drove the clearance of water-saving trees and shrubs to make way for olive trees whose root systems lacked water-storage or soil enriching potentials). Students can examine a well-developed Moroccan example of olive tree-driven environmental degradation at http://www.american.edu/ted/olive.htm. Moreover, as Steven Kinzer has noted (at http://www.ncsj.org/AuxPages/031702SilkRoad.shtml), no Central Asia oil pipeline can serve as a guarantee of peace, wealth and stability, particularly in this region. He writes:

Such a pipeline could bring trouble as well as wealth. Since it would pass through much remote and mountainous terrain, regional warlords who believed they were not receiving a just share of the profits might be in a position to blackmail the government. Nor is it certain that wealth from transit fees would trickle down to the masses; precisely the opposite has happened in Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, where corrupt elites have become rich while many live in misery. So a pipeline, which could bring more cash into Afghanistan than any other step short of legalizing opium, could just as easily promote destabilization and upheaval.

     Klaus Mühlhahn reminds us of a key element of inter-civilization exchange when he writes of the "localization" (in this case, Sinification) of interrogation and other techniques of political terror. When Confucius was asked if opponents of the political system he favored should be killed, he responded with the question "Of what use is it to kill men?" This has been taken to mean that the killing of a regime's opponents was proof of the failure of one's ideas. Modern Germany took a different tack. Dachau was originally represented as a camp where political dissidents could win redemption by doing constructive work for the state, but was a work-to-death camp serving the Final Solution. Yet, in China, even German-influenced Guomingtang Chinese internment camps favored political "re-education" over execution and this seems to have served as the model for Communist regimes throughout Confucian-influenced Asia, such as those in Vietnam. Looking for differences within the larger world of such camps, students will find that the French-influenced Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge camps were modeled more on the French Revolution with its evocation of the Terror's "Year Zero"--rather than on those of the Guomingtang or Mao. However, Klaus Mühlhahn's focus on political violence and repression informs us how "cultural globalization" includes not only the spread of the cell phone and American jeans, but also extends to the dissemination of techniques of political coercion and state-sanctioned mass murder ranging from the French Revolution to the auto-genocide in Cambodia.

     Instructors who wish to further explore China's place in world history from the old Silk Road to the New and China's larger place in world history might wish to explore the following websites, offering both lesson plans and content supporting student research and classroom activities... Many of these sites go far beyond the usual suspects to offer sources in that they deal with trans-regional and not merely Chinese issues, such as women and the concept of "decline."

     This essay closes with a lesson plan designed to lend insight into how and why China passed from being a global superpower to the "sick man of East Asia"
through an examination of the early modern tea trade.

Web Resources Useful for Examining the Place of China in World History

Resources for the Study of the Silk Road (s) Old and New

An expansive resource for teaching about the Silk Road is offered by the College Board through its free of cost subscription (mere sign-up required) AP Central website at http://apcentral.collegeboard.com/apc/public/courses/teachers_corner/28276.html.

The principal site for lesson plans and associated classroom materials on the ancient Silk Routes and which are particularly useful for identifying the factors that led to cultural exchange along its course can be approached at two alternative addresses:

http://www.international.ucla.edu/eas/sum-inst/links/silkunit.htm
http://www.isop.ucla.edu/eas/sum-inst/links/silkunit.htm#background

Exercises designed for students between the 4th to 12th grade can be found at:

http://www.crayola.com/lesson-plans/detail/silk-road-treasures--traders-lesson-plan/

Silk Road games and building a student exhibition are among the many links offered at:

http://www.askasia.org/teachers/lessons/index.php?no=&era=&grade=&geo=05&length=50&s=&p=4 and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silkroad_Online.

Students can access Silk Road histories and take a virtual tour of the Chinese Silk Road center of Dunhuang are available at:

http://www.ess.uci.edu/~oliver/silk.html
http://www.silkroadfoundation.org/toc/index.html
http://www.chinapage.com/silkroad.html
http://depts.washington.edu/silkroad/exhibit/trade/trade.html
http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ince/hd_ince.htm

Though, as mentioned above, it is designed as a study guide and lesson plan resource, the following site is very useful for identifying the factors that led to cultural exchange along the Silk Road:

http://www.international.ucla.edu/eas/sum-inst/links/silkunit.htm#background

See also:

http://www.asiasociety.org/arts/monksandmerchants/silk.htm

.

Key middle-men of the northernmost Silk Road were the Sogdian people, whose "glories" and achievements are discussed at:

http://www.silk-road.com/newsletter/December/pre-islamic.htm
http://www.silk-road.com/artl/sogdian.shtml
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sogdiana (includes map)
http://east-asian-history.suite101.com/article.cfm/the_sogdians

.

The southern Silk Route, including the Tea-Horse trade, is explored at:

http://www.cpamedia.com/trade-routes/tea-horse-road-historical-perspective/
http://www.Chinaculture.org/gb/en_curiosity/2005-10/19/content_74658.htm
http://trade-routes-resources.blogspot.com/2008/03/tea-horse-road-or-cha-ma-gu-dao.html (offering the best map).

China's opening of the southernmost Silk Road to tourism is analyzed at http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/200102/15/eng20010215_62482.html.

