Chapter Nineteen
A North Europe World of Tea: Scotland & the Tea Trade, ca. 1690- ca.1790
Andrew Mackillop
At first glance, Scotland may not seem an obvious context for exploring the trends
and tensions which characterized the importation, distribution and consumption of tea in
eighteenth-century Europe. As a small, relatively underdeveloped kingdom on the outer
edge of the North Sea world, Scotland had little direct experience of Asia and indeed had
liquidated its own short-lived East India Company as a precondition of union with England in
1707.1 Yet it is Scotland’s marginality to the early phase of Europe’s direct contact with Asia
from circa 1500 to circa 1700, when juxtaposed with the country’s sudden inclusion
thereafter within the monopoly market of the United English East India Company (EIC),
which makes its interaction with Asian products so potentially illuminating. Scotland
experienced the centuries of the Eurasia trades as one of extremes, moving from relative
insulation from Asia commodities as late as around 1700 to a position where, by the 1770s,
many commentators felt that Scottish society risked being fatally undermined by a welter of
influences from the East.2
All European countries experienced their version of this angst over the supposedly
corrupting and enervating characteristics of Asian luxury, as well as the shift toward ideas of
‘new’ luxury which imbued commodities and their consumption with a range of virtuous,
civilizing, modern and beneficial attributes.3 As is well known, tea was among the most
obvious of the many exotic goods sweeping across Europe, driving innovative forms of elite
and mass consumption while transforming imitative production methods, social practices
and cultural expectations.4 In most respects, Scotland followed rather than set these
European trends. It experienced its own increasing levels of legal trade and consumption in
tea, a parallel smuggling economy of noticeable size and efficiency, and an intense debate
that sought to realign older, moralistic concepts of luxury in positive ways to better reflect
1
social and market realities.5 But key aspects of the country’s involvement in the tea
economy and its associated patterns of consumption were played out in an unusually
intense fashion and in ways that complicate ideas of a homogenous European or British
reaction to the wave of consumables from Asia. Indeed, the manner in which Scottish
merchants, smugglers and consumers bypassed the EIC’s official monopoly and participated
disproportionately in the Swedish East India Company (SEIC) helped to ensure the creation
of a highly variegated ‘British’ tea economy and culture. In this way Scotland played a
significant role in ensuring that instead of than a single, EIC-framed British world of tea
there emerged a metropolitan, London-based tea economy and a variety of provincial or
regional based alternatives.
With the exception of some studies of smuggling and Irish society’s changing
perception of EIC imports, the regionally diverse manner in which different parts of Britain
and Ireland reacted to the coming of tea has not received sufficient attention. 6 The value of
the Scottish example lies in the way it offers a reconfiguration of the established geography
of the tea trade in Europe, by forcing attention away from defined national markets and the
importation strategies of the large monopoly companies in Amsterdam and London.7 What
emerges instead is a greater appreciation of the multi-centred and sophisticated regional
and pan-European connections which underpinned the emergence between around 1720
and 1790 of what can be described as a North Europe world of tea.
Nowhere is the influence of tea upon Scottish society more evident than in the
parish surveys of the Statistical Account of Scotland, published from 1791 to 1799.8 Written
by Kirk ministers with access to local lore, basic economic information and history, many
summaries reveal how tea consumption was considered to be one of the great socioeconomic changes of recent times. One or more parishes in 25 out of Scotland’s 33 counties
noted the impact of tea in some manner or another (see Map 23.1). A vivid folk- memory
endured in some parishes about the precise number of kettles and families that had the
wherewithal to access tea before the upsurge in mass consumption began.9 One statistical
entry in particular captures the product’s impact upon a small, coastal village and the
prosaic yet profound way it shaped local practices and memory. The Reverend James Scott’s
1793 summary of Benholme parish in Kincardine, which contained the village of Johnshaven
2
(see Map 23.1), a well known centre of smuggling throughout much of the century, noted
the aura that had once surrounded tea:
About 50 years ago, the Excise officer’s family was the only one in Johnshaven
that made use of tea; when the tea kettle was carried to the well, to bring in water,
numbers both of children and grown people followed it, expressing their wonder, and
supposing it to be “a beast with a horn”.10
By the time of the Statistical Account, tea had become a central part of life and
culture all over the country. Its pervasive mundanity was captured brilliantly in another
memorable image by the Reverend Scott, who observed: ‘Now the tea kettle has lost of the
power of astonishing.’11 Yet how had this situation come to pass and what does it reveal
about how provincial societies, far from the dominant centres of Europe’s tea economy,
incorporated a ‘global’ product in local, regional and national ways? Given Scotland’s
geography, it is hardly surprising that tea arrived late in comparison to other western
European countries. The parish of Pettinain in Lanarkshire (see Map 23.1) proclaimed it was
the first place in Scotland where tea drinking occurred. According to lore Andrew Kennedy
of Clowburn, Conservator of the Scots Staple at Veere in Zeeland from 1689, returned home
‘towards the end of the [last] century’ and brought back tea given him as a present from the
directors of the United Dutch East India Company (VOC).12 This would date the arrival of tea
to some point in the 1690s.
