Section IV
A Taste for Tea
Hanna Hodacs
Tea was a key commodity in eighteenth-century Europe. Europeans had already
been drinking hot water infused with Chinese leaves for at least a century, but primarily for
medicinal purposes. Around 1700, the consumption pattern changed; the European markets
for caffeinated drinks such as tea, and coffee, swelled and within fifty years such beverages
were no longer a luxury but a necessity--at least on British and Low Country tables. Together
with the trade in Indian cotton, the other ‘new’ Asian eighteenth-century commodity, the
tea trade expanded rapidly. Mass-produced Chinese porcelain followed suit; not only was
porcelain used when drinking tea, it was also a suitable cargo to transport together with tea
chests. Heavy, insensitive to dampness and scent-free, porcelain was packed at the bottom
of the East-Indiamen with tea on top.
That tea became a popular beverage in eighteenth-century Europe is well known,
and previous research has explored the cultural and social expressions this consumption
took. The focus of this section is the link between trade and rapidly expanding consumption,
an approach that helps to outline and explore geographies and chronologies of the
European tea drinking revolution.
The first contribution, by Chris Nierstrasz, illuminates the creation of a mass market
for cheap black tea in Northwest Europe and particularly in Britain. What singles out
Nierstrasz’s approach is his focus on the competition between the different East India
companies. The tea trade was not only a central business concern of the two big
companies—the Dutch and the English—but also for the smaller ones, such as the company
operating out of Ostend in the first decades of the Eighteenth Century or the Scandinavian
companies. While all these companies competed on relatively even ground in Canton, this
was not the case in Europe. The demand for tea varied greatly in different parts of Europe,
as did fiscal policies. Most important here was the high British import duties which created a
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lucrative market for tea smuggled from the Continent and Scandinavia. Thus, Nierstraz’s
multi-company approach helps explain the growing mass market for tea in Britain.
The pan-European wholesale market for Chinese tea and how it was interconnected
is studied in more detail in Hanna Hodacs and Leos Müller’s contribution. Although the
chapter focus exclusively on the Swedish East India Company, the article highlights the
complex logistics necessary for a company to trade with distant sellers on behalf of distant
consumers. It involved transporting and tracing thousands of chests of tea across the globe
and, since almost all tea imported by the Swedish company was re-exported, between ports
in Europe. The combination of distances covered and quantities handled promoted a
standardisation of tea which can help to further explain the growth of the tea market. As
Hodacs and Müller’s analysis of the purchasers of the Swedish tea also illuminates, it was
individuals with the connections and financial means to invest in large quantities of cheap
tea who dominated the wholesale market for Swedish imported, and soon to be exported,
Chinese tea types. The networks and fortunes required had largely been generated by
repeated investment in the China trade, many of the Swedish-based wholesalers had handson experience as supercargoes, gained from working for the Swedish and the Ostend
companies. Another common denominator was their Scottish origin.
The Scottish diaspora in Ostend and later on Gothenburg reflected the European
organisation of the Asian trade. The English East India Company was granted a monopoly to
the trade with Asian goods in England and Wales, and after the Acts of Union of 1707, in
Scotland. Scottish merchants wanting to get a share of the lucrative trade in the expanding
tea business sought out the Ostend, and later on the Swedish company, with the same aim.
As Andrew Mackillop’s chapter in this section illustrates, the connection between China,
Sweden and Scotland not only promoted the movement of men and money. The struggle of
the English Company to sell on tea to the northern parts of the British Isles shows the extent
to which illicit Swedish tea had penetrated the Scottish market. This ‘North-Sea World of
tea’ generated its own consumer preferences and its own commercial dynamics. Scottish
consumers did not want Bohea from London; they opted for ‘Gothenburg Congu’. Access to
higher quality but cheaper (and illicit) black tea from Sweden had refined the taste buds of
Scottish consumers. The Scottish example is not only interesting because it reflects on the
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connection between consumer preferences and trade connections. The speed with which
Chinese tea became a part of the daily Scottish diet is another aspect Mackillop’s chapter
illuminates. In spite of being one of the least affluent areas of North West Europe, tea
consumption in Scotland evolved in conjunction with established trade connections first
with the Low Countries, and later and more rapidly in the wake of the expanding tea trade
of the Swedish East India Company.
The growth of imports of tea to Europe underlines the speed with which Europeans
took to the habit of drinking tea in the Eighteenth Century. The prevalence of tea pots, cups
and other utensils in eighteenth-century domestic settings can provide further evidence and
explanations for this process. The material culture surrounding tea drinking in the Southern
Netherlands is at the forefront of Bruno Blondé and Wouter Ryckbosch’s contribution, the
final chapter in this section. Together with Britain, the Low Countries was arguably the place
where tea drinking expanded most quickly. The supply from the East India Company in
Ostend was one factor, but Blondé and Ryckbosch suggest another explanation as they trace
ownership of ceramic vessels suitable for brewing and consuming hot drinks in inventories
of households in cosmopolitan Antwerp and the more provincial Aalt. Their results suggest
that the urban environment more generally, rather than the size or the centrality of the
town, was an important factor promoting tea consumption. More importantly perhaps,
ceramic household utensils predated the establishment of a mass market for tea. The shift
on a broad social scale, from more durable metallic vessels, like silver cups, to arguably
more decorative, but definitely cheaper and more fragile ceramic took place in the
Seventeenth Century, before a mass market for tea was established. Some of this was
porcelain from China, some of it was European earthen- and stoneware, in many cases
decorated to imitate the Asian products.Whatever material used, it marked a change in
consumer behaviour. The urban tables of the Southern Netherlands were in that sense
already set, in advance of the arrival of the Chinese tea. Not only can this circumstance help
explain the swift incorporation of tea as a drink on an everyday basis in the Low Countries, it
also suggest that the fusion of Chinese perishable and fragile goods, tea and porcelain, with
European pottery of mixed media helped promote the tea revolution in eighteenth-century
Europe.
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