The Maritime Silk Road is examined at:

http://www1.chinaculture.org/08olympics/2008-07/09/content_136318.htm
http://www.china.org.cn/english/features/zhenhe/132334.htm

The "New Silk Road" between the China and Europe and the Middle East and the negative as well as positive aspects of its development is discussed at

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=3822414
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/08/AR2007040800923.html
http://www.forbes.com/global/2008/0602/062.html
http://enterpriseresilienceblog.typepad.com/enterprise_resilience_man/2008/11/the-new-silk-road.html (with map)
http://www.newsweek.com/id/76010
http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/ed20070624a1.html.

Sites offering commentary on the Silk Road pipelines with extensive maps include:

http://igcc.ucsd.edu/regions/middle_east/GreatSilkRoad/silkroaddefault.php
http://www.sras.org/geopolitics_of_oil_pipelines_in_central_asia

Students will enjoy and greatly learn from a mocking but informative piece on the concept of a "New Silk Road" as exploited by financial "experts" and trade boosters produced by the syndicated financial column, "The Motley Fool," at http://www.stockgumshoe.com/2008/10/the-new-silk-road-motley-fool.html.

Web Resources Stressing Comparative Aspects of Chinese History

The influence of China (and India) on trade patterns in Asia is discussed at:

http://www.historyforkids.org/learn/india/economy/
http://depts.washington.edu/silkroad/exhibit/trade/trade.html
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1310/is_1984_June/ai_3289705
http://www.seasite.niu.edu/Tagalog/Tagalog_Default_files/Philippine_Culture/trade_and_early_empires.htm

A comparison between Confucius and Socrates is made at:

http://www.san.beck.org/C&S-Contents.html

Connections between Confucianism, Daoism, and Western philosophy are made at

http://www.friesian.com/confuci.htm

A comparison of the role of women in ancient China and in Rome is offered at

http://adam.burnetta.com/Writings/ancient-rome-china-women-comparison.html.

Students will enjoy the awesome animation of the Chinese naval expeditions of the early 15th century at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sultan/media/expl_01q.html).

The Web offers the means to comparatively examine the lives of some of the world's greatest explorers, including Admiral Zheng He:

http://chinapage.com/zhenghe.html,

Christopher Columbus:

http://www.millersville.edu/~columbus
http://www.columbusnavigation.com/

Vasco da Gama:

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1497degama.html

The Polo family:

http://www.silk-road.com/artl/marcopolo.shtml
http://www.korcula.net/mpolo/index.html

.

Web Resources for Studying China's place in the Rise and Demise of Civilizations:

Web sites offering links exploring the last indigenous Chinese dynasty, the Ming, can be found at:

http://www.stockton.edu/~gilmorew/consorti/2feasia.htm

For the art of the Qing Empire:

http://www.art-and-archaeology.com/timelines/china/qing.html

For the decline of the Qing dynasty:

http://library.thinkquest.org/26469/history/1900.html

That decline was accelerated by the failure of a reform effort which climaxed in the 103 days from June 11 to September 21, 1898 examined online at:

http://www-chaos.umd.edu/history/modern3.html

This failure came on top of the Opium War examined at:

http://www.wsu.edu/~dee/CHING/OPIUM.HTM
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/ChinaDragon/opiumwar.html

A web site encourages discussion of Chinese Opium Commissioner Lin Zexu's letter to Queen Victoria at:

http://web.jjay.cuny.edu/~jobrien/reference/ob29.html

The destructive mid-19tth century Chinese "peasant" Taiping Rebellion http://www.chaos.umd.edu/history/modern2.html gravely weakened 2000 years of traditional Chinese government. The Boxer Rebellion at the end of that century (http://www.smplanet.com/imperialism/fists.html provided the coup de grâce

Other sites that serve to illuminate key figures in the decline and fall of the Qing Empire include a biography of Yuan Shikai at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuan_Shikai

The emergence of Republican China, including Sun Yat-Sen's early political platform, is treated at http://www.chaos.umd.edu/history/republican.html

The life of Chiang Kai-shek set against the background of nationalist politics is provided at http://www.wsu.edu:8001/~dee/MODCHINA/SUN.HTM

A reflection on the legacy of the student-led May Fourth movement is offered at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_Fourth_Movement

An excellent introduction to the life of Chinese communist Mao Zedong is provided at http://www.asiasource.org/society/mao.cfm

An essay comparing the course of "westernization" in Russia and Japan (and China as well) can be found at http://www.socyberty.com/Social-Sciences/A-Comparison-of-Westernization-in-Russia-Japan-and-China.67924

.

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China is examined at http://library.thinkquest.org/26469/cultural-revolution/.

A virtual tour of the Cultural Revolution, including files of documents and personal reminiscences, is located at http://www.cnd.org/CR/english/.

Art played a major role in the Cultural Revolution, as is borne out by two exhibitions, entitled "Rethinking Cultural Revolution Culture" and "Picturing Power: Art and Propaganda in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution," respectively:

http://www.sino.uni-heidelberg.de/conf/propaganda/
http://kaladarshan.arts.ohio-state.edu/exhib/poster/exhibintro.html

Attacks by the Red Guards on teachers are discussed at:

http://www.cnd.org/CR/english/articles/violence.htm

The nature of the Chinese Peoples' Liberation Army is described at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%E2%80%99s_Liberation_Army.

The limits of the recent movement toward liberalization in China, and by extension in the remaining communist nations, were tested during the student occupation of Tiananmen Square in 1989. This event is explored at http://www.tsquare.tv/. It offers film and music clips, a photo gallery, and a transcript of Deng Xiaoping's June 9, 1989, speech declaring martial law. A transcript of the Public Broadcasting Company's superb documentary on the Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing China in 1989 can be found at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/gate/.

