"In Erika Rappaport's big, beautifully illustrated book, we have the first global history of how tea became a universal beverage. Rappaport accomplishes this feat by circling the world created by British imperialism, connecting tea pickers, plantation owners, traders, retail shop owners, chain stores, teetotalers, workers on their breaks, and ladies that lunch. Exploring the tea leaf's transformation from plant to drink, Rappaport tells a rigorous, vivid story of the workings of modern capitalism." --Victoria de Grazia, Columbia University "In this remarkable book covering several centuries and reaching across many continents, Erika Rappaport explores the production, marketing, and consumption of a simple plant and familiar commodity, one that people had to be taught to want. She demonstrates tea's key role shaping colonial and postcolonial worlds, consumerism, politics, and, above all, the cultural, trading, and power relations that made and unmade the British Empire. Ambitious analytical breadth, meticulously researched case studies, and evocative images combine to make this essential and compelling reading." --Geoffrey Crossick, University of London "This is commodity history at its best. Tea provides a window into a global economy that flourished for many centuries--long before the globalization of our own age.

We meet the producers, workers, marketers, and consumers connected to the tea that underpinned empire and postcolonial societies. Rappaport ambitiously takes us from the tea plantation to the metropole and back, capturing a big story in a teacup." --Lizabeth Cohen, author of A Consumers' Republic " A Thirst for Empire is an appealing and wide-ranging new history of tea in the modern world, with a particular emphasis on imperial networks and the role played by marketing and advertising. Sitting at the intersection of imperial history, consumer culture, and the processes of globalization, this book speaks to readers interested in world history as well as those who love their tea." --Frank Trentmann, author of Empire of Things "Positioning tea as the commodity at the heart of this compelling story, A Thirst for Empire demonstrates the ways in which a mass consumer culture emerged between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries in dynamic relations to the rise and fall of the British Empire. This book is monumental in its reach across time and space, and focused in its investigation of how tea was produced, sold, and consumed." --Nadja Durbach, University of Utah "There are lots of histories of tea out there--none, however, offer a similarly sophisticated interpretation and skilled weaving together of such diverse themes, actors, and places. Relying on enormous archival work at sites around the globe, this ambitious book offers an important contribution to understandings of empire, globalization, the rise of consumer culture, and consumer desires.

" --Abigail McGowan, University of Vermont.