The accuracy of Pettinain’s claim to fame cannot be verified; but the product was
almost certainly known earlier to Scottish aristocratic and landed families.13 There is
definitive evidence of tea consumption among aristocratic elites in Edinburgh by 1691.14
One aspect of the tale surrounding Kennedy of Clowburn does have a convincing ring: the
Netherlands connection. For all the later connotations surrounding tea as a particularly
British recreational product, during the early emergence of the trade Scottish society would
just as readily have associated tea with the Continent. At the end of the Seventeenth
Century the Netherlands remained Scotland’s premier continental source of many luxuries
3
from Asia.15 Andrew Russell, a merchant-factor from Stirling based in Rotterdam who
retained extensive commercial links with Scotland, certainly traded in coffee, tea, and
chocolate. His accounts detail impost rates at Rotterdam for tea in 1691 and 1692, and
again from 1694 to 1696.16
The 1700s to early 1730s marked an era of consolidation for the EIC, not least as a
consequence of the growing profile of tea as a percentage of total imports.17 In Scotland, by
contrast, the quarter century or so after 1707 was marked by structural recession as
consumer demand and the economy struggled to adjust to new levels of taxation and
competition from high quality goods from the rest of Great Britain.18 One result of this
situation seems to have been a largely unknown phase of experimentation and a growing
awareness of the wide varieties of teas, price patterns, and potential market opportunities.
John Cowan, a merchant in Stirling (See Map 23.1), typified this speculative climate and the
steep learning curve required by those engaging in the trade. In November 1726 Cowan
purchased tea in London for sale in Rotterdam in an effort to diversify his portfolio of
exports. Commissioning the London-Scots merchant, George Udny, he asked for ‘a small
parcel [of] goods such as the India Company sells, to be exported to Holland’ as a trial; it was
to include 200 lb of Bohea tea ‘of the very cheap sort’ and 600 lb of pepper.19 Attempting to
dispose of such goods in the Netherlands might seem a particularly counter-intuitive
approach and evidence of a lack of specialised commercial knowledge among merchants of
a society with no direct contact with Asia. Yet Cowan’s reasoning had less to do with the
intricacies of markets in the United Provinces than an up-to-date awareness of British fiscal
policy, particularly the value of the drawback of 4 shillings and 6 pence allowed on reexported tea.20
By 1745, the flow of tea handled by Cowan had reversed as adjustments in the
British customs and excise regime now facilitated importation from the Continent. 21 What
followed was a series of complaints to his associate, Alexander Livingston, in Rotterdam that
the 400 lb of ‘coarse’ tea imported from the Netherlands would not sell. The inability to
dispose of lower quality tea was part of an influential trend by which both merchants and
consumers felt that the two big monopoly companies continually failed to read market and
taste preferences effectively. Complaints over the EIC’s persistent inability to import
4
sufficient quantity and higher quality varieties forced the introduction in 1745 of a licensing
system by which British merchants could import from continental sources if the quarterly
sales at East India Company House failed to adequately provide for domestic consumption.
