Come learn the history behind how tea became the world's most popular beverage after water with professor and chair of the department of history at the University of California Santa Barbara, Erika Rappaport. This talk illuminates how between the late nineteenth and the mid-twentieth century the British-dominated tea industry based in South Asia invented the technologies and methods of global advertising that are still with us today. It demonstrates the continuities between nineteenth-century imperialism and modern forms of globalization and argues that the economic crises of the Great Depression transformed the way in which business thought about and approached non-white, non-European and working-class consumers in the global marketplace.
Erika Rappaport is professor and chair of the department of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She received her BA in history from UC Berkeley and her PhD in history from Rutgers University in 1993 and worked as an assistant professor at Florida International University moving to the department of history at UCSB in 1997. She is the author of the prize-winning , A Thirst for Empire: How Tea Shaped the Modern World (Princeton University Press, 2017); Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London's West End (Princeton 2000), and is co-editor of Consuming Behaviours: Identities, Politics and Pleasure in Twentieth Century Britain (Bloomsbury 2015). She has written many articles on the history of tea, empire and commodities, women, urban history, consumer culture and Victorian and Modern and Imperial Britain and is currently writing a book on how the public relations industry managed the process, understanding and memories of British colonialism and business after World War II.
PURCHASE Erika's book through the Garden's online shop HERE
