British Imperialism and Tea Culture in Asia and North America, 1650-1950
by
Sydney Cunliffe
BA, McGill University, 2011
A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements for the Degree of
MASTER'S OF ARTS
in the History Department
 Sydney Cunliffe, 2014
University of Victoria
All rights reserved. This thesis may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by photocopy
or other means, without the permission of the author.
ii
Supervisory Committee
British Imperialism and Tea Culture in Asia and North America, 1650-1950
by
Sydney Cunliffe
BA, McGill University, 2011
Supervisory Committee
Dr. Zhongping Chen, Department of History
Supervisor
Dr. Gregory Blue, Department of History
Departmental Member
iii
Abstract
Supervisory Committee
Supervisor
Dr. Zhongping Chen, Department of History
Departmental Member
Dr. Gregory Blue, Department of History
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.
iv
Table of Contents
Title Page………………………………………………………………………………….. i
Supervisory Committee…………………………………………………………………… ii
Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………. iii
Table of Contents………………………………………………………………………….. iv
Acknowledgments............................................................................................................... v
Introduction......................................................................................................................... 1
Chapter One: British Imperialism and Changes in Asia's Tea Culture............................... 12
Tea Culture in the British Empire and Anglo-Chinese Trade............................................. 12
British Demand for Chinese Tea and the Opium War......................................................... 23
British Tea Plantations in India and Global Tea Markets.................................................... 32
Chapter Two: British Colonialism and Tea Politics in American
Society................................................................................................................................. 47
The Spread of British Tea Culture in the American Colonies............................................. 47
The British Monopoly of Chinese Tea Importation and the
American Revolution........................................................................................................... 54
The Legacy of British-style Tea Culture in the United
State...................................................................................................................................... 62
Chapter Three: British Impacts on the Tea Trade and Culture in Canada .......................... 74
British Interests and Asian Tea Trade in Canada................................................................. 74
The Influence of British Tea Culture in Canada and Canadian Cultural Identity................ 83
The Prevalence of British Indian and Ceylon Tea in Canadian and Global
Markets................................................................................................................................. 94
Conclusion.......................................................................................................................... 101
Bibliography....................................................................................................................... 103
Appendix............................................................................................................................ 120
v
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Dr. Gregory Blue for helping develop my knowledge and interest
in world history, that most important of subjects which ties it all together. I would also
like to thank Dr. Zhongping Chen, who has generously spent many hours in helping me
to develop and construct my ideas for this thesis and in cultivating my interest in the
expansive world of commercial history.
Introduction
During Britain's commercial and colonial expansion in Asia, North America, and
throughout the globe, tea played important and complicated roles. Although many
attempts were made throughout the British Empire at transplanting tea, large-scale tea
cultivation was confined to monsoonal Asia by the requirements of climate and soil
specific to that region. Until the mid-nineteenth century knowledge of tea processing
techniques was mainly restricted to China’s inner provinces and remained inaccessible to
the British and other Westerners. The increasing import of Chinese tea into Britain and its
colonies, especially those in North America, caused serious trade deficit on the British
side, triggered the illegal export of opium from British India to Qing China from the
early-nineteenth century and led to the well-known “Opium Wars” of 1839-1842 and
1856-1860. However, it is still little known how the British interest in tea caused
transnationally interrelated changes in its trade and cultivation in Asia, especially China
and India, and in the related politics and culture of Britain’s thirteen North America
chartered colonies before and after they gained independence.
The relationship between British imperialism and tea production and trade in Asia
and between tea consumption in North America respectively has received scholarly
attention to different extents. Most previous studies have often focused only on the rapid
popularity of tea consumption in Britain from the mid-seventeenth century, the dramatic
increase of tea importation from China thereafter, and the British plantation of the
drinkable plant in the Indian subcontinent from the mid-nineteenth century. In contrast, a
few other works have concentrated on the rise of tea consumption in the United States
2
from the eighteenth century and especially its impacts on the anti-British politics in the
era of the American Revolution. But they have not examined how British imperialism
brought about transnationally related changes in the production and trade of Asian tea
and North American tea culture and politics in the colonial and post-colonial periods.
In 1935, William H. Ukers published All About Tea, an exhaustive compendium
on the scientific, technical, commercial, social, and artistic history of tea. It contains a
2,000-title bibliography and an index of 10,000 entries.1 His extensive empirical evidence
and statistical analysis have cemented the status of his work as the first stand-alone text
in the historiography of tea. His book traces British consumption of Chinese tea from the
1650s and indicates the subsequent increase of tea imports from China and the rise of
tariff on the imported commodity as tea gained popularity in Britain. It also presents
information about the consumption and taxation of tea in the British colonies, including
those in North America.2 But Ukers does not attempt to examine tangible links between
such historical phenomena in Asia and North America.
There is also a lack of comprehensive studies on the connections between
imperial profits and tea consumption and culture throughout the British Empire. Also
lacking in contemporary research is an examination of how this British tea culture and
demand for the commodity impacted China's domestic tea production. A few general
works discuss this topic during the era of the Canton trade system from the eighteenth to
the mid-nineteenth centuries. In an influential work, A History of East Asian Civilization,
John K. Fairbank and Edwin O. Reischauer stated that in the early-nineteenth century
1
William H. Ukers, All About Tea,(New York: Tea and Coffee Trade Journal, 1935), 2 vols.
2
Ukers, All About Tea, vol. 2, 49-65.
3
"European and American demand for Chinese goods through the Canton trade [was] no
more than a small fraction of the domestic demand," and that "the principal market
remained the Chinese consuming public." Even at the height of the Canton trade system
around 1800, Chinese demand for locally produced goods dwarfed international demand,
and total domestic production was predominantly consumed by the local population.
Domestic consumption of tea in China, along with such goods as cotton textiles and silk,
remained higher than what was exported to Europe and America, even though tea
accounted for three fifths of Chinese exports throughout the eighteenth century. 3 By
1782, tea exports from China accounted for 2,816,000 lbs, and by the 1830s had reached
over 30 million lbs.4 Thus, British and other Western demand for Chinese tea merely
supplemented an already burgeoning domestic market.5
In contrast, Robert Gardella offers a more international analysis of the tea trade
and production on the southern coast of China in Harvesting Mountains: Fujian and the
China Tea Trade, 1757-1937. He provides insight into the development of the tea
economy as it was influenced by international trade, first during the era of the Canton
trade system (1757-1842) and then in the aftermath of the Opium Wars. Fujian's position
as an established exporter of processed tea and the sixth largest provincial tea producer of
China in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries allowed it to expand rapidly to meet the
new international demand after the Canton trade system was abolished following the
3
Edwin O. Reischauer and John K. Fairbank, A History of East Asian Civilization (Boston: Houghton Mifflin
Company, 1960), 345.
4
Peter C. Perdue, Rise and Fall of the Canton Trade System: China in the World: 1700-1860s (Cambridge,
MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2014),
http://ocw.mit.edu/ans7870/21f/21f.027/rise_fall_canton_01/cw_essay02.html, accessed February 18, 2014.
5
Reischauer and Fairbank, A History of East Asian Civilization, 97; Ulrike Hillemann, Asian Empire and
British Knowledge: China and the Networks of British Imperial Expansion (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2009), 3-4.
4
opium wars of the mid-nineteenth century. Gardella argues that the existing provincial
infrastructure of tea cultivation and processing allowed the Fujianese tea trade to attain
predominance even before the Treaty of Nanjing opened treaty ports to Western
merchants in 1842.6
Although Gardella includes a regional study of the tea export industry in China in
his book, similar works in Western languages still lack detailed analysis of changes in
this industry across China,7 such as the shift from green to black tea production that
happened largely because of specific demand from Britain as well as its colonies in North
America, Australia and elsewhere. Although there are many publications that document
changes in the Asian tea trade and production under the impact of British imperialism,
these works generally ignore the dynamics for such historic change from Britain’s former
and remaining colonies, including the United States and Canada. 8 Nor have they fully
accounted for how the British colonists employed Chinese tea processing techniques for
their successful experimentation with tea plantation in India and Ceylon from the midnineteenth century.
Hosea B. Morse, author of The East India Company Trading to China, 16351834, offers an exhaustive study of the East India Company's commercial dealings with
6
Robert Gardella, Harvesting Mountains: Fujian and the China Tea Trade, 1757-1937 (Berkeley, University
of California Press, 1994), 12.
7
Several English-language studies include in-passing examinations of some aspects of Chinese tea culture,
although they do not focus explicitly on this subject. (See John Kieschnick, The Impact of Buddhism on
Chinese Material Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).