For further coverage see http://www.historywiz.com/Demonstratiotion.htm.

The National Security Archive (a non-governmental "watch dog" organization) offers a briefing book and a wealth of documents on the 1989 Tiananmen Square protest movement at http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB16/.

Still photography of the protests, their repression, and ongoing efforts at democratization in China is offered at http://www.christusrex.org/www1/sdc/tiananmen.html.

A 360 degree moving image view of Tiananmen Square can be viewed at http://www.Roundtiananmensquare.com/.

For a discussion of how corruption may ruin China's rise as a world power, see http://www.carnegieendowment.org/.

Further discussion of democracy and human rights in China is offered at:

http://hrw.org/english/docs/2002/08/02/china4187.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_democracy_movement
http://www.opendemocracy.net/democracy-china/chill_3272.jsp
http://usinfo.state.gov/eap/Archive/2006/Feb/15-436496.html

.

Web-based Lesson Plans for Chinese Ancient History and Culture:

http://www.mrdonn.org/ancienthistory.html
http://www.kcta.ku.edu/KCTAlessons/china.html (sorted by grade)
http://www.education-world.com/a_lesson/lesson099.shtml
http://www.historylink101.com/
http://multimedialearning.org/presentations/211_China.php3 (for purchase only)

Early Modern China's Place in World History Seen through the Story of Tea

     James Anderson's article refers to this writer's own "Chinese Tea in World History" which contains a wide variety of classroom teaching resources on that subject that were originally designed as a "Teaching Gem" for the Advanced Placement World History Reader Lesson Plan Jamboree. Its focus is on the means of conveying concepts such as the continuing China-centered global economy in the early modern period and at the same time discuss the contemporaneous rise of the West as an agent of increasing cultural and economic globalization. This exercise became a fuller, illustrated article published in Education About Asia, 13 no. 2 (Fall 2008), 8-14. Both a "gif" file of that article with illustrative photographs is available at no cost by emailing mgilbert@hpu.edu. A less-graphically rich version is offered in an Appendix which follows the Select Bibliography offered below. That article is a useful starting point for this lesson and may be used directly in support of it, with students engaging it in :slow reading" discussion groups or assigned specific sections for analysis. However, this lesson plan goes beyond the article to suggest research and other student activities.

Lesson Plan: Learning About China's Place in the Early Modern World through the Southern Silk Route Using Tea Bricks


 
 

     As conversations among instructors on Internet Listserv sites such as AP-World have established, it is no easy task to address in the classroom the continuing China-centered global economy in the early modern period and at the same time discuss the contemporaneous rise of the West as an agent of increasing cultural and economic globalization. One of the most popular ways of doing so is to show just how much of the word's early modern trade was China-centered, while at the same time demonstrating how Europe's vaunted conquest of the America's and hence Europe's access to cheap new world silver, and Europe's access to the world's storehouse of martial and trans-oceanic naval technology, first gave the West merely the means to participate, and only much later dominate, the China trade. Thanks to the efforts of many teachers, one means of doing so is via readings or lesson plans derived from books and articles such as by Ken Pomeranz's The World Trade Created (1999) and The Great Divergence: China Europe and the Making of the World Economy (2001) and Dennis O. Flynn and Arturo Giráldez's "Born with a 'Silver Spoon': The Origin of World Trade in 1571," in the Journal of World History, 6, no. 2, (Fall, 1995): 201-221.

     The lesson plan offered below offers a more visual and tactile approach to this subject than Pomeranz/Flynn-based materials. Its focus is the Chinese tea bricks and minimally requires only the accompanying photograph, though students' eyes light up when you pass around an actual tea brick (widely available on the Internet for $14.00-$20.00 or even less). Internet sources well serve this topic (see bibliography below).

Why Chinese Tea Bricks?

     Long before oil assumed the title, tea was the world's "black gold," as much for its role in the world's currency as for its value as a commodity. When pressed into embossed molds which were scored into sections, "tea bricks" were easily transportable and at any point could be eaten as food, crushed into powder and consumed as medicine, or mixed with water and drunk as a beverage. However, from at least the 10th century, tea bricks were widely used as a medium of exchange that formed a considerable part of the world's currency prior to the 20th century and continued to do so in more limited capacity until shortly after the Second World War. The Opium Wars (though Tea Wars might be a better concept) helped mark the growing shift from a China-centered to a European centered global economy, the primacy of not merely of tea, but the tea brick as a commodity exchange.

     However, tea bricks played a role in the process by which the chief beneficiary of that shift, Great Britain, lost its first empire. The Boston Tea Party (when tea bricks were thrown in to Boston Harbor) played a major role in that development. The Tea Act of 1764 merely restated much earlier trade regulations that compelled Britain's American colonists to buy tea only from British merchants.

     The Act exempted the Company for any taxes in the Americas that its competitors—mostly smugglers like John Hancock—would have had to pay, making the Company's tea cheaper than the smuggled product. The Company's increased sales were to enable the Company to better recoup it debt. That debt was incurred by losses resulting from its acting as a military auxiliary in defending British interests in India during the series of wars with France and its European allies ending with the Seven Year's War.

