基于爲期31个月的民族誌田野调查，作者介绍了在大吉岭因爲茶而翻天复地的变化里，凸显的农业生产与消费全球化后产生的问题。通过目睹、倾听、研究，作者描述了地理标誌、公平贸易或大吉岭地区的廓尔喀独立运动等很少被提及的细节。这些看似高举“正义”大纛的行动，迴避了大吉岭当地因爲全球产业链的茶叶生产消费所导致的“道义经济”（moral economy）崩解，这也导致公衆对今日大吉岭茶产业中的不正义“视而不见”——这正是书中最核心的批判。

Nestled in the Himalayan foothills of Northeast India, Darjeeling is synonymous with some of the finest and most expensive tea in the world. It is also home to a violent movement for regional autonomy that, like the tea industry, dates back to the days of colonial rule. In this nuanced ethnography, Sarah Besky narrates the lives of tea workers in Darjeeling. She explores how notions of fairness, value, and justice shifted with the rise of fair-trade practices and postcolonial separatist politics in the region. This is the first book to explore how fair-trade operates in the context of large-scale plantations. Readers in a variety of disciplines—anthropology, sociology, geography, environmental studies, and food studies—will gain a critical perspective on how plantation life is changing as Darjeeling struggles to reinvent its signature commodity for twenty-first-century consumers. The Darjeeling Distinction challenges fair-trade policy and practice, exposing how trade initiatives often fail to consider the larger environmental, historical, and sociopolitical forces that shape the lives of the people they intended to support.