Tea And Empire

"Tea has been one of the most popular commodities in the world. Over centuries, profits from its growth and sales funded wars and fueled colonization, and its cultivation brought about massive changes--in land use, labor systems, market practices, and social hierarchies--the effects of which are with us even today. A Thirst for Empire takes a vast and in-depth historical look at how men and women--through the tea industry in Europe, Asia, North America, and Africa--transformed global tastes and habits and in the process created our modern consumer society. As Erika Rappaport shows, between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries the boundaries of the tea industry and the British Empire overlapped but were never identical, and she highlights the economic, political, and cultural forces that enabled the British Empire to dominate--but never entirely control--the worldwide production, trade, and consumption of tea. Rappaport delves into how Europeans adopted, appropriated, and altered Chinese tea culture to build a widespread demand for tea in Britain and other global markets and a plantation-based economy in South Asia and Africa. Tea was among the earliest colonial industries in which merchants, planters, promoters, and retailers used imperial resources to pay for global advertising and political lobbying. The commercial model that tea inspired still exists and is vital for understanding how politics and publicity influence the international economy ..."--Jacket.

This book brings to life for the first time the remarkable story of James Taylor, ‘father of the Ceylon tea enterprise’ in the nineteenth century. Publicly celebrated in Sri Lanka for his efforts in transforming the country’s economy and shaping the world’s drinking habits, Taylor died in disgrace and remains unknown to the present day in his native Scotland. Using a unique archive of Taylor’s letters written over a forty-year period, Angela McCarthy and Tom Devine provide an unusually detailed reconstruction of a British planter’s life in Asia at the high noon of empire. As well as charting the development of Ceylon’s key commodities in the nineteenth century, the book examines the dark side of planting life including violence and conflict, oppression and despair. A range of other fascinating themes are evocatively examined, including graphic depictions of the Indian Mutiny, ‘race’ and ethnicity, migration, environmental transformation, cross-cultural contact, and emotional ties to home.

Although tea had been known and consumed in China and Japan for centuries, it was only in the seventeenth century that Londoners first began drinking it. Over the next two hundred years, its stimulating properties seduced all of British society, as tea found its way into cottages and castles alike. One of the first truly global commodities and now the world’s most popular drink, tea has also, today, come to epitomize British culture and identity. This impressively detailed book offers a rich cultural history of tea, from its ancient origins in China to its spread around the world. The authors recount tea’s arrival in London and follow its increasing salability and import via the East India Company throughout the eighteenth century, inaugurating the first regular exchange—both commercial and cultural—between China and Britain. They look at European scientists’ struggles to understand tea’s history and medicinal properties, and they recount the ways its delicate flavor and exotic preparation have enchanted poets and artists. Exploring everything from its everyday use in social settings to the political and economic controversies it has stirred—such as the Boston Tea Party and the First Opium War—they offer a multilayered look at what was ultimately an imperial industry, a collusion—and often clash—between the world’s greatest powers over control of a simple beverage that has become an enduring pastime.

Apart from water, tea is more widely consumed than any other food or drink. Tens of billions of cups are drunk every day. How and why has tea conquered the world? Tea was the first global product. It altered life-styles, religions, etiquette and aesthetics. It raised nations and shattered empires. Economies were changed out of all recognition. Diseases were thwarted by the magical drink and cities founded on it. The industrial revolution was fuelled by tea, sealing the fate of the modern world. Green Gold is a remarkable detective story of how an East Himalayan camellia bush became the world's favourite drink. Discover how the tea plant came to be transplanted onto every continent and relive the stories of the men and women whose lives were transformed out of all recognition through contact with the deceptively innocuous green leaf.

The British were slow to take to tea, lagging behind the Portuguese and Dutch, and even the French. When they finally took it to their hearts, however, it became a national obsession. They covered their kingdom with tea gardens and tea shops. The taxation of tea led to massive smuggling, and the loss of their American empire.

This book brings to life for the first time the remarkable story of James Taylor, 'father of the Ceylon tea enterprise' in the nineteenth century, and examines the dark side of planting life including violence and conflict, oppression and despair.

A history of the colonial tea plantation regime in Assam, which brought more than one million migrants to the region in northeast India, irrevocably changing the social landscape.

"Tea has been one of the most popular commodities in the world. Over centuries, profits from its growth and sales funded wars and fueled colonization, and its cultivation brought about massive changes--in land use, labor systems, market practices, and social hierarchies--the effects of which are with us even today. A Thirst for Empire takes a vast and in-depth historical look at how men and women--through the tea industry in Europe, Asia, North America, and Africa--transformed global tastes and habits and in the process created our modern consumer society. As Erika Rappaport shows, between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries the boundaries of the tea industry and the British Empire overlapped but were never identical, and she highlights the economic, political, and cultural forces that enabled the British Empire to dominate--but never entirely control--the worldwide production, trade, and consumption of tea. Rappaport delves into how Europeans adopted, appropriated, and altered Chinese tea culture to build a widespread demand for tea in Britain and other global markets and a plantation-based economy in South Asia and Africa. Tea was among the earliest colonial industries in which merchants, planters, promoters, and retailers used imperial resources to pay for global advertising and political lobbying. The commercial model that tea inspired still exists and is vital for understanding how politics and publicity influence the international economy ..."--Jacket.

The British were slow to take up tea, lagging behind the Portuguese and Dutch, and even the French. When they finally took it to their hearts, however, it became a national obsession. They covered their kingdom with tea gardens and tea shops. The taxation of tea led to massive smuggling, and the loss of their American empire. To guarantee their supply of tea they went to war against the Chinese. Intrepid planters cleared the jungles of the empire - in India, Ceylon and Africa - to plant up tea. They moved over a million people to work on the plantations, where hundreds of thousands of them died of ill treatment. Eventually the British gained control over most of the world tea trade. centuries of British and world history. Once a tea-planter himself, he explains how tea was traded, grown, manufactured and marketed to satisfy the British thirst for fine tea and large profits.

This paper examines how British imperialism brought about transnationally related changes in the trade and production of Asian tea as well as tea culture and politics of North America between the mid-seventeenth and the mid-twentieth century. These changes reflected a growing theme of globalization in the local political and social histories of the two continents, which developed as a result of Britain's imperialist policy of utilizing Asian-grown tea to finance the British Empire, especially its colonial rule in Asia and North America. Westernized consumption of Asian black tea with sugar was developed in Britain after the mid-seventeenth century, and was exported to its settler colonies, including those in North America. It was not only the domestic consumption of Chinese tea in Britain but also its popularity in the British colonies which led to the dramatic increase of tea importation from China and to the Anglo-Chinese Opium War (1839-1842). Such demand for the Asian herb further led to its plantation in India and Ceylon under British control from the mid-nineteenth century. British imperialism and tea consumption also influenced tea culture in colonial New England, and especially, heavy taxation on the import and retail of Chinese tea sparked the American Revolution. Nonetheless, British-style tea culture still left a permanent legacy in the United States in the post-revolutionary era. By contrast, in Canada, the British-style tea culture, especially Britain's new policy toward reciprocal trade benefits with its colonies from the late eighteenth century, resulted in expanding revenues for colonial governments. The popularity of British tea culture in Canada and other remaining colonies not only enhanced colonists' identity with Britain and ensured its imperialist cultural hegemony overseas but also helped the British-controlled tea product in India and Ceylon to prevail over the previously prevalent Chinese tea in the international market by the early twentieth century.