ORIGINAL ARTICLE Conceptualizing China's tea history in the 19th century: Incorporation into the capitalist world-economy Sung Hee Ru Seoul National University Asia Center, Seoul, South Korea Correspondence Sung Hee Ru, Seoul National University Asia Center, #410, 1 Gwanak-ro, Gwanak-gu, Seoul, 08826, South Korea. Email: hanngl@snu.ac.kr Funding information Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea; National Research Foundation of Korea, Grant/Award Number: NRF-2020S1A6A3A02065553 Abstract Recent historical accounts of the 19th century China's tea history have been presented without adequate attention to global capitalism's dynamics, despite the fact that researchers have explicitly or implicitly accepted the idea that China experienced a massive and unprecedented change in tea cultivation during the period, prompted by the penetration of capitalist logics. By analysing China's capitalist incorporation process, I show why and how tea- growing areas in southern China drove export-oriented pro- cess of tea cultivation, increasing the number of seasonal workers—including Chinese tea growers migrating to British India's tea plantations—and experiencing ecological degra- dation and economic underdevelopment. In addition, I reveal how analysis of China's incorporation process helps to investigate the relationship between China's tea industry and its early industrialization. By allowing us to examine China's tea history and the dynamics of the capitalist world- economy in the long 19th century in tandem, concept of China's incorporation process elicits macrolevel, global, and historical narratives of the 19th century Chinese tea history. KEYWORDS capitalist world-economy, China's incorporation process, Chinese tea history, the 19th century Received: 28 July 2020 Revised: 31 October 2021 Accepted: 13 November 2021 DOI: 10.1111/joac.12469 J Agrar Change. 2021;1–19. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/joac © 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 1