8
John Kieschnick, The Impact of Buddhism on Chinese Material Culture (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2003), 263; Of Tripod and Palate, 213-217.
5
9
China until the end of its monopoly in 1833. Morse's text, while hugely helpful to any
student of English or Chinese trade history during the period concerned, leans heavily on
the sheer quantity of its sources, namely, the East India Company records. These records
are his biggest strength but also his greatest weakness, as the study is more a summary
and analysis of the records, particularly between 1775-1834 when they are most
complete, than an actual layered and comprehensive argument structured upon diverse
evidence. For the context of this paper's subject, Morse's study provides great value as it
hinges upon the crux of this paper, the trade of opium, bullion, cotton, and tea, which
helped to build tea consumption in the Empire and set the stage for the Opium Wars and
British transplantation of Chinese tea to India in the second half of the nineteenth
century.
Beatrice Hohenegger’s book, Liquid Jade, argues that British interest in Indian tea
production grew in tandem with imperial interest in the country as a colony. 10 As the
British East India Company lost its 113-year old commercial monopoly over China trade,
especially tea trade, in 1834, it increasingly considered India as a viable source of tea
production in Asia. Hohenegger especially indicates that the shift to the tea plantation in
India reflected British imperialist desires to control the supply of tea in Asia. 11 Such
imperialist aims led to the gradual displacement of the Chinese tea industry after the midnineteenth century, positioning Britain as the new master of the Asian industry and global
9
Hosea Morse, The Chronicles of the East India Company, Trading to China 1635-1834 (Oxford: The
Clarendon press, 1926–1929).
10
Beatrice Hohenegger, Liquid Jade: The Story of Tea from East to West (New York: St. Martin's Press,
2006), 154-155.
11
Hohenegger, Liquid Jade, 158-160.
6
market because tea from the British Empire, especially India, accounted for 90 percent of
the West's supply by 1900.12
In The Empire of Tea: The Remarkable History of the Plant That Took Over the
World, Iris Macfarlane and Alan Macfarlane also argue that the British commoditization
of tea was a main factor in Britain's ability to build a global empire. They stress how the
efficiency of the Indian tea industry was a result of colonial officials' employment of
methods similar to those used by British factories during the Industrial Revolution, such
as assigning specialized tasks and ensuring workers to sign long-term contracts and sleep
on or near the work premises.13 But their study lacks any discussion about links between
Indian tea production and traditional tea-gathering methods that had been used for
centuries in China. In contrast, Helen Saberi argues that the British demand for tea had
led to some of the world's first cases of "industrial espionage," because the colonial
government in India sought to covertly acquire information on tea plants and methods of
cultivation from China in order to establish a self-sustaining colonial tea industry.14
By the mid-nineteenth century, British colonials living in India not only engaged
in experimentation with tea plantations but also made the drinking of black tea a daily
custom. However, the number of tea consumers across the vast Indian population
remained limited, and tea-drinking was heavily localized in regions where the plant was
common such as northeastern India. Jason Goodwin posits that tea was not consumed by
12
J.M. Scott, The Tea Story (London, U.K.: William Heinemann Ltd., 1964), 76.
13
Iris Macfarlane and Alan Macfarlane, The Empire of Tea: The Remarkable History of the Plant that Took
Over the World (London: Overlook Press, 2004), 44.
14
Helen Saberi, Tea: A Global History (UK, London: Reaktion Books, 2010), 128.
7
the native population outside of northeastern India until the seventeenth century.
15
Thus,
the tea plantation in India was mainly driven by demand in Britain and its existing and
former colonies where tea consumption had been expressly promoted as a means of
increasing British revenues and perpetuating British cultural imperialism and where many
local populations still kept the British style of tea culture.16
Indeed, tea trade and plantation in Asia were not only driven by the British style
of tea-drinking in both Britain and its former and remaining colonies. Roy Moxham
argues that tea was responsible for Britain's ability to build its empire and maintain
domestic stability during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, although it also
triggered the American Revolution against the British Empire.17 In the aftermath of the
French Revolution (1789), Britain's political situation seemed to become increasingly
precarious to lawmakers. At a time when demand for tea was exploding among all levels
of the population in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, fears regarding Britain's
ability to continue to meet domestic demand grew. This led to a push towards the search
for a secure and sustainable source of tea production which Britain could control.
The loss of the American colonies by Britain in the 1770s, as Moxham claims,
was also a direct result of the heavy taxes imposed by the British government on
imported Asian tea, which had become increasingly important in American society due to
its social value and addictive properties. However, he does not provide a causal analysis
of the links between the British tea trade in Asia and the revolutionary politics in North
15
Jason Goodwin, Time for Tea: Travels through China and India in Search of Tea (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, Inc., 1990), 174.
16
Saberi, Tea, 130.
17
Roy Moxham, Tea: Addiction, Exploitation, and Empire (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2003), 69.
8
America. In fact, the American Revolution is merely a minor theme in his work.
18
Although he stresses that tea was a major component of the British Empire's economic
strength during the imperial period, and that tea was significant for the continuity of the
empire outside of Asia and Africa, he does not examine the reciprocal relationship
between British imperialism and tea culture in North America, and especially Canada.19
Iris Macfarlane and Alan Macfarlane's Green Gold: The Empire of Tea presents
another interesting argument that tea, unlike other contemporary commodities in
circulation such as gin and tobacco, had uniformly positive health benefits for consumers,
and contributed to the working[?] efficiency and effectiveness of the British working
class. A sober and temperance-touted beverage, tea also prevented the consumption of
bacteria through boiled water. Alan Macfarlane, who penned the second portion of the
book, credits tea as the major catalyst after 1730 for the first Industrial Revolution in
Britain and the formation of the powerful Sung dynasty, Japanese urbanization and
industry, and the British Empire.20 His argument, however, attributes all these different
phenomena simplistically to one source, and is too narrow in its analysis of the impacts of
tea production and consumption on the British Empire, especially North America.
As is detailed below, there is a growing number of publications documenting the
history of tea culture in North America, especially Canada, but they have rarely examined
the connections between how this culture developed and how the British developed
colonial tea trade or plantation in Asia. Some of these works merely touch upon the
impact of British imperialism on Canadian society by the late-nineteenth century through
18
Moxham, Tea, 46-50, 69, 159, 206-207.
19
Moxham, Tea, 49-50, 69.
20
Iris Macfarlane and Alan Macfarlane, Green Gold: The Empire of Tea (London: Ebury, 2003).
9
summary reviews. While a few other studies have used trade data to analyze the impact
of tea commodity in Canada, they do not explicitly focus on Asian black tea consumption
as a major cultural influence in the Canadian colonies and provinces. Thus, there is a
general lack of studies which focus wholly on tea as a vehicle for British social and
cultural influence in the Canadian provinces.
In William Easterbrook’s Canadian Economic History, he discusses the role of
the Hudson's Bay Company, the primary British colonial agency in Canada, in the
importation of tea from China from 1821. Because of the British monopoly over the
China trade. Easterbrook indicates that the Hudson's Bay Company ships were forbidden
from direct commerce with China, although from 1821 the Company was able to consign
beaver pelts to a Boston-based firm named Perkins and Company. This permitted the
exchange of furs for Chinese goods when the market exchange rates were unfavourable
to the company. On behalf of the Hudson's Bay Company, merchants from Perkins and
Company purchased such items as tea and silk from China with the profits garnered from
exporting the Company’s furs.21 Thus Britain's trading monopoly, Easterbrook argues,
prevented the initial development of any direct commercial relationship between China
and Canada.
Another important study of tea consumption within the British Empire is David
Grigg's article published in 2002,22 which documents tea production in Asia and its
consumption in former and existing colonies including Canada in the late nineteenth
21
W.T. Easterbrook and Hugh G.J. Aitken, Canadian Economic History (Toronto: Macmillan of Canada,
1963), 328.
22
David Grigg, "The Worlds of Tea and Coffee: Patterns of Consumption," Geojournal 57 (2002): 283-294.
10
century. Grigg also provides a comparative assessment of coffee and tea consumption. He
argues that the British exported their drinking preference for tea throughout their empire,
and he uses statistical evidence to stress that Britain's colonies had higher per capita tea
consumption than most other Western counties and their colonies by the late-nineteenth
century.23 He does not, however, explain why and how the British government’s colonial
policies helped to popularize tea consumption in its colonies, especially Canada, from the
eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. Nor does he examine how the tea culture in Canada
and other British colonies affected the Anglo-Chinese tea trade and British tea plantation
in India.
The use of sources in this paper range from economic records and trade data to
personal journals, travelogues and social and political publications and newspapers.