22
Yet Cowan’s consternation at the loss he sustained on Dutch tea masks the more
intriguing evidence that Scottish society had already established clear preferences and a
definite awareness of varieties, price and quality. Returning some of the coarse leaf to
Rotterdam, Cowan began ordering a much more diverse range of teas. In early November
1745, he instructed Livingston to consign £40 of ‘good bohea tea’, 50 lb of the higher quality
leaf, Congou, and a further 50 lb of Souchong. This was followed in May 1746 by another
order on Rotterdam for 300 lb, most of which was Souchong and other unnamed types on a
sliding scale of cost.23 The increasing sophistication of Cowan’s purchases shows an
awareness of the various levels of demand in and around Stirling, and speaks to the
existence of an increasingly discerning customer base many hundreds of miles from the
main metropoles of the tea trade.
The two generations between circa 1730 and 1790 were marked in Scotland by
interactions and reactions with the importing strategies of the EIC and VOC, the changing
fiscal regime of the British state and the creation of the Swedish East India Company.24 The
result was a flourishing of provincial smuggling economies and the deepening of Scottish
preferences for, and even reliance on, continental imports of tea. The age of the illicit tea
economy in the British-Irish Isles is conventionally divided into distinct stages. The pre-1745
decades were marked by pervasive but small-scale smuggling. Thereafter competition
between legal and smuggled tea stabilised before a ‘new mode’ of ‘associations’ emerged in
the decade or so after the end of the Seven Years War (1756-1763). These organisations,
such as the Clovan, Mull and Carrick ‘companies’ focused on large-scale importation of teas
such as Congou which the EIC failed to provide in sufficient quantity or quality. 25 They
consolidated supplies of Swedish East India Company tea and linked with wholesale and
retail networks across Northern Britain and Ireland. This era marked in effect the apogee of
a distinctive northern subset of the wider European tea economy.
The prominence of Scotland within some of these trends is striking. The country’s
geographical situation, its small consumer base and relatively underdeveloped retail
5
provision might point to a peripheral role in the evolution of Europe’s tea cultures. 26 Yet as
early as February 1761, the EIC directors had become sufficiently concerned at the scale of
‘a clandestine trade in tea’ to order an intelligence-gathering exercise in Edinburgh.27 In fact
the country lay at the cutting edge of alternative modes of supply, consumption culture and
taste preferences that ultimately helped to force adjustments upon the EIC and the elite
London tea dealers. As the ‘the most revealing example’ of the new connections created
between European suppliers and the domestic British market, ‘Scotland was the only region
[in Britain and Ireland] that threatened the dominating position of London’. 28 In this sense
Scotland lay not at the periphery of a British tea economy, but constituted a key market in
the North Europe world of tea.
What is far less appreciated is the period of the 1730s-70s, which set the stage for
the later, better documented large-scale illicit tea economy. The high profile smuggling
networks of the 1760s-80s did not emerge in a vacuum, but evolved from a less dramatic
but still significant era of growing Scottish engagement with tea. If the Netherlands had
been the first supplier of non-EIC tea to Scotland, Sweden emerged rapidly as the dominant
new source with the foundation in 1731 of the Swedish East India Company. A number of
Scots entrepreneurial networks have been identified as operating within the organisation
from the moment of its inception. This was the case both at the level of the directorate and
among the supercargoes who acted as the chief mercantile operatives in Asia. 29 Colin
Campbell from Moy in Moray and the Aberdeenshire merchants Charles Irvine and James
Moir were only the most prominent foreign nationals who formed a substantial percentage
of the SEIC’s elite merchants in the early years of its existence. Scots constituted a majority
or substantial minority of supercargoes on 35 per cent of all SEIC voyages to Asia between
1732 and 1750, and held 18 per cent of all such posts in the same period. 30
While Scotland, in common with other British regions, could not access the tea trade
directly as a consequence of the EIC’s monopoly, Scottish mercantile networks could and did
move easily across and between the formal regulatory frameworks. The effects of this
mobility are apparent in the ways in which tea was traded in Scotland throughout the
middle decades of the century until the 1790s. A unique record of the volume, variety,
prices, customer base and distribution scope of a north European tea dealer can be found in
6
the ‘Tea Sales Books’ of James Corbet, merchant and ship-owner in Dumfries during the
1750s-60s.31 (See Map 23.1) Like most other purveyors of tea beyond the specialised circle
of dealers in London and Amsterdam, Corbet was a general merchant, with the product
forming only one part of a much wider range of commodities.
