Strasbourg University
PhD student (by the time of the conference : post-doctoral researcher)
Strasbourg/France
neufville@unistra.fr
Abstract
Although economic historians and historians of consumption have long ago taken interest in crops and products of global significance, such as tea, tea culture in the Caucasus has remained out of their focus. This topic has also remained out of the purview of historians of the Caucasus within the Russian/Soviet Empire. My research aims at uncovering the history of this project of implementing a tea industry in the Caucasus. I will show how it started out, as an attempt of Tsarist officials to overcome Imperial Russias dependency on Chinese tea and British commercial networks. Therefore, what was at stake was not only the taming of the newly-conquered Caucasus, nor the «improvement» of Caucasian rural areas, but Imperial Russias place in the global competition for imperial supremacy. I will demonstrate how Caucasian tea culture was taken a step further by Soviet authorities, and how «Caucasian» tea became «Soviet» and, more especially, «Georgian» tea. I will retrace this history at both a global (insofar as people of very different national backgrounds participated in the Caucasian tea industry, which was a trans-imperial project from the start) and local scale (as I will try to uncover how tea culture was received, appropriated, integrated into local habits and ways of life). I will demonstrate that tea culture in the Caucasus was designed and implemented as a colonial project, and that it is a relevant vantage point from which one can observe the effects of Russian and Soviet imperialism. As I will show, this did not preclude local appropriations, and the formation of a local tea expertise that remains an asset for Georgia´s future.
Keywords: Tea culture, Tea industry, History of Consumption, Environmental History, Rural History, Colonial History, Economic and Social History, Labour History.