While the first chapter is concerned mainly with numerical statistics and quantities, the
second and third chapter, and particularly the third, deal more with social data and
statistics and utilize the latter set of sources. While it is difficult to integrate these two
types of data throughout the document, particularly given the intended focus of the
individual chapters, it is evident that this is a product of a dual focus within this paper
which aims to identify a connection between economic history and the social and cultural
impacts which were fostered by movement of quantities of goods around the world.
In contrast with all of the aforementioned previous studies, this paper adopts a
transnational approach in the study of the interactions between British imperialism and
tea culture in both Asia and North America as well as their economic, political and
23
Grigg, "The Worlds of Tea and Coffee," 287.
11
cultural impacts in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These changes reflected a
growing theme of globalization in the political and social histories of the two continents,
which developed in tandem with the British engineered system of utilizing Asian-grown
tea to finance and facilitate imperial colonial policies. Such policies led to varied historic
changes in Britain’s colonies of India, New England and Canada, as well as the Chinese
society beyond the British Empire and the American society after its independence
12
Chapter One
British Imperialism and Changes in Asia's Tea Culture
The first chapter of this paper examines how the consumption of the addictive tea
product in both Britain and its overseas colonies led to the dramatic increase in
importation of the commodity from China to England and its transplantation by the
British in India. In particular, the British political, social, and financial employment of tea
in its colonies, especially those in North America, resulted in historic changes in local tea
production in China and India as well as the trade of the Asian product in the global
market.
Tea Culture in the British Empire and Anglo-Chinese Trade
Tea-drinking practice began in Britain later than in continental Europe, but it soon
became a widespread fashion in the island nation and its overseas colonies, with vast and
significant ramifications. Drastic increases in tea importation from China were driven by
demand from the entire British Empire including its colonies in North America. In
particular, the increasing popularity of black tea and rising rates of consumption in the
British Empire affected tea production and exportation in China.
Accounts of Chinese tea and drinking practices first reached Europe through
Portuguese merchants two years after Portugal established a trading base at Macao in
1557. Similar knowledge was also attained through the travel writings of others European
travelers, including the Dutchman Jan Hugo van Linschoten (1563-1633). Linschoten's
memoir, which was completed in 1596, includes one of the first references to tea in
13
24
European writings. Chinese tea was first transported to Europe sporadically through the
Dutch colony of Bantam, Java, beginning in 1606, but it did not gain significant favour in
continental Europe until the second half of the seventeenth century. According to
available sources, Chinese tea was first sampled in Holland in 1610, in France in 1635
and in Germany in 1650, while England first received leaves of the plant in 1657.25 Tea
evolved into a fashionable drink enjoyed by the wealthy throughout Europe in the 1650s
and 1660s. However, in continental Europe, excluding Holland, this trend faded quickly
after 1670.26 In contrast, the practice of tea-drinking in Britain grew steadily among the
wealthier social tiers in the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries and exploded
after 1730 when supply increased and the price of tea was lowered considerably, growing
to rival even contemporary per capita consumption of its main source country, China. 27
The expansion of supply lines was a result of the establishment of a direct sea-route
between China and Britain following the invention of faster transport vessels, the
clippers. Soon after, the British custom of tea-drinking spread to the colonies throughout
the British Empire, including New England and later Canada.
In Britain, the vast tea trade evolved from the initially modest market established
by the London coffee houses.28 Tea was first sold publicly for non-medical purposes in
1657, when a coffee house owner, Thomas Garway, began to sell the brewed infusion to
customers at his shop in Exchange Alley in London. Initially, tea was taxed by the East
24
Jan Huyghen Van Linschoten, The Voyage to the East Indies (London, UK: 1885), vol. 1, 85.
25
Ukers, All About Tea, vol. 1, 30-32.
26
Macfarlane and Macfarlane, Green Gold, 72-73.
27
Denys Mostyn Forrest, Tea for the British: The Social and Economic History of a Famous Trade (London,
UK: Chatto and Windus, 1973), 19-21.
28
Roy Moxham, Tea: Addiction, Exploitation, and Empire (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2003), 21,
43.
14
India Company according to its liquid weight, and it was sold in contemporary coffee
houses by paying a tax at 3p per gallon.29 It was also brewed and preserved in a cask in
liquid form for days prior to sale, and then reheated in individual portions at the time of
purchase. This practice diluted the flavour and caffeine content of the tea and may have
been partly responsible for its initial failure to attain the same level of popularity as
coffee and other hot drinks in Britain before 1689, when it began to be taxed according to
dry weight.30 The aforementioned London merchant Garway initiated the practice of
adding honey to tea for a sweetened flavor by 1660, and he was also one of the first to
sell the product in its original dried form for customers who wished to brew the drink at
home.31
A cycle of market-saturation and stagnant sales followed by insufficient supply
and higher prices successively affected the domestic tea market in Britain until the
eighteenth century. This ineffective market was aggravated by the initial decisions of
officials of the East India Company who permitted overly large quantities of tea into
Britain. These officials were as yet uneducated of the potential profitability the Asian
product could bring when kept a carefully limited supply, as the business cycle was in its
most profitable stages.32 In 1678, import of Chinese tea into Britain reached 4,713
pounds, and it saturated the market for seven years, when another oversized shipment
was brought in with the same results.33 As the retail price of tea dropped, from about £3.5
29
Moxham, Tea: Addiction, Exploitation, and Empire, 21.
30
Macfarlane and Macfarlane, Green Gold, 66-67.
31
Woodruff Smith, Consumption and the Making of Respectability, 1600-1800 (New York: Routledge, 2002),
123.
32
Moxham, Tea: Addiction, Exploitation, and Empire, 21.
33
Ukers, All About Tea, vol. 1, 38.
15
per lb in 1652 to £1 in 1700, consumption of the product accordingly rose in Britain. By
1800, the cost of Chinese black tea fell to one-twentieth of its cost a century earlier.34
Black teas, which were to become an emblem of British imperial power and culture, had
already surpassed green teas in popularity in Britain by the early eighteenth century. 35
The addition of sugar to black tea in Britain became widespread soon after its
introduction. Because the sugar trade blossomed almost simultaneously with the tea trade
in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and because the price of tea fell as
supply increased, it became increasingly common for most wealth groups to mix tea with
sugar each time tea was served.36 This practice became more firmly entrenched among
wider segments of the British population during the eighteenth century as more of the
poor and working classes began to partake in tea-drinking. Sweetened tea provided not
only a brief repast from long hours of hard labour because of the sugar and caffeine
content, but also provided an energy stimulant and caloric boost. Like tea importation
into Britain, sugar imports expanded quickly from 10,000 lbs in 1700 to over 150,000 lbs
one century later.37 Per capita consumption of sugar reached 17 lbs in 1801, a
considerable portion of which was taken with tea.38
By 1700, tea had been adopted by wealthier homes in England and Wales,
although it was still too costly for most commoners. Meanwhile, the majority of the
populations of Ireland and Scotland had yet to taste the plant which would soon become
34
Timothy Keirn, "Tea," The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern World , ed. Peter Stearns (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2008), vol. 8, 1-15.
35
Keirn, "Tea," 211-213.
36
Alan Macfarlane and Iris Macfarlane, Green Gold, 75.
37
Moxham, Tea: Addiction, Exploitation, and Empire, 31.
38
Henry Hobhouse, Seeds of Change: Five Plants that Transformed Mankind (London: Sidgwick & Jackson,
1985), 114.
16
the most popular hot beverage throughout the British Isles. In 1715, tea-drinking customs
further spread to the masses of England when the less expensive Chinese green tea came
into common use. At approximately half the price of black Bohea tea, which had been
favored by more wealthy consumers, green tea provided the poor of Britain with their
first taste of the bitter and caffeinated beverage.39 By 1783, this preference for green tea
had temporarily shifted domestic consumption patterns so that one third of the tea
consumed in Britain was green, while the remainder was almost exclusively black. 40 As
the price of black tea dropped and imports increased, larger swaths of the population
were able to afford and taste the exotic black variant, which increasingly became a staple
of the British diet. By the late-eighteenth century, tea had become hugely popular as an
item of consumption within the private sphere of the home, and had begun to traverse the
boundary from a luxury to a daily necessity in the national mindset. 41 As green tea was
widely considered the national beverage of the Chinese Empire, perhaps British officials
implicitly applauded the embedding of black tea into the nation's patriotic fabric. Either
way, by 1800 tea was firmly entrenched as a staple of the English diet, politics, and
culture. This trajectory would continue as annual per capita tea consumption in Britain
increased at a rate of fifty per cent between 1800 and mid-century.42
The English were among the first Europeans to popularize the use of the “china”
or porcelain equipment imported from China for tea usage, even though they favoured
Indian black tea over Chinese tea later on. When the English began to add milk and sugar
39
Ukers, All About Tea, vol. 1, 46.