Table 23.1 James Corbet Tea Sales Book, Dumfries, 1758
Tea
Price (per
Localities/County
lb)
Heyson
Customer
Base
13 shillings
Dumfries (burgh) =
Green
Women = 35
16
9 shillings
Gentry = 10
Singlo
Dumfries (county)
8 shillings
Green
= 20
Aristocracy =
7
Best
Congou
7 shillings, 6
Hawick (Roxburgh)
pence
Clergy = 5
Carrachan
Congou
6 shillings, 6
(Kirkcubright)
pence
officeholders = 4
Best
Heyson
2nd
Congou
Kirkbean
5 shillings
(Kirkcubright)
4 shillings, 6
Glasgow (Lanark)
4 shillings, 3
(Lothian)
pence
ZZiong
Whitehaven
Best
Artisan = 4
Merchant = 3
pence
Edinburgh
Best
Burgh
4 shillings
(Cumberland)
3 shillings,
7
Lawyers = 3
Shopkeeper =
2
Customs &
Breakfast
10 pence
Excise = 2
Breakfast
Military = 1
Bohea
Vinter = 1
Coarse
Schoolmaster
Breakfast
=1
Source: National Records of Scotland, CS 96/2153-2155: Tea Books of James Corbet,
merchant and shipowner, Dumfries, 1754-1762.
Table 23.1 provides an overview of Corbet’s 363 tea sales in 1758. The tea books
show Corbet’s activities expanding considerably, with 474 lb of ‘breakfast tea’ sold at four
shillings per lb in 310 separate transactions between August 1755 and the end of 1756.
Congou formed a prominent element in his sales strategy and demand remained buoyant,
with 175 Ilb sold in 104 separate sales at 7 shillings per lb between August 1755 and
February 1756.32 The central role of women in the culture of tea consumption is confirmed
unequivocally in Corbet’s ledgers. Women formed 54 per cent of his customers for breakfast
tea and 38.4 per cent for the more expensive Congou over the latter months of 1755. They
retained this high profile throughout 1758, constituting 39 per cent of his entire customer
base in that year. Contemporary representations of tea as a particularly feminine, domestic
and polite pursuit was clearly reflected in market practice; but acquiring tea also ensured
women operated at the sharp end of pricing trends and demands for certain varieties. If this
was the case in fashionable salons in Paris and London it was no less true in predominately
rural regions like the Scottish borders.
One salient feature of Corbet’s distribution network was its regional scope; his
horizons were essentially those of the south west Scottish borders. The known social
background of his customers is also telling; the preponderance of landed elites and the
8
professional orders is only to be expected. But shoemakers, wrights and masons also
purchased the cheaper varieties, while merchants and shopkeepers such as John Little in
Langholm and William Main in Dumfries almost certainly retailed the product further down
the social hierarchy. (See Map 23.1) The most striking aspect of Table 23.1 is the diversity of
teas and the mixed pricing structure. It is testimony to the sophistication of tea distribution
networks and customer tastes across north Europe that a non-specialist merchant in a
provincial Scottish burgh was able to offer ten different tea varieties. It is also a telling
indication of how Corbet sourced the better quality leaf that his ledger was arranged by
1757 under the distinct headings ‘Congo tea from Gothenburg’ and ‘Gothenburg Congo’.33
Any attempt to understand how the trade operated in Scotland by mid-century is
fortunate in having detailed accounts from the north east region which offer an excellent
contrast to Corbet’s network in the south west. Watson and Anderson, merchants of Cullen,
a small royal burgh on the Banff-shire coast, were another general business with extensive
links to the Continent and particularly to Gothenburg. (See Map 23.1) Table 23.2
summarises their transactions for the month of January in 1759 and 1761. In just those two
months over 300 lb of tea was sold to 22 customers in Cullen and its regional hinterland.
Although nowhere near the many hundreds of pounds of tea routinely handled by the elite
London dealers, the volume of leaf distributed by the Cullen-based merchants was still
impressive.34
Table 23.2 Watson and Anderson of Cullen Tea Sales, January 1759 & 1761
Tea
Price (per lb)
Localities/C
ounty
Heyson
13 shillings
Green
Customer
Base
Cullen
Indeterminat
(Banff) = 6
e = 11
Elgin
Merchants =
6 shillings to 5
Best
shillings, 10 pence
9
Congou
2nd
5 shillings, 6 pence
(Moray) = 4
6
4 shillings
Keith
Women = 5
Congou
(Banff) = 2
Bohea
Letterfurie
(Banff)
Deskford
(Banff)
Source: NRS, CS 96/2918: Accounts of Watson and Anderson, Cullen, 1758-1762, pp.