     In the process of that fighting, the Company had taken the opportunity to build what was to become a second British Empire. The irony lies not in that it was American opposition to this tea tax (and the draconian British Tory response) that was the proximate cause of the loss of its first empire, but that the "jewel in the crown" of that second empire, India, provided the opium stocks that would resolve the trade imbalance with China and propel Britain to dominance in East Asia. Before the Opium Wars, China was the great sink of the world's silver; afterwards, China suffered a catastrophic net outflow of that specie.

     This lesson offers more than a glimpse of the transitional state of the early modern world economy. It can open many other windows into world history, such as:

1. The role of food and foodways in world history
2. The place of tea in world history
3. "Commodity currency" in the world system (as a means of introducing the world system)
4. Regional varieties of commodity exchange and beverage consumption.
5. The global context and results of the growth of the political power of the British East India Company's in India.
6. Role of "coffee houses" (actually tea was increasingly drunk there) in the establishment of global trading and insurance networks (Lloyds of London, etc.)
7. The American Revolution (The Tea Act of 1764, brick tea thrown into Boston Harbor by the "Sons of Liberty," closing of Boston Harbor.
8. Disease in world history (the boiling of water for tea helped control the spread of water born diseases in both Japan and Britain)
9. The Industrial Revolution and Tea (Alan Macfarlane, author of Savage Wars of Peace (1997) believes tea played a role in Industrial Revolution in Britain, but not in Japan.

Lesson Plan: Using Tea Bricks to Illuminate the Early Modern World

Types of activity:

1) In classroom activity/lecture: Student handle tea bricks in class; Socratic discussion of what it is made of; the uses of a "commodity currency;" why commodity currency was so prevalent in the early modern economy; prompt a discussion of specie currency, mercantilism, growth of commercial economy as well as undercutting its dominance, forcing students to more closely examine other assumptions, such as Columbus conquered the world around 1500.

2) Homework or Library assignment: identify the importance of tea in world history and the "global reach" of tea bricks as global currency.

3) Team Activities: each team explores one of the following: the reasons for the popularity of tea in China and Europe, the role of commodity currency in Asia, Africa and the Americas; connecting British dominance in India to the American Revolution to the Opium Wars; reasons for the shift in popularity in Britain from beer and coffee to tea.

4) Student research: origins and evolution of the Japanese tea ceremony, "tea and imperialism," plantation economies (See Tom Standage, History of the World in Six Glasses (New York: Walker and Company, 2005) and Woodruff D. Smith, "Complications of the Commonplace: Tea, Sugar, and Imperialism," in the Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 23, no. 2 (Autumn 1992), 259-278.

On-Line Resources:

1) http://www.stashtea.com/facts.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea

Stash site provides an accessible short history of tea consumption, examines the socio-political and cultural factors in its adoption in Asia and Europe (ignores mint tea consumed in the Middle East). The site notes the spread and use of tea in Europe, including the first use of milk in tea there.

The Wikipedia article is just as effective.

2) http://www.2basnob.com/tea-history-timeline.html

Timeline of use and distribution of tea from 2737 B. C. E to 1910 A.C.E.

3) http://www.aim-digest.com/gateway/pages/book/articles/tea.htm

In an interview, Alan Macfarlane, author of Savage Wars of Peace (1997) offers an argument that attempts to explain why tea replaced beer and ale in Britain, how it helped control water-born diseases, limiting fatalities and improving worker-health and thus the role tea played in Industrial Revolution in Britain, but not in Japan, a theory which has a Jared Diamond-like simplicity students will enjoy and teachers can use to develop their critical-thinking skills.

Select Bibliography

Evans, John C. Tea in China: The History of China's National Drink. New York: Greenwood Press, 1992.

Flynn, Dennis O., and Arturo Giráldez. "Born with a 'Silver Spoon': The Origin of World Trade in 1571," Journal of World History, Vol. 6, no. 2, (1995): 201-221.

_____"Cycles of Silver: Global Economic Unity through the Mid-Eighteenth Century." Journal of World History, Vol. 13, no. 2, (2002): 391-427.

Gardella, Robert. Harvesting Mountains: Fujian and the China Tea Trade, 1757-1937. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.

Timothy Keirn, "Tea," in Stearns, Peter, editor- in-chief. The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern World. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Volume 8: 211-213.

Alan Macfarlane. The Savage Wars of Peace: England, Japan, and the Malthusian Trap. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

McNeill, J. R., "Review of The Savage Wars of Peace: England, Japan, and the Malthusian Trap by Alan Macfarlane in The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 77 (June 2005): 415–417

J. Pelzer and L. Pelzer, "Coffee Houses of Augustan London," History Today (October 1982): 40-47.

Kenneth Pomeranz. The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.

_____and Steven Topik. The World Trade Created: Society, Culture, and the World Economy, 1400 to the Present, 2nd ed. Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1999.

Okakura, Kakuzō. The Book of Tea. Edited and Introduced by Everett F. Bleiler. New York: Dover, reprint, 1964 (originally published in 1906).

Sarkar, Goutam K. The World Tea Economy. New Delhi, India: Oxford University Press, 1972.

Standage, Thomas. History of the World in Six Glasses. New York: Walker and Company, 2005.

Smith, Woodruff D. "Complications of the Commonplace: Tea, Sugar, and Imperialism," Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 23, no.2 (Autumn 1992): 259-278.