40
Hohenegger, Liquid Jade, 44.
41
Julie E. Fromer, A Necessary Luxury: Tea in Victorian England (Athens, ?: Ohio University Press, 2008),
60.
42
Moxham, Tea: Addiction, Exploitation, and Empire, 63.
17
to black teas in the late seventeenth century, they altered not only the taste and
composition of tea but also its function as a caloric treat, thereby creating a tradition
endowed with new facets of social utility. Tea consumption, which differed in
preparation and accompaniment according to social and economic means, gave structure
and nutritional support to the English diet. 'Tea-time,' usually in the mid- to lateafternoon, became prevalent among the middle- and upper-classes in England by the
nineteenth century, and contributed to the temporal compartmentalization of quotidian
activities. It also became a late pick-me-up which could be indulged in during the long
afternoon hours when energies were lowest.43
Tea-drinking offered a veritable smorgasbord of uses to English society. For the
upper-classes, it offered an avenue for relaxation and reflection, a method for entertaining
guests and an opportunity to advertise one's wealth and propriety. Most importantly, tea
provided a subject of common enjoyment around which parties and events could be
based, and it was an imperative component of the "bourgeois lifestyle" pioneered in
Britain.44 As well, the equipment required for tea preparation, which could include a
kettle, teapot, and any number of teacups, sugar holders, and milk dispensers, were
among the first exotic items of mass consumption sold in England and could be used to
influence or indicate fashionable sensibility or taste among the very wealthy. The middleclass utilized these same elements to exhibit their wealth and status to the full extent of
their financial ability. For the working-class, tea served a more practical purpose. As a
source of caffeine, tea was a useful component in the completion of a full workday, and,
43
Fromer, A Necessary Luxury, 7.
44
Eric Hobsbawm, Fractured Times: Culture and Society in the Twentieth Century (London, UK: Abacus,
2014), 109.
18
with the addition of sugar and sometimes milk, also provided a necessary caloric boost to
a limited diet.45
Tea, as Julie E. Fromer argues, existed simultaneously as both a luxury and a
necessity in Britain, and in this way achieved special significance as a cornerstone of
British culture and an imported exotic good. Because of its identification with both
categories, she argues, tea played a critical role in conceptions of domesticity in England
as well as the imperial affairs of the British Empire. The need to obtain the Asian product
drove colonial expansion in Asia and affected the development of social and political
structures in the imperial colonies.46 In this way participation in tea-drinking in England,
and by extension its colonies, contributed to the expansion and perpetuation of the
Empire and to its symbolic significance within its colonies.
In British society as a whole, the eventual shift in consumption of green to black
tea in the eighteenth century had several causes. The addition of sugar to tea, which
began in Britain in the late-seventeenth century and became ubiquitous with tea
consumption in the early-eighteenth century, produced a more widely desirable taste in
black than in green tea.47 As both sugar and black tea became more affordable throughout
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, their fusion assumed prominence in the mindset
of British consumers eager for caloric intake and sweet flavour. The proliferation of
adulterated green teas in the eighteenth century, which were uncaffeinated and sometimes
unhygienic (some concoctions were known to include sheep's dung), but easier to be
45
Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (Boston, MA: Penguin, 1985),
110, 147.
46
Fromer, A Necessary Luxury, 5-6, 60.
47
Smith, Consumption, 121-123.
19
reproduced than adulterated black blends, also contributed to the shift in popular
preference from green to black teas.48
The shift toward black tea consumption in the British Empire was further
cemented by the transition to British-controlled black tea production in India which
began to develop in the mid-nineteenth century.49 This new dynamic allowed production
of tea which was consumed within the British Empire to be controlled solely by British
colonial agents, and relieved British commercial agents of any interference from noncolonial producers controlled by the Chinese government. In this way, the tea culture in
Britain and its colonies underwent transnationally interrelated changes, and such cultural
change significantly affected Britain’s trade in Asia, especially in China.
The creation of the British East India Company in 1600 set the stage for Britain’s
commercial and colonial expansion in Asia, including its tea trade in China.50 China first
began to sell tea directly to the East India Company in 1689, and in 1698 the British
Parliament granted a monopoly to the Company on all trade with China which lasted until
1834. This monopoly permitted the British government to extract great profits from the
tea trade, and its control of the same trade with its colonies brought in more revenue. Tea
accounted for 60 percent of the East India Company's trade by the 1760s.51 Between 1771
and 1837, the East India Company increased its annual expenditure on Chinese tea from
48
Hohenegger, Liquid Jade, 96.
49
Hohenegger, Liquid Jade, 96.
50
Encyclopedia of World Trade From Ancient Times to the Present (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2005), s.v.
"British Empire."
51
Keirn, "Tea," 8-9.
20
six million to thirty-five million pounds.
52
The Company prior to the Opium Wars
purchased its Chinese goods primarily from Canton because the Qing government limited
commercial export dealings to a select group of Chinese merchants based within that port
city.53 Canton, now referred to as Guangzhou, was a southeastern coastal city located in
Guangdong province, and it remained the only treaty port open to Western merchants
until 1842.54 In the last three decades of the eighteenth century, the East India Company
went from being one of several European merchant corporations soliciting Chinese tea to
being the principal buyer of the city's tea exports. The Company's tea purchases more
than doubled from 33 per cent of Canton's total tea exports in the 1770s to 80 per cent in
the first decade of the 1800s.55
The East India Company's monopoly of the China trade to Great Britain allowed
the Company to build a trading empire based upon the profitable acquisition of Chinese
goods including silk and tea, which came to be in increasingly high demand throughout
the British Empire during the eighteenth century. 56 Tea began to displace silk as the
major staple of the Sino-British trade in 1718, and in 1721 Sir Robert Walpole's
government replaced the import duty on tea with an excise tax which, together with other
subsequent legislation, helped to protect the East India Company's monopoly on tea
imported into Britain and its colonies.57 Imports of the Chinese product to Britain quickly
52
Tan Chung, "The Britain-China-India Trade Triangle, 1771-1840," Indian Economic and Social History
Review 11 (1974): 412.
53
A.J.H. Latham and Kawakatsu Heita eds., Intra-Asian Trade and the World Market(New York: Routledge,
2006), 10.
54
J.M. Scott, The Tea Story, (London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1964), 44.
55
Chung, "The Britain-China-India Trade Triangle, 1771-1840," 412.
56
Saberi, Tea: A Global History, 94.
57
Ukers, All About Tea, vol. 1, 77.
21
ballooned to two million pounds annually by 1725, and to twenty-five million pounds by
1800. By the 1770s, per capita consumption of tea among Great Britain's 12.5 million
men, women, and children exceeded one pound per annum.58
The consumption of tea in Britain and the importation of the product from Asia
have long received attention from historians, but the significant per capita consumption
of tea in British colonies and its impacts on the British trade and plantation of tea in Asia
have been a peripheral consideration of scholarly interest. A fundamental question of this
inquiry, therefore, is how the demand for Asian tea from both Britain and its colonies
affected the Sino-Anglo tea trade, the proportion of black tea exports from China, and the
colonial efforts to transplant tea into India. After establishing the East India Company's
monopoly over the China trade in 1698, the British Parliament in 1721 further passed an
act forbidding its colonies from importing tea from any party other than the Company.59
Through these measures, the British government sought not only to control the tea trade
in Asia but also to generate imperial income through the rising popularity of tea
consumption in its colonies.
The spread of British colonial tea culture not only facilitated colonial expansion
and administration but also provided an increasing dynamic for imperialist ventures in
both China and India. While a detailed analysis of British colonial politics and economic
policies as relating to tea in North America will be left to Chapters Two and Three, it is
necessary to examine how here importation of tea by the British into their colonies,
especially those in North America, affected Britain’s imperial policies toward tea trade
58
Forrest, Tea for the British, 69.
59
Bernhard Knollenberg, Growth of the American Revolution: 1766-1775 (New York: Free Press, 1975), 90;
Benjamin Woods Labaree, Colonial Massachusetts: A History (Millwood, N.Y.: KTO Press, 1979), 3-9.
22
and plantation in Asia.