1-7, 210-220.
Large sections of Watson and Anderson’s accounts do not indicate the precise type
of tea sold, so it cannot be said with certainty that the limited but high quality varieties
listed in Table 17.2 were all that was available. Despite their northerly situation, the Cullen
merchants were more competitively priced than Corbet for Congou teas in particular,
reflecting no doubt their easy access to SEIC marts in Gothenburg. Even before the onset of
the larger smuggling associations of the later 1760s and 1770s, the North Europe tea trading
system delivered highly competitive prices even for mid-quality products, shaping Scottish
tastes and preferences in the process. The Cullen business focused far more obviously on
wholesale distribution to other merchants than the small retail sales which characterised
Corbet’s customer base in and around Dumfries. Merchants such as John Jameson in Keith
and James Duncan in Forres, who often acquired up to 20 Ilb several times a month,
performed a similar role to that of Archibald Little in Langholm. (See Map 23.1) Meanwhile,
in January 1761, John Clerk, merchant in Elgin, paid £61 7s 2d for 185 lb of tea, a surprising
amount of which consisted of the higher quality ‘Best Congou’, ‘2nd Congou’ and ‘Green
Heyson’.35
10
If Cullen acted as a local emporia, connecting its rural hinterlands and neighbouring
burghs to the metropoles of the tea trade, it was not alone in this function. A number of
burghs across Scotland, not normally associated in any way with the tea trade, performed
this wholesale and retailing function. To the examples of Stirling and Dumfries can be
added: Cupar in Fife, Crieff in Perth, Kirriemuir in Angus, Peterhead in Aberdeenshire and
Stromness in Orkney. (See Map 23.1) This is not an exhaustive list, but does point to the
practical mechanics by which tea spread across the whole country. In the Statistical Account
for Cupar, the burgh was portrayed as ‘a store house’ supplying surrounding parishes with a
range of commodities, including tea. Kirriemuir was described as ‘the mart to which the
inhabitants of the neighbouring parishes chiefly resort’. Tea, along with other imports such
as sugar, rum and wine, came up from Dundee in nine carts arriving twice weekly, with
another two carts once a week from Montrose.36 (See Map 23.1)
The reports on Crieff, Stromness and Peterhead were unusually specific. (See Map
23.1) With a population of around 1,344, Stromness imported a total of 860 lb, much of
which would then be retailed out into the surrounding countryside. Here was one of the
most northerly satellite tea emporia in the British-Irish Isles. Crieff’s role as a regional
distribution centre comes across clearly in the fact that, with a total village and rural
population of approximately 2,640 in 1792, the town hosted nineteen tea retail outlets and
an annual consumption of 5,015 lb. Peterhead exemplifies these smaller regional centres
and provides a telling glimpse of the legacy of the North Europe tea zone as it dissipated in
the aftermath of the Commutation Act. With a population in 1794 of 4,100 people, the town
absorbed no less than 9,000 lb of tea and sustained twenty tea dealers.37 These small, often
unlicensed outlets, coupled to the tendency of merchants such as Corbet to sell packages to
itinerant ‘chapmen’ who retailed across rural parishes, warn against assessing the
prevalence of tea in Scotland based on the country’s smaller per capita ratio of licensed
shops.38 That a small, north eastern Scottish town sustained this level of tea infrastructure is
testimony to the scale and influence of the Gothenburg connection. Indeed, in a moment of
disarming candour, the Reverend Dr Moir in Peterhead admitted of his home town that
‘formerly there was too much connexion [sic] with an illicit trade from Gotthenburg [sic] and
Holland, that has now almost ceased.’39 Although smuggled tea aroused a high profile but
11
short lived boycott campaign in 1744, illicit tea became a routine, even acceptable facet of
life in Scotland.40 In 1765 Andrew Muirson, an officeholder at the Court of Justiciary in
Edinburgh asked his brother James Muirson of Troup outside Banff to send him 3 to 4 lb of
‘good Congo Tea’. (See Map 23.1) Given its clearly illicit nature, Andrew asked for the tea to
be sent to Aberdeen, where Robert Auld, Clerk of the Justiciary circuit would forward it on in
a secure fashion under the inviolate seal of the judicial system. 41 Even legal officials charged
with upholding the EIC’s monopoly economy had a taste for tea that overcame whatever
scruples they may have harboured against smuggling.