Marc Jason Gilbert is Professor of History and the National Endowment for the Humanities Chair in World History at Hawaii Pacific University

Appendix

Chinese Tea in World History

Marc Jason Gilbert

Hawaii Pacific University

     Second today only to water as the world's most consumed beverage, tea comes in many forms and has many sources. However, the four Chinese teas processed from the Camilla sinensis plant, green, white, black and oolong,1 have played so long and so great a role in world history that it is possible to say that no other commodity is more revealing of the global human experience. Indeed, long before oil assumed the title, tea was the world's "black gold." Unlike oil, tea is a renewable resource, but like oil, tea is of rising economic value.2 There is thus every reason to believe tea will continue to shape both Chinese history and world society as it has for more than two millennia.

From a Local to Global Beverage

     Tea may have been first consumed in China as a beverage as early as 4,000 ago and by the classical era served as a refreshing stimulant that facilitated Za-Zen or seated Buddhist mediation. Its association with Buddhism enabled tea to shape Chinese elite tastes and ultimately much of Asian culture. For example, the need for a drinking vessel that did not adulterate the taste of the finest teas—as did wooden, metal and clay cups—stimulated the development of Chinese porcelain, whose production became a major factor in Chinese and later global industry and trade. During the Tang (618-907) and Song (960-1279) Dynasties, tea drinking, tea shops and tea as a subject of poetry and art became part of the fabric of Chinese life. Manuals were devoted to its production and use, the earliest being The Classic of Tea written by Lu Yu between 760-780. A Buddhist adept, Saicho, is believed to have carried the first tea seedlings to Japan in 805, where Chinese tea-drinking habits evolved into the tea ceremony which came to define Japanese culture.

     During the southern Song Dynasty (1127-1279), Arab merchants acquired tea from the city of Quanzhou in Fujian Province and carried it to the Middle East and other lands where Muslims consumed it in place of wine and other forbidden (haram) stimulants and beverages. In 1610, a Dutch ship calling at Macau took the first load of Chinese tea to Europe, where it was initially prized for its medicinal value, a quality long recognized by Chinese physicians. By the early 18th century, Europeans had come, like many Chinese, to view tea-drinking as a symbol of wealth and sophistication. By the middle of that century, this association drew British merchants to taverns and "coffee houses" (originally modeled on Ottoman examples) where tea quickly replaced the more expensive and harder to obtain coffee that gave these establishments their name. An advertisement in The London Gazette in September of 1658 proclaims, "That Excellent, and by all Physitians approved, China Drink, called by Chineans, Tcha, by other Nations Tay, alias Tee, is sold at the Sultaness-head, a Cophee-house, in Sweeting's Rents by the Royal Exchange, London."3 However, because it served merchants directly engaged in the tea trade, Garraways "coffee house" in Exchange Alley in the City of London is generally thought to be the first to replace coffee with tea. Garraways later served as the locale of several stories by Charles Dickens, who was among the first to describe these houses as places where upwardly middle class merchants and stockbrokers with limited means could meet to pool their skills and financial resources.4 Such egalitarian gatherings encouraged the development of important capitalist economic institutions. The modern insurance industry was born at Edward Lloyd's establishment on Lombard Street, where shippers sought wealthy merchants to underwrite their vessels and where Lloyd himself conducted auctions and read out shipping news (hence "Lloyd's of London"). Such shops also facilitated a British cultural florescence, as poets, writers and playwrights such as John Dryden, Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and Samuel Johnson made these establishments a second home.5


 
 

Sugar, Tea and the Industrial Revolution

     When mixed with sugar, tea also served as an inexpensive means of energizing Europe's emerging working class. It is generally agreed that tea afforded industrial workers some protection against water-borne diseases through the boiling of tea-water (a process that eventually made drinking the safer boiled water more palatable). One scholar, Alan Macfarlane, author of The Savage Wars of Peace: England, Japan, and the Malthusian Trap (1997 and 2003), believes that tea's health-saving properties played a decisive role in the development of the Industrial Revolution in tea-drinking Britain and, if somewhat later, in tea-drinking Japan.6 This argument has drawn much criticism,7 and its determinist element is certainly flawed. For example, the Chinese also drank tea, but only Japan was to later rapidly industrialize. However, tea-drinking remains worthy of exploration when tracing what modern Chinese historian Kenneth Pomeranz and others have called "The Great Divergence,"8 or the different development arcs traced by the Eurasian West and the Eurasian East post- 1500 A. C. E.

     Whether or not increasing demand by Europeans for sugar-sweetened tea helped drive the Industrial Revolution in Europe, it certainly led to an expansion of the Atlantic slave trade to supply more laborers for sugar cultivation. Growing demand for tea in the West drew China closer into the emerging global trade network, as tea became China's principle export. Since Europeans increasingly purchased Chinese tea with Mexican silver, the flood of silver entering China led to a sharp devaluation of that metal. This made tea even more expensive (as more silver was required to meet the China price). European and American merchants addressed the rising cost of tea by trading in a commodity that was just as valuable, but illicit in China: opium.

From Colonialism to Globalization

     China's attempts to halt European efforts to smuggle opium into their state led to the First Opium War (1839-1842). This conflict ultimately led to China's political and economic subjugation, but the global demand for tea exceeded Chinese production even under European domination. To meet it, Europeans flexed their imperial muscles, establishing tea plantations initially in Assam and Sri Lanka and later in East Africa, Indonesia and South America.9 Global tea production facilitated a global tea culture. Chinese-style teashops and tea parties became characteristic of European society at the metropole as well among imperial officials and their families abroad. Tea-drinking also became so ingrained in the cultures of colonized indigenous peoples as to constitute one of Western imperialism's most visible post-colonial legacies, particularly in India.