As early as 1768, on the eve of the American Revolution, annual imports of
Chinese tea from Britain into its American colonies reached over one million pounds, of
which the vast majority was transported legally and charged duties which benefited
imperial coffers. Although statistical data from Canada is not available in that era,
American imports by 1770 represented a substantial 17 per cent of Britain’s total
purchases of Chinese tea.60 According to British customs records, an average of 200,000
pounds of tea per year was shipped by the East India Company from England to British
North America during the third quarter of the eighteenth century. An additional average
of 52,630 pounds was smuggled into the continent annually during this same period by
American merchants.61
During and immediately following the outbreak of the American Revolution
(1775-1783), imports of Chinese tea plummeted due to wartime-related disruptions in
marine transportation. Per capita consumption of Asian tea would not recover in the
United States until the mid nineteenth century, when there might have been a resurgence
in popularity of British-style tea culture but there was certainly a preference for the taste
of Asian tea over domestically produced herbal blends.
Evidently, the British import of Chinese tea was driven by the popularity of the
beverage both in Britain and its colonies. While the escalation of the British tea trade
with China was influenced by their colonies in North America, Australia and other areas,
60
Moxham, Tea: Addiction, Exploitation, and Empire, 46.
61
Goldstein, Jonathan, Philadelphia and the China Trade 1682-1846: Commercial, Cultural, and Attitudinal
Effects (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1978), 18.
23
as has been shown above, it also led to significant changes in tea production and export in
Asian countries.
British Demand for Chinese Tea and the Opium War
In Britain and its colonies, black tea eventually became the established favourite
beverage over green tea by the nineteenth century, although in the United States green tea
consumption remained higher than black tea consumption throughout the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries.62 As the demand for the Asian commodity increased in the British
Empire during the era of the Canton trade system (1757-1842), especially after the
thirteen American colonies gained their independence, black tea production in China
expanded to meet the demand, thereby leading to its rise in the proportion of total
Chinese tea exports.
Tea has been a fixture of the Chinese diet and widely circulated in China ever
since the Tang dynasty (618-907 C.E.). According to historian Wu Chengming, by the
mid-Qing period (1644-1912), tea was the fourth most valuable of the seven major
commodities that together accounted for 80 percent of all domestic trade within the
Chinese empire.63 From the seventeenth century, tea also assumed prominence in the
Sino-European trade. China remained the primary exporter of tea to continental Europe
and to the British Empire until the last quarter of the nineteenth century, when British had
developed plantations of the plant in India and elsewhere. The prevalence of tea in Sino-
62
Hohenegger, Liquid Jade, 198.
63
Wu Chengming, "Lun Qingdai qianqi woguo guonei shichang," in "A Discussion of Early Qing Domestic
Markets," cited in Gardella, Harvesting Mountains, 6.
24
Anglo commerce was especially evident from the eighteenth century when tea-drinking
became a prominent feature of British society and the China trade became a lucrative
source of the East India Company's revenues in Asia.64
Following the conquest of Bengal during the years 1757-65, the British
government was able to extract revenue from trade with India, the levy of taxes and sale
of cotton and other goods from India,65 and the exportation of Indian raw cotton to China
began to expand rapidly.66 Over the course of the next half century, the cotton trade with
China became integral to the East India Company's transfer of funds from India to Britain
via the Canton market because it was used to help pay for tea import from China to the
British Empire.67 East India Company’s exports to Canton provided China with an
inexpensive solution to its textile shortage as the price of Indian cotton fell below that of
domestic cotton.68
By the 1820s, a growing trade imbalance had still developed between British
exports into China and the British demand for Chinese goods, mainly tea, via the East
India Company. At the heart of the trade imbalance were Indian cotton, British precious
metals, and Chinese tea. During the eighteenth century, the Company purchased tea, silk,
and porcelain from China via the sale of Indian cottons and British woolens. As Chinese
demand for these goods decreased by the 1830s, British demand for tea continued to
64
K.N. Chaudhuri, The Trading World of Asia and the English East India Company, 1660-1760 (Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 54-55.
65
H.V. Bowen, "British Exports of Raw Cotton and Piece Goods from India to China during the Late
Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries," in How India Clothed the World: The World of South Asian
Textiles, 1500-1800, ed. Giorgio Riello and Tirthankar Roy, (Leidin, The Netherlands: Koninklijke Brill,
2009), 118-119 .
66
Riello, Giorgio and Tirthankar Roy , eds., How India Clothed the World: The World of South Asian
Textiles, 1500-1850 (Leiden, The Netherlands: Koninklijke Brill NV, 2009), 31.
67
Bowen, "The Integration of the Asian Cotton Textile Industry," 4-5.
68
Bowen, "British Exports of Raw Cotton," 115-116, 123.
25
grow, thus creating a major disparity in the Sino-Anglo trade.
69
The dependence of
British purchase of Chinese tea upon the export of Indian cotton set a precedent for the
export of smuggled Indian opium for Chinese tea.70
By the end of the eighteenth century and in the early nineteenth century, during
the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, the British largely monopolized raw
cotton importation into Canton, only a minor portion of which American merchants
usurped through smuggling. By 1792, cotton exports to China had reached 30 million lbs
and accounted for roughly 80 per cent, both by value and by quantity, of legal British
exports from India to China.71 Meanwhile, an average of 21,717,062 lbs of tea was
imported into Great Britain from Canton by the East India Company. 72 In 1805, British
exports of raw cotton from India to China rose to 55.3 million lbs, while Company
imports from Canton, especially tea, remained at approximately 22 million lbs. Beginning
in 1804, Indian cotton exports allowed Britain to cease or limit export of bullion into
China in exchange for Chinese goods, mainly tea.73 By 1817, 75 per cent of the goods
imported into China by Britain were from India, of which cotton represented
approximately half of the total cargo, and by 1825 Indian imports increased to 83 per
cent.74 Meanwhile, British tea imports had reached 28.8 million lbs by 1820 and
accounted for well over half of British imports from China’s sole open trading port of
69
Moxham, Tea: Addiction, Exploitation and Empire, 64.
70
Ashin Das Gupta, The World of the Indian Ocean Merchant, 1500-1800, Collected Essays of Ashin Das
Gupta, ed. Sanjay Subrahamanyam (New Delhi, 2001), 213-14.
71
Mintz, Sweetness and Power, 113.
72
Mui and Mui, The Management of Monopoly, 70.
73
Michael Greenberg, British Trade and the Opening of China 1800-42 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, 1969), 10.
74
Greenberg, British Trade and the Opening of China, 11.
26
Canton. Thus, Indian cotton was mainly used by the British to finance tea purchases from
China and to transfer imperial wealth from India to Britain.
However, the export of cotton from India began to decline after 1790 partly
because of the monopsony created by the East India Company which blocked other
potential buyers. As cotton became less valuable to the company, this upset the delicate
equilibrium the British East India Company had established in the exchange for Chinese
tea, which had rapidly become the Company’s profitable trade item in Britain and its
colonies, especially after 1784.75 Thus, a new commodity was desperately needed by the
British East India Company in its exchange for Chinese tea at Canton. 76 By 1801, Britain
was spending a colossal £13.25 million on tea annually, including retail and wholesale
purchasing, and national consumption in Britain had reached 2.5 lbs per capita, which is
about three to four cups per person per day.77 Similarly the turmoil in Europe, especially
the wars with revolutionary France and Napoleon’s Continental blockade of British trade
to continental Europe led in the early nineteenth century to high inflation of paper money
in many European nations, including Britain.
Meanwhile, since the 1790s, the declining profitability of cotton trade made the
East India Company face a growing shortage of silver. The mounting debt of the East
India Company caused by its costly military expansion and growing administration
within India from 1757 exacerbated this problem. Additionally, the value of silver
became inflated after the American Revolution, and that interrupted the silver flow from
75
Prasannan Parthasarathi, "Cotton Textile Exports from the Indian Subcontinent, 1680-1780," (paper
presented at the XIV International Economic History Congress, Helsinki, Finland, 2006, Session 59), 11.
76
Sutton, The East India Company's Maritime Service, 9.
77
Ukers, All About Tea, vol. 1, 237.
27
78
Mexico to Europe.
In the following years, the falling value of the Spanish American
peso due to political disruptions in Spain’s trans-Atlantic colonies led to further inflation
that disrupted Asian trade patterns.79 The growing imbalance in Asian trade was already
identified by the British government as a tangible and growing issue of concern by
1790.80
A strong competition had long existed between European and Asian merchants to
retain large stores of silver since the mid seventeenth century. During the 1660s and
1670s, the East India Company purchased its stores of silver specie from mints in Seville,
Spain, and Mexico City. After growing scarcity of silver in those locations the Company
shifted to purchase of bullion from Lima and Potosi. After a major decade-long silver
shortage in London beginning in 1683, the East India Company in 1695 began to
purchase silver from Holland and Spain directly as commercial transactions began to
increase, thereby combating the Company's shortages of silver coins.81 Meanwhile, silver
increasingly became recognized as the only commodity that could guarantee Chinese tea
purchases, which in turn ensured control of distribution of the commodity throughout the
British Empire. Nineteenth century commentators described this problem as the Asian
"drain" of silver to the East.82 As debts and expenses rose, the East India Company
78
Sutton, The East India Company's Maritime Service, 251; Hobhouse, Seeds of Change, 114.