Taken together, what evidence can be recovered concerning the volume and nature
of Scottish society’s engagement with tea confirms the pervasive reach of the North Europe
smuggling zone, its commercial sophistication and its enduring impact upon Scottish tastes
and product preferences. In 1785, Ilay Campbell, the Lord Advocate of Scotland, was
commissioned by Henry Dundas to enquire into the effects of the Commutation Act in
Scotland. The results were a series of interviews with prominent tea dealers, Mr Paton of
Glasgow and Aitchison of Edinburgh, which provide the single best overview of Scotland’s
place in the North Europe world of tea. Put simply, by the 1760s and 1770s, Gothenburg tea
had almost totally displaced its EIC equivalents, driven down prices and produced a wave of
supply that swept over the English border as far as Newcastle and Leeds and across the
North Channel into the north of Ireland. Both dealers confirmed that the EIC’s brown and
Bohea teas did not sell well in Scotland. Ordinary Scots men and women, it seemed,
preferred SEIC Congou of ‘the best sort’, believing a heavier tea suited the heavier diet.
Paton emphasised the widespread belief that ‘The East India Company have not been at
sufficient pains to supply Scotland with this article [Congou]’.42
This complaint had existed for decades and is salutary proof of the problems the EIC
and VOC experienced in attempting to cater to the emergence of regionally diverse tastes
within nominally national markets. Scotland was in effect a Congou drinking society, with its
preferences and tastes shaped by its inclusion in the Gothenburg tea zone as opposed to the
London economy. The Edinburgh dealers noted that, by the 1770s, suppliers in Gothenburg
shipped approximately 15,000 chests of 80 lb each, only approximately half of which was
then consumed in Scotland: 33per cent came into the Firth of Forth and the remaining two
12
thirds into the other regions of Scotland. Edinburgh and Leith consumed about £100 worth
of tea a day, while Glasgow’s daily consumption ran at 300 lb of Congou. Over and beyond
the widespread Scottish preference for Congou – a trend already evident in the records of
Corbet and Watson and Anderson – national sentiments were also at play. According to
Aitchison, some Scots felt it demeaning to the country’s status within the Union to be
obliged to purchase in London. Capturing a sense of the patriotic and anti-metropolitan
sentiments that culturally legitimately Scotland’s consumption of ‘Swedish’ as opposed to
‘British’ tea, Aitchison concluded: ‘It may be said indeed that the distant parts of England
will be in a similar situation. But this will scarce be thought a good answer to those who
consider Edinburgh the capital of Scotland as much as London is the capital of England’.43
The ministers of the Statistical Account were correct to highlight the emergent
centrality of tea in Scottish society. Their judgements and those of Aitchison have found
support in a rigorous analysis of Scottish port customs and excise records which has
confirmed the profound importance of tea within the economy and society of post-Union
Scotland. All the known estimates suggest a North Sea world tea economy in Scotland worth
somewhere in the order of £360,000 to £480,000 per annum – figures which match closely
the average £456,583 value placed on tobacco imports in the mid-1770s. Nothing better
illustrates the grossly neglected significance of tea to Scotland than the fact that it stands in
comparison with the great colonial product long held responsible for the transformation of
the country’s international economy. Indeed, along with the similarly addictive tobacco leaf
and the overland trades with England, tea has been justly described as ‘a third […] mainstay
of Scottish commercial activity’.44
The history of tea in post-Union Scotland offers a compelling example of the need to
rethink interpretative assumptions that place ‘Asian’ commodities into unproblematic,
undifferentiated ‘European’ markets. If the centuries of the Eurasia trades confirm Asia’s
startling internal complexities and diversity, they also point to the need to remain sensitive
to Europe’s own heterogeneity. Scotland’s developing consumption preferences placed the
country for most of the Eighteenth Century into a hitherto neglected North Europe world of
Tea. This was characterised by constantly adjusting commercial networks based in
continental hubs like Rotterdam, Ostend and, above all, Gothenburg that connected and
13
served a host of smaller ports such as Dumfries, Cullen and Peterhead. Such was the
influence of this variant of Europe’s wider world of tea that it played a significant but by no
means exclusive role in ensuring that even the EIC could not secure complete control of its
domestic British markets. The value of studying tea in an eighteenth-century Scottish
context is that it complicates the usual emphasis on the emergence of comprehensive forms
of Britishness, not least as a consequence of the country’s disproportionate involvement in
imperial activities. But in some crucial respects tea made Scotland more, not less, European,
a trajectory which supports the renewed interest in the continental connections and
influences that continued to shape the British-Irish Isles.45 Only drastic fiscal recalibration
and regulatory restructuring by means of the Commutation Act finally secured the basis of a
genuinely integrated British market and culture of tea by the early 1790s. It is a measure of
the impact of the northern economy and culture of tea that Europe’s seemingly most
powerful fiscal-military state and East India Company were forced to act in such a way.