 
 


 
 

     The once highly profitable tea plantations established in colonial times now face rising production costs and worker unrest. However, whether on the rise and or in decline, tea production, distribution and patterns of consumption were and remained potent forces in world history. The past and continuing power of tea in the world economy is clearly illustrated by the role of tea in the rise and development of modern multinational corporations as diverse in origin as Unilever ("Lipton Tea") and Tata Industries ("Tetly Tea").10

     This short narrative history placing tea in a global context helps illuminate China's central place in the early modern world's economy, while at the same time providing insight into the contemporaneous rise of the West as an agent of increasing cultural and economic globalization. It also demonstrates how much of the word's early modern trade was China-centered, while showing how Europe's seizure of the silver resources of the Americas and Britain's control over India's opium fields were among the factors that assisted the West to initially participate in and eventually replace China at the center of the world's economy. Models for this discussion can be found in the works of two pairs of scholars: the above-mentioned Kenneth Pomeranz and Steven Topik's The World Trade Created: Society, Culture, and the World Economy, 1400 to the Present and Dennis O. Flynn and Arturo Giráldez landmark essays, "Born with a 'Silver Spoon': The Origin of World Trade in 1571" and "Cycles of Silver: Global Economic Unity through the Mid-Eighteenth Century."11 However, students may gain similar insights into the changing place of China in world history through a more overtly materialist approach, one which focuses on a once ubiquitous tea format: "brick tea."


 
 

Brick Tea as an "Exchange Commodity"

     In pre-modern China, tea was hydraulically pressed into embossed molds. The resultant bricks (most often smooth and rectangular, but also round and/or textured) had the virtue of being standardized by type of tea, weight and purity of content. Rectangular bricks were usually scored into standardized sections allowing such pieces to be broken off and yet remain convertible in value. Brick teas were easily transportable and at any point could be eaten as food, crushed into powder and consumed as medicine, or mixed with water and drunk as a beverage. It was also easily convertible into silver.12 As a result, brick tea was widely used as a medium of exchange throughout pre-modern Afro-Eurasia. Mongols and the various Chinese dynasties used brick tea as currency when purchasing their war-horses. Both the Tibetans and Yuan Chinese had a state office called "Tea Horse" to supervise the trading of Chinese tea for Tibetan horses. Scholars consider this trade so significant as to be considered alongside the Silk Road as a venue for material and cultural exchange.13 Even today the "Yunnan-Tibet Old Tea Horse Road," draws tourists.14 Imported tea bricks (often amounting to 6,500 tons a year) continued to serve as currency in Bhutan and Tibet until slowly replaced by British-Indian silver rupees (1874-1935).15 Brick tea was in great demand by the Russian aristocracy and served as currency in the eastern Soviet Union as late as the Second World War.


 
    Caption: In Western Szechuan, men laden approximately 300lbs of brick tea each depart for Tibet. Photograph taken on July 30, 1908 at an altitude of 5,000 ft. See www.arboretum.harvard.edu/.../wilson.htm.
 


 
 

     Brick tea had much earlier constituted a major form of both trade and currency in the Middle East and North Africa, where, as mentioned above, tea sweetened with sugar replaced wine as a social beverage with the rise of Islam. The prevalence of tea bricks in these economies has led to speculation as to their penetration into neighboring European markets. However, there is no doubt regarding their presence as an "exchange commodity" in the daily life of Britain's North American colonies. There, tea bricks (along with barrels of molasses and specific amounts of other forest products such as pine timber) were legal tender in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This hard evidence of China's global reach extended to future American President James Monroe's plantation in Virginia, whose material needs and operational expenses were paid for in brick tea (the accompanying image of brick tea was photographed from a sample on display there).

     Brick tea played a major role in the American Revolution in which James Monroe fought and was wounded. It was brick tea that was thrown into Boston Harbor by the Sons of Liberty on December 16, 1773, a development that precipitated the final break between the Tory-controlled British Parliament and its American colonies. For much of the preceding decade, Parliament had attempted to circumvent their American colonists' resistance to direct taxes by enforcing what was known as the Navigation Acts, laws that secured the privilege of trading to and from the Americas for British-owned ships sailing to and from Britain. It was in part to prevent the colonists from circumventing these restrictions by smuggling that Parliament gave the British East India Company a monopoly of the tea trade to the Americas. This monopoly would not raise the price American colonists would pay for tea, but would serve to undercut the prices charged by American smugglers. This monopolist gambit backfired, as evidenced by the chests of brick tea thrown into Boston Harbor. The draconian Tory response to the "Tea Party" in Boston—their closing of its harbor, the quartering of British troops there, etc.—ultimately inspired Patrick Henry of Virginia's famous speech on the evils of British rule which closed with the words, "I know not what course others may take, but, as for me, give me liberty or give me death!"