Alejandra Irigoin, “The End of a Silver Era: The Consequences of the Breakdown of the Spanish Peso
Standard in China and the United States, 1780s–1850s,” Journal of World History, vol. 20, No.. 2 (2009):
207-244.
80
Macfarlane and Macfarlane, Green Gold, 109.
79
81
K.N. Chaudhuri, The Trading World of Asia and the English East India Company, 170-171.
82
William Elder, "Statistics of the Foreign and Domestic Commerce of the United States: Embracing a
Historical Review and Analysis of Foreign Commerce from the Beginning of the Government" United
States Departmet of the Treasury (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1864), 198.
28
became uneasy depleting its silver in exchange for tea and other Chinese commodities.83
At the same time, the British government secured a colossal £77,000,000 in tax revenue
from tea trade between 1711 and 1810, and relied heavily on the trade for its domestic
and colonial finances.84 According to some estimates, by 1830 the tea trade accounted for
as much as five per cent of Britain's gross domestic product.85
Thus, the East India Company came under rising pressure to find a commodity
which could be acquired inexpensively and used to maintain the Company's high profits
from the tea trade. As a result, the British increasingly shifted from cotton to opium
production in India and began to use the latter to fund Western demand for Chinese tea.86
The history of the opium trade and subsequent wars is a familiar story to historians, but
its relation to the British tea trade in China still deserves discussion here.
From the seventeenth century, opium had been produced by the British and
exported to China from Malwa and Bengal in northwestern and northeastern India,
respectively. British exportation of opium to China increased rapidly in tandem with tea
importation from 28,000 lbs in 1729 to 140,000 lbs by 1767.87 Although the trade was
managed by the East India Company and its officials, the actual sale of opium at Chinese
ports was delegated to private traders so as not to implicate the Company, for opium
import into China had been illegal in the country since 1729. Private British firms
contracted by the East India Company therefore undertook large-scale smuggling of
83
Chaudhuri, The Trading World of Asia, 155, 163-164.
84
Macfarlane and Macfarlane, Green Gold, 99.
85
Hobhouse, Seeds of Change, 94.
86
Sutton, The East India Company's Maritime Service, 9, 253, 262.
87
Moxham, Tea: Addiction, Exploitation, and Empire, 66.
29
opium to China, while the Company’s ships transported it covertly in limited quantities
only and among varied cargoes to conceal its presence.88
In 1758, thirty-seven years after the East India Company gained its monopoly
over the China trade, the British Parliament guaranteed the Company a further monopoly
in opium production in India. The opium trade to China was initially controlled by
Portuguese traders until the East India Company assumed control in 1773. Within three
years, the Company was importing some sixty tons of opium into China annually, and by
1790 this figure had doubled to more than 120 tons. Then, between 1820 and 1839,
annual imports increased significantly from 280 to 2,800 tons. In 1833, the year before
the Company’s monopoly on the China trade was terminated, the British were exporting
1,500 tons of opium to China per year, and British profits from this export reached eleven
and a half million dollars annually, or the equivalent of several billion dollars in today's
currency.89 Annual tea imports meanwhile were valued at over nine million dollars,
which is demonstrative of how Company profits from the sale of opium and other goods
in Asia were used to purchase stores of tea for distribution throughout the Empire. 90 In
turn, profits from the sale of Indian opium in China and from the sale of tea in Britain and
its colonies were used to fund Britain’s colonial governments or absorbed into imperial
coffers.91 Opium profits continued to exceed tea purchase expenses until the Opium
Wars, guaranteeing surplus revenue for the British government and the continuation of a
lucrative trade deal.
88
Jean Sutton, The East India Company's Maritime Service, 249.
89
Macfarlane and Macfarlane, Green Gold, 110.
90
Hobhouse, Seeds of Change, 152.
91
William H. Ukers, All About Tea, vol. 1, 67.
30
Due to the effectiveness of opium production and trade, the East India Company
was able to entirely finance its annual expenditure on Chinese tea with opium sales by
1825, thus allowing Britain to eliminate silver exports to China after 1824 and facilitating
the British imperial policy of using Asian commodities to fund the major costs of
empire.92
After the American Revolution, the British Parliament elected to avoid taxation of
its remaining colonies in favour of a less contentious system whereby Britain would
benefit from increasing its trade with them while overseeing their transition to becoming
self-sustaining entities, which would impose minimal financial strain at home. With the
help of the opium trade, the import and sale of Chinese tea in Britain and its colonies
generated an extraordinary amount of wealth for the Crown up to the second quarter of
the nineteenth century. In 1830 alone, the government raised £4,000,000 in revenue from
tea importation into Britain.93 Of this sum, approximately £847,523 was domestically
taxed revenue.94 Monies raised exclusively from the sale of tea in Britain and throughout
the Empire equaled approximately one half the cost of maintaining the British imperial
navy.95 In the first half of the nineteenth century, China exported mainly tea and silk in
exchange for opium and cotton goods. These four goodsrepresented the vast majority of
the Sino-British trade in 1840. Even by 1870, silk and tea still accounted for about 70 per
cent of China's exports.96 By the mid-nineteenth century, opium dwarfed all other goods
92
Sutton, The East India Company's Maritime Service, 271-272.
93
Macfarlane and Macfarlane, 113.
94
Ukers, All About Tea, vol. 1, 74-75.
95
Glenn Melancon, Britain's China Policy and the Opium Crisis: Balancing Drugs, Violence, and National
Honour (Vermont: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2003), 18.
96
Wolfgang Keller, Ben Li, Carol H. Shiue, China's Foreign Trade: Perspectives from the Past 150 Years
(London, UK: Centre for Economic Policy Research, 2010), 20.
31
exported from India, and most of this was sent to China.
97
British imports of tea were
heavily dependant on the continued exportation of opium from India to China via British
transportation networks which essentially sustained the trade.
The abolition of the East India Company's monopoly in the China trade in 1834
destabilized the opium for tea trade and led to escalating tensions between China and
Great Britain. In 1838, the Daoguang emperor of Qing China issued an order to eliminate
opium addiction and prohibit its importation into China. One year later, Britain declared
war on China following the Qing official seizure of a large quantity of imported opium
and an immediate blockade of foreign trade in Canton. Even during the war, China
continued to export $25.7 million worth of tea, mainly to Britain, in 1840 which
represented 68 per cent of the country's total exports. Simultaneously, Britain was able to
illegally export $6.1 million of opium from British India to China, or 10 per cent of total
exports from India.98
The Chinese challenge to the surreptitious British imperial policy of trading
Indian opium in exchange for tea was a major factor to the eruption of the Opium Wars in
1839-1842 and 1856-1860. Through these wars, the East India Company and the British
government ensured the continuity of the exchange of opium for tea. 99 Until 1840, all of
China's foreign trade was executed via a limited number of Chinese firms trading in
Canton, although each of the Opium Wars opened several ports, and multiple foreign
firms gained permission to trade within China. Throughout the period of warfare, British
97
Angus Maddison, Class Structure and Economic Growth: India & Pakistan since the Moghuls (London:
George Allen and Unwin, 1971),
98
John R. Hanson, Trade in Transition: Exports from the Third World, 1840-1900 (New York: Academic
Press, 1980).
99
The Crystal Reference Encyclopedia. ,"British Empire."
32
merchants were able to smuggle Chinese tea to the whole British Empire and to its
former colonies in North America, while the Company’s stores in London never fell
below a nine months' supply of Chinese tea. American merchants also intermittently
supplemented the tea trade during and after the warfare by transporting the commodity
for retail in North America.100
Nonetheless, it became increasingly clear to British officials that a new system
would have to be developed which would secure Britain's acquisition of large quantities
of Asian tea. As a precaution to safeguard against interruptions in tea shipments from
China, the East India Company had begun in the late eighteenth century to look for an
alternative, and more profitable, source of tea. In this way, India first came to be viewed
as a potential location in which massive tea production could be sustained at limited
expense to imperial coffers, with cheap Indian labour as a supporting factor in this
experiment. Thus, British imperialism further propelled the commercial transplantation of
tea, including the transfer of cultivation techniques from China to India, where it was
produced in unprecedented quantities to satisfy demand from the British Empire.