Therein lies one of the many benefits of remaining alive to post-Union Scotland’s highly
distinctive interaction with, and taste for, tea.
Map 17.1: Eighteenth-Century Scotland and Tea
14
15
16
1
A. Mackillop, ‘A Union for Empire? Scotland, the English East India Company and the British Union’,
The Scottish Historical Review, 87 (2008), pp. 120-122.
2
John Dwyer and Alexander Murdoch, ‘Paradigms and Politics: Manners, Morals and the Rise of
Henry Dundas, 1770-1784’, in John Dwyer, Roger A. Mason and Alexander Murdoch (eds), New
Perspectives on the Politics and Culture of Early Modern Scotland (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1982),
pp. 231-33.
3
Christopher J. Berry, The Idea of Luxury: A conceptual and historical investigation (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 101-2, 126-73; Maxine Berg, Luxury and Pleasure in
Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 6-7, 29-39.
4
Philip Lawson, ‘Tea, Vice and the English State 1660-1714’, in A Taste for Empire and Glory: Studies
in British Overseas Expansion, 1660-1800 (Aldershot: Variorum, 1997), XIV, pp. 1-21; James Walvin,
Fruits of Empire: Exotic Produce and British Taste, 1660-1800 (New York: New York University Press,
1997), pp. 9-32; Helen Clifford, ‘A Commerce with things: the value of precious metalwork in early
modern England’, in Maxine Berg and Helen Clifford (eds), Consumers and Luxury: Consumer culture
in Europe, 1650-1850,(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), pp. 161-162.
5
David Allan, Scotland in the Eighteenth Century (London: Longman, 2002), pp. 181-183.
6
Martyn J. Powell, The politics of consumption in eighteenth-century Ireland (London: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2005); Hoh-Cheung and Lorna H. Hui, ‘The Commutation Act and the Tea Trade in Britain,
1784-1793’, The Economic History Review, 16 (1963), pp. 244-45; Hoh-Cheung and Lorna H. Mui,
‘Smuggling and the British Tea Trade before 1784’, The American Historical Review, 74 (1968), p. 59.
7
Andrew Mackillop, ‘Accessing Empire: Scotland, Europe, Britain, and the Asia Trade, 1695 - c. 1750’
Itinerario, 29 (2005), pp. 7-25.
8
Donald J. Withrington, ‘What was Distinctive about the Scottish Enlightenment?’, in Jennifer J.
Carter and Joan H. Pittock (eds), Aberdeen and the Enlightenment(Aberdeen: Aberdeen University
Press, 1987), pp. 15-16.
9
Monquhitter (Aberdeen); Lethnot and Navar, Murroes (Angus); Mortlach (Banff); Twynholm
(Kirkcubright); Bathgate (Linlithgow); Forres (Moray); Dowally (Perth): http://stat-accscot.edina.ac.uk/link/1791-99/ , date accessed 13 April 2013.
10
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13
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14
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16
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22
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23
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24
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25
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27
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28
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29
Sven T. Kjellberg, Svenska Ostindiska Compagniera, 1731-1813 (Malmö: Allhems, 1974), pp. 36, 41,
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30
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31
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32
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33
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34
Mui and Mui, Shops and Shopkeeping, p.180.
35
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38
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39
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40
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42
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43
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44
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45
Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1832 (London: Pimlico, 1992); Stephen Conway,
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17