 
    Caption: The Boston Tea Party
 

     The Boston Tea Party ushered in an era of global war and revolution that led to the destruction of much of the so-called First British Empire in the north Atlantic. However, it also gave rise to a Second British Empire in Asia that came to eclipse China's centuries old dominance in that region. The return to power of the Tory Party after its short post-American Revolutionary War political exile saw the eventual rise of Tory Prime Minister William Pitt (1759-1806), who sought compensation for the loss of Britain's thirteen American colonies on the subcontinent of India. This was accomplished by Parliament's seizure of control over the direction of the British East India Company's political affairs under the Regulating Act of 1784. By 1818, the British East India Company's Parliament-appointed governor-generals had conquered much of India. In the 1820s, Assam was annexed and tea plantations quickly established there. By the 1830s, the "Honorable Company" had secured control of much of the opium fields of India and established a near-monopoly over Indian opium production and sale. This monopoly would ultimately resolve the West's trade imbalance with China. It would facilitate the West's domination over the Chinese state via the Opium Wars and associated conflicts and ultimately assist in the transfer to the West of China's global economic pre-eminence. The course of the history of brick tea thus runs parallel to the larger narrative of tea in modern Chinese and world history.

     Chinese tea provides a host of opportunities to study both the ancient and early modern world economy and opens many windows into Asian and world history. These include the role of food and foodways in society (such as the spread of the "tea ceremony" in Japan and Korea and tea drinking throughout the Christian and Muslim worlds); the function of "commodity currencies" (an excellent means of introducing students to the "world system"); regional varieties of commodity exchange and beverage consumption (from Tea-Horse to sugar); the place of "coffee houses" in the establishment of global trading and insurance networks; the spread of plantation economies, and the influence of both diet and disease in the Industrial Revolution in the West and in Japan. These issues can be explored through a variety of in-classroom activities and student research. Many of these activities offer highly visual and even tactile approaches to the global aspects of the culture and economy of tea. Classroom applications of brick tea-related lesson plans abound and are supported by a variety of traditional and on-line resources. The simplest approaches need employ only the accompanying photographs, though students' eyes do light up when they are permitted to handle a readily available tea brick.16 [See Summary of Resources below] However, teachers and students will greatly benefit from first consulting Tim Keirn's entry on "Tea" in the new The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern World.17 Thomas Standage argues that world history can be encompassed in "six glasses,"18 but Keirn suggests that much of Chinese as well as world history is revealed by examining one glass of tea.

Marc Jason Gilbert is the National Endowment for Humanities Endowed Chair in WorldHistory and Humanities at Hawaii Pacific University

Summary of Resources:

     An accessible short history of tea consumption at http://www.stashtea.com/facts.htm examines the socio-political and cultural factors in the spread of tea culture across Asia and to Europe (though it ignores mint tea consumed in the Middle East). This site also notes the first European use of milk in tea. A Wikipedia article on tea at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea is also useful as a general reference. A timeline tracing the use and distribution of tea from 2737 B. C. E to 1910 A. C. E. can be found at http://www.2basnob.com/tea-history-timeline.html/. An eyewitness account of the Boston Tea Party that also provides a lively discussion of its historical context is offered at http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/teaparty.htm. The role of trans-Atlantic politics in that event is explored at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Tea_Party. Thomas Standage (History of the World in Six Glasses, 2005), offers a mainstream view of the role of tea in the Industrial Revolution, which is redacted for classroom use by Deborah Johnson in "Research and Teaching: A History of the World in Six Glasses,"World History Connected, the free online journal of world history currently available at http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/whc/3.2/johnston.html and soon to be offered via the JSTOR database. Alan Macfarlane (The Savage Wars of Peace: England, Japan, and the Malthusian Trap (1997 and 2003), discusses his controversial views on the relationship between tea and the Industrial Revolution via a streaming video-supported website at http://www.alanmacfarlane.com/savage/tea.html. Macfarlane's views are also summarized at http://www.aim-digest.com/gateway/pages/book/articles/tea.htm. Content at these sites explains why Macfarlane thinks tea replaced beer and ale in Britain as well as why he believes tea helped control water-born diseases, limiting fatalities, improving worker-health and thus played a role in Industrial Revolution, a thesis which has a flawed, Jared Diamond-like simplicity students familiar with the latter's Guns, Germs and Steel (1997) can easily critique/explore and teachers can employ to develop their analytical skills.

Select Bibliography

Evans, John C. Tea in China: The History of China's National Drink. New York: Greenwood Press, 1992.

Flynn, Dennis O., and Arturo Giráldez. "Born with a 'Silver Spoon': The Origin of World Trade in 1571," Journal of World History, Vol. 6, no. 2, (1995): 201-221.

_____"Cycles of Silver: Global Economic Unity through the Mid-Eighteenth Century." Journal of World History, Vol. 13, no. 2, (2002): 391-427.

Gardella, Robert. Harvesting Mountains: Fujian and the China Tea Trade, 1757-1937. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.

Timothy Keirn, "Tea," in Stearns, Peter, editor- in-chief. The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern World. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Volume 8: 211-213.

Alan Macfarlane. The Savage Wars of Peace: England, Japan, and the Malthusian Trap. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

McNeill, J. R., "Review of The Savage Wars of Peace: England, Japan, and the Malthusian Trap by Alan Macfarlane in The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 77 (June 2005): 415–417

J. Pelzer and L. Pelzer, "Coffee Houses of Augustan London," History Today (October 1982): 40-47.

Kenneth Pomeranz. The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.

_____and Steven Topik. The World Trade Created: Society, Culture, and the World Economy, 1400 to the Present, 2nd ed. Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1999.

Okakura, Kakuzō. The Book of Tea. Edited and Introduced by Everett F. Bleiler. New York: Dover, reprint, 1964 (originally published in 1906).