British Tea Plantations in India and Global Tea Markets
The tea plant, camellia sinensis is native to the mountainous region of both
southern China and northwestern India and.101 It was transplanted to Japan from China in
the early ninth century and cultivated there for several centuries, becoming a regular item
of consumption among a substantial portion of the Japanese population by the sixteenth
100
Moxham, Tea: Addiction, Exploitation, and Empire, 81.
101
Robert Gardella, Harvesting Mountains, 6.
33
century. However, tea plants indigenous to northern India remained wild until the midnineteenth century, when they were discovered by Europeans. 102 Although it seems that
the British domesticated the wild tea in India for large scale of plantation, they evidently
did so under the impact of tea trade and technology in China.
In 1684, the Dutch East India Company, or Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie
(VOC), had first imported tea seeds from Japan into the Dutch-ruled parts of present-day
Indonesia and attempted to transplant tea there. Due to the terrain's inhospitability to the
delicate Japanese seeds, the tea industry there remained crippled until the late nineteenth
century, when more hardy Assamese seeds were imported into the Dutch East Indies and
large-scale cultivation of tea began thereafter.103 Meanwhile, in the late-eighteenth
century, the British East India Company had also begun to consider alternative locations
for the plantation of tea outside of China. Sir Joseph Banks, an English botanist, was the
first to recommend parts of Northern India as a viable location for tea production, at the
request of the East India Company in 1778.104
However, the East India Company's ongoing monopoly of the highly profitable
tea trade with China and the British colonies meant that exploration of new avenues of
tea production in Asia remained a distant concern at this time. It was not until the second
quarter of the nineteenth century when British dissatisfaction with China's refusal to
modernize its tea production methods, the termination of the Company’s monopoly in the
China-trade, the aforementioned Sino-British trade imbalance, and related political
conflict resulted in a more serious search for alternative options.
102
Scott, The Tea Story, 65-67.
103
Scott, The Tea Story, 71, 75.
104
Macfarlane and Macfarlane, Green Gold, 100.
34
The discovery of India's potential for tea cultivation was made during the 1830s
by a number of colonial officials and private individuals who worked simultaneously but
separately. One year after the East India Company lost its monopoly of the China-trade,
in 1834 the governor-general of India, Lord William Bentinck, appointed the pioneering
Tea Committee based in London which began to oversee testing of tea cultivation in
certain regions in India. In that same year, Bentinck formed the Committee of Tea
Culture and established experimental tea gardens there. Chinese tea seeds, which were
obtained through consignment, were tested at the Calcutta Botanic Gardens in the mid
1830s, although this yielded few results.105
The Committee, which initially consisted of two Englishmen and one Chinese
doctor, was soon enlarged to include thirteen men, two of whom were Chinese. However,
high quality tea seeds and skilled workers who were knowledgeable about tea plantation
and processing were difficult to enlist, as Europeans had hitherto been forbidden from
entering the interior of China beyond the treaty ports, and skilled workers in the Chinese
tea industry were relatively well paid and often unwilling to emigrate. Even on a
scientific level, the possibility of the transplantation of tea outside of China seemed
dubious, and the members of the Committee were altogether skeptical. 106 Furthermore, it
was illegal in China to provide foreigners with information on tea cultivation. Chinese
officials helped to ensure secrecy by intimidating the families of workers who had been
brought by the British to India. These officials also imposed limitations on the amount of
tea seed which could be purchased from cultivators in China.107
105
Thomas Eden, Tea, 3rd ed., (London, UK: Longman, 1976), 2.
106
Ukers, All About Tea, vol. 1, 138.
107
Moxham: Tea: Addiction, Exploitation, and Empire, 91, 94-95.
35
Late in 1834, the Tea Committee was informed of the discovery of the tea plant
indigenous to Upper Assam in northeastern India. This information prompted Company
officers and British colonial officials to call for immediate cultivation of tea in that
region. In a letter to the British government the Tea Committee wrote that the discovery
was "by far the most important and valuable that has ever been made in matters
connected with the agricultural or commercial resources of this empire."108 Concurrently,
numerous wild tea plants were found in Nepal, the Manipur district, and other areas,
which were reported to the British governor general.
The "wild" Assamese plant, however, was unlike high-quality Chinese teas which
had undergone generations of selective breeding, and it was initially viewed by British
consumers and merchants as inferior to the Chinese imports.109 Because of its initial
inferiority to Chinese green and black tea, the problem of how to grow high quality tea in
northeastern India's fertile soils became the key issue in the imperial mission for control
of the Asian tea industry. Thus, the Tea Committee made repeated attempts to secure
supplies of Chinese tea seeds through the paid voyages of various qualified nationals to
China. Because the well-protected green tea districts buried deep in the interior of China
were inaccessible to European tea spies, only supplies of black Bohea tea seeds were
procured in significant amount by the British during the 1830s.110
After much debate over a location to transplant Chinese tea for large-scale
plantation, the tea plants were sent to a number of British tea gardens in various regions
108
J.H. Batten, "Notes and Recollections on Tea Cultivation in Kumaon and Gurhwal," Tea Cyclopedia,
Calcutta, 1881, 245, quoted from Ukers, All About Tea, vol. 1, 139.
109
Julie E. Fromer, "'Deeply Indebted to the Tea-Plant': Representations of English National Identity in
Victorian Histories of Tea," Victorian Literature and Culture vol. 36, no. 2 ( 2008), 535-537.
110
Ukers, All About Tea, vol. 1, 138-139.
36
of India, including the Himalayas and Assam. At first, a variety of methods were tested,
including growing Chinese and Assamese tea plants separately, or in a hybrid variation.
By the early twentieth century, the native Assamese variety represented the most soughtafter breeds by tea planters, although in the early experimental period Chinese tea plants
were overall considered to be the "better variety" and far superior to the "degraded Assam
plant" by the Tea Committee members and other contemporaries. While the cultivated
Chinese tea plant was initially viewed as more desirable, ultimately the indigenous
Assamese plant was found to be most successfully cultivated in British plantations in
Assam and other areas in India.111
The governor-general of India established the first government-owned tea garden
in Assam in 1835. Soon, its superintendent Charles Bruce had overseen the
transplantation of wild tea from the Assamese jungles into the garden. In 1838 the British
government gradually annexed Assam, which until then had been ruled by Assamese
monarchs; the annexation made large-scale tea cultivation of the region possible for the
first time. By 1839 a number of chests of Assamese tea were sold on the London market,
where their prices fluctuated between 16 and 34 shillings per pound, slightly higher than
Chinese tea. Their prices, initially inflated due to their novelty, gradually fell and became
affordable to more segments of the population by the 1870s as the quality of Assamese
black tea was also improved. Generally, however, in this early period Assamese tea still
could not compete with Chinese tea in terms of market and price.112 One of the first
successful tea planting companies, the Assam Company, was established in London in
1839, and its major purpose was to "cultivat[e] the newly discovered tea plant in Assam."
111
Ukers, All About Tea, vol. 1, 140, 142; vol.2, 130-131.
112
Scott, The Tea Story, 75.
37
Thereafter, the influential Jorehaut Company was founded in 1858, which led to
increased speculation by other newly-formed companies in the region. Although the
Assam Company initially lost over £200,000 due to mismanagement and a general lack
of knowledge of proper cultivation techniques, by 1847 its tea exportation from Assam
began to develop more aggressively.113 By 1851 the trade was becoming increasingly
profitable, and along with developing tea plantations in Nilgiris and elsewhere, India
gradually displaced China as the major global supplier of tea.
Nonetheless, the British still continued to make attempts to transplant Chinese tea
into India. Improvements in the quality of Assamese tea cultivation and taste in the midnineteenth century were largely owing to scientific and horticultural advances in the
British understanding of Chinese tea cultivation. Following the development of the
Wardian glass case in the late 1830s by an English doctor and botanist, the East India
Company became convinced that the device could be used to transport hundreds of
uncorrupted tea seeds and plants from China to India.114 In 1848, the Scottish botanist
Robert Fortune was approached by the East India Company's horticultural advisor and
asked to venture into China with the purpose of gathering tea seeds, plants, and workers
for India. In 1851, Fortune departed from China to Calcutta with a huge supply of
Chinese tea seeds and plants, including well-protected germinated seeds which produced
over 12,000 new plants in India.115
113
. Ukers, All About Tea, vol. 1, 149, 150.
114
Sarah Rose, For all the Tea in China: How England Stole the World's Favorite Drink and Changed
History (New York: Penguin, 2010), 45-48.
115
Ukers, All About Tea, vol. 1, 142.