Sarkar, Goutam K. The World Tea Economy. New Delhi, India: Oxford University Press, 1972.

Standage, Thomas. History of the World in Six Glasses. New York: Walker and Company, 2005.

Smith, Woodruff D. "Complications of the Commonplace: Tea, Sugar, and Imperialism," Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 23, no.2 (Autumn 1992): 259-278.

 

 
Notes

1 To learn about Chinese teas, its many varieties and patterns of consumption, visit http://chineseteas101.com/. Accessed June 10, 2008.

2 Recent scientific research has proven that green tea is of great value in promoting vascular health. See "Benefits Of Green Tea In Reducing An Important Risk Factor For Heart Disease," in Science Daily, July 3, 2008 at http://www.sciencedaily.com/

releases/2008/07/080702080624.htm. Accessed July 10, 2008.

3 From Bryant Lillywhite, London Coffee Houses, cited at British Muslim Heritage, http://www.masud.co.uk/ISLAM/bmh/BMH-IRO-coffee_houses.htm. Accessed June 10, 2008.

4 For a complete list of Dickens' references to Garraways, see Alex J. Phillips et al, The Dickens Dictionary (Research and Education Association, 2001): 137.

5 See Godfrey Hodgson, Lloyd's of London (New York: Viking Adult Books, 1984) and Markman Ellis, The Coffee House: A Cultural History (London: Phoenix, 2005) and J. Pelzer and L. Pelzer, "Coffee Houses of Augustan London," History Today (October 1982): 40-47.

6 This issue is directly addressed at Alan Macfalane's homepage to be found at http://www.alanmacfarlane.com/savage/tea.html. Macfarlane also contends that the pace of Japan's industrial growth was initially slowed by its tendency to reject labor-saving devices i/n order to maintain employment opportunities for its population. Thus, while Britain was launching its Industrial Revolution, "Japan was undergoing an industrious one." See an essay encapsulating Macfarlane's views entitled "Did Beer and Tea Make Britain Great?" at AIM, the Alcohol in Moderation Digest website at http://www.aim-digest.com/gateway/pages/book/articles/tea.htm. Accessed May 10, 2008.

7 For a world historian's contrarian view, see J. R. McNeill, "Review of The Savage Wars of Peace: England, Japan, and the Malthusian Trap by Alan Macfarlane," in The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 77 (June 2005): 415–417. For the critique of a Japanologist, see Karen Wigen, "Review of The Savage Wars of Peace: England, Japan and the Malthusian Trap, by Alan Macfarlane," in Monumenta Nipponica, Vol. 53, No. 2 (Summer, 1998): 273-276.

8 Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).

9 See Woodruff D. Smith, "Complications of the Commonplace: Tea, Sugar, and Imperialism," Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 23, no.2 (Autumn 1992): 259-278.

10 For Unilever see its homepage at http://www.unilever.com/. Accessed on May 10, 2008. For the Tata Group (Tetley Tea and other brands), see http://www.tata.com/tata_tea/index.htm. Accessed May 10, 2008. Unilever has recently attempted to spruce up its global image by promoting its commitment to "sustainable and ethical" tea production, a sign, if market driven, of the growing confluence of globalization and environmentalism.

11 Kenneth Pomerantz and Steven Topik. The World Trade Created: Society, Culture, and the World Economy, 1400 to the Present, 2nd ed. Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1999) and Dennis O. Flynn and Arturo Giráldez, "Born with a 'Silver Spoon': The Origin of World Trade in 1571," Journal of World History, Vol. 6, no. 2, (1995): 201-221 and "Cycles of Silver: Global Economic Unity through the Mid-Eighteenth Century," Journal of World History, Vol. 13, no. 2, (2002): 391-427.

12 In the 19th and early 20th century, the third quality of the five quality levels of tea brick was the equivalent of the Tibetan "brgyad pa" ("eighth"), which was then worth eight standard Tibetan silver coins (tangkas) weighing approximately 5.4 grams. See Wolfgang Bertsch, The Use of Tea Bricks as Currency among the Tibetans - Der Gebrauch von Teeziegeln als Zahlungsmittel bei den Tibetern (Landau, Germany: European Union to Search for, Collect and Preserve Primitive and Curios Money/ European Association for Collecting, Preserving and Researching of Original and Unusual Forms of Money [EUPRIMO], no. 75, 2006). See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_brick. Accessed on May 10, 2008.

13 See "The Ancient Tea and Horse Caravan Route: The 'Silk Road' of Southwestern China," at http://www.silk-road.com/newsletter/2004vol2num1/tea.htm. Accessed on June 10, 2008.

14 See "Tea Horse Road" at http://www1.chinaculture.org/created/2005-09/16/content_73021.htm and K. Gabrisch, Geld aus Tibet, Rikon: Stadt Winterhur Department fur Kulturelles -e-Tibet-Institute, 1990, cited at http://www.tibetancoins.com/III%20Tibetan%20Trade. Both sites accessed June 10, 2008.html.

15 Ibid.

16 Tea bricks are widely available on the Internet for $14.00-$20.00 or less.

17 Timothy Keirn, "Tea," in Peter Stearns, editor- in-chief, The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008): Vol. 8, 211-213).

18 Thomas Standage, The History of the World in Six Glasses (New York: Walker and Company, 2005).

 

 

 
Home | List Journal Issues | Table of Contents
© 2009 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
Content in World History Connected is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the World History Connected database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.


Terms and Conditions of Use