38
The British demand for tea from China and the subsequent plantation of the
product in India fundamentally reshaped tea markets in Asia and in the entire world,
including British North American colonies. Although other European powers including
the Dutch attempted to transplant tea to their colonies in Asia, their plantations remained
largely unsuccessful until much later in the nineteenth century. In contrast, British
experimentation with Indian and Chinese tea seeds on Indian soil resulted in the first
successful large-scale commercial plantation of tea outside of China in history. In this
way, British imperialism was a major force in the transplantation of the tea plant in India,
and that transplantation in turn facilitated the British imperialist causes around the world.
Tea from India was first sold in Britain in 1839, when eight chests of the product
were brought to auction in London where they generated a huge amount of interest. 116 A
contemporary newspaper in London remarked that "the more immediate object of the sale
was to determine whether the Assam tea would command such a price here as to make it
worth while to commence the importation on a larger scale."117 This would soon prove to
be the case. Although India was unable to provide a significant portion of tea to the
London market until the 1870s, when major technological innovations in tea production
were achieved, it did become a major supplier in the world market thereafter. 118 By 1888,
British plantations in India were producing 86 million pounds of tea. In the same year the
importation of Indian tea to the British Empire surpassed that from China for the first
time, a landmark occurrence.
116
Ukers, All About Tea, vol. 1, 148.
117
"State of the Revenue," Bell's Life in London and Sporting Chronicle, Jan. 13, 1839.
118
Saberi, Tea: A Global History, 103; Ukers, All About Tea, vol. 1, 158.
39
Under the direct control of the colonial government in India, tea production there
not only ensured a stable supply of this Asian product for the whole British Empire but
also greatly reduced the expense of purchasing Chinese tea, which was subject to a high
tax in China and had to be transported over long distances.119 Indeed, by 1880 when tea
imports from India were rising, tea importation from China was subject to an average 35
per cent tax by the Chinese government, as well as incurring transportation costs.120
More importantly, Indian tea was produced with indigenous coolie labour so
labour costs were markedly low and provided the British government with additional
revenue via its sale throughout the Empire. By the time large-scale tea production
emerged in British India in the 1870s, both Canada and the United States had gained
independence, although New Zealand, South Africa, and Australia effectively remained
under colonial rule into the twentieth century. Canada and Australia were principal
destinations for Indian tea, and such trade directly or indirectly benefited the United
Kingdom. As black Asian tea once again gained favour in the U.S. market from the midnineteenth century, imports spiked from about 1880. While Ceylon cultivated black tea
exclusively, some regions of India cultivated minor plantations of green tea for export,
although the primary export was black tea. Initially modest, the value of British tea
imports from India to the United States increased rapidly from £25,661 in 1855 to
£147,989 two years later, and reached £230,064 in 1860.121 By 1925 annual imports of
Indian tea were estimated at 4,902,000 lbs into the United States. Canada, however,
trumped these figures by importing 7,951,000 lbs in the same year. Smaller quantities
119
Macfarlane and Macfarlane, Green Gold, 105-106.
120
Moxham, Tea: Addiction, Exploitation, and Empire, 114.
121
William Elder, "Statistics of the Foreign and Domestic Commerce of the United States," 198-199.
40
were exported to other settler colonies in the British Empire, where per capita
consumption was high but populations were smaller.122
British Ceylon, which also developed large-scale tea production after the
widespread failure of its coffee crops due to disease in the early 1880s, produced major
cargoes which were transported by British traders to North America and to other places
throughout the British Empire. By 1925, Australia and New Zealand imported
15,345,000 and 7,017,000 lbs of Ceylon tea, respectively, Canada imported 20 million
lbs, and even the United States imported 15,837,000 lbs.123 Notably, Canada was
routinely the recipient of larger quantities of British tea grown in Asia than its much more
populous North American neighbor in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, or
other British colonies for that matter. Gross public revenue generated by the colonies for
the British government by 1911 was comparatively the highest in the Australian
Commonwealth, which contributed £11.86 per capita. New Zealand provided £11.05, and
South Africa £2.38. The Dominion of Canada, meanwhile, provided the British
government with £5.23 gross public revenue per capita in 1911. Australia, New Zealand,
and Canada received the highest number of tea imports of all nations within the
Commonwealth, and at the same contributed the greatest amount of revenue. By this
time, the tea being sold within the British Empire was almost exclusively exported from
India. Because the British government did not directly tax its settler colonies but instead
encouraged independent economic and commercial growth within and among them, its
profits came mainly from exporting Indian tea to these colonies.
122
Ukers, All About Tea, vol. 2, 349.
123
Ukers, All About Tea, vol. 2, 338-339.
41
Tea production in India produced revenue for the British authorities and profit for
private adventurers as well. After the possibility of tea plantation in India was confirmed,
a sudden surge of English investors and prospective plantation owners appeared, and they
wished to take part in the Indian tea industry. The colonial government encouraged this
by offering large land tracts with lax loan conditions from 1851. As the interest of
investors grew, the British government abolished the original loan terms specified by the
unpopular Assam Rules in 1854, which increased loan interest rates and taxes on
plantation land. As a result, in 1861 Lord Canning's Rules replaced the Assam Rules,
offering easier terms on land leases among other concessions. Over fifty British-owned
companies were producing tea in Eastern India under long-term contracts by 1860, and
hundreds of such companies were operating in India and Ceylon by the first decade of the
twentieth century.124
Tea mania provided the British colonial government in India with the opportunity
to collect taxes on plantations according to their acreage and amount of tea seeds, which
were sold at inflated prices. The government collected revenue by auctioning new tracts
of land. Prior to the 1860s land was sold at a fixed rate, between two and eight rupees per
acre. A modification of the Canning Rules in 1861 by the British Secretary of State in
London inadvertently allowed land to be auctioned to the highest bidder, thereby again
increasing the government's tax revenue.125 As a result of unchecked speculation and
investment in unproductive or even nonexistent tea estates, tea investors suffered in the
1860s as tea prices dropped and profits sank. The tea industry stabilized in India by 1873,
and its production reached fifteen million lbs per year. Seven years later, output increased
124
Ukers, All About Tea, vol. 2, 124.
125
Ukers, All About Tea, vol. 1, 154.
42
to forty-three million lbs, of which 75 percent was grown in Assam. Meanwhile,
governmental and private investment in tea plantation reached almost ten million pounds
by the late 1870s.
Thus, initially tea plantation in India was a highly speculative investment of the
British government, but by the end of the nineteenth century Indian tea production
represented a significant source of revenue for the British Empire.126 Owing to the
formation of trade associations which lobbied for the introduction of Indian tea into the
Commonwealth and American markets, Indian tea exports rose quickly in the 1880s.
Annual imports of Indian tea into Australia, for example, increased from 870,000 lbs in
1881 to 2,710,000 lbs the following year.127
In 1878 the total shipment of tea from India was 33,656,715 lbs. In 1882 exports
expanded to 58,233,345 lbs. By 1890-1891, the total export shipped from Calcutta in
British India had ballooned to 110,194,819 lbs.128 Ninety percent of this went directly to
the United Kingdom, where some was exported for resale in North America, while
4,195,295 lbs, or 4 per cent, was shipped directly to Australia. By 1890-91, 760,000 acres
in India had been earmarked for tea planters, a large portion of which was in current use.
Active tea plantations in Assam alone amounted to 230,822 acres; Assam was the largest
tea plantation region, while in other districts of Cachar, Sylhet, Bengal, Darjeeling, and
Jalpaiguri large-scale tea plantations were also beginning to be cultivated.129 Tea planters
provided a significant portion of the provisional land revenues collected by the colonial
126
Ukers, All About Tea, vol. 1, 131, 133.
127
William Wilson Hunter, The Indian Empire, Its People, History, and Products (London: Smith, Elder, &
Co., 1892), 507.
128
Hunter, The Indian Empire, 603-604.
129
Hunter, The Indian Empire, 603.
43
government in India, while profits made from tea sales in the United Kingdom and
throughout the Empire represented another hefty portion of total revenues from the late
nineteenth .
The revenue gained by the British government from India was organized into the
categories of land revenue, excise, assessed taxes, provincial rates, customs, salt, and
stamps. Land revenue, of which the tea plantations were a significant contributor, was by
far the most significant source of revenue, with an annual average of about £21.5 million
between 1869 and 1879. Total revenue during the four year period between 1879 and
1883 was £163,063,061. Land revenue accounted for 53 per cent of the total. In
comparison, the total gross revenue in 1880 of the United Kingdom was £110,512,650.130
Furthermore, levies on tea import into Britain produced substantial profits from
the time of its first sale and into the twentieth century. Both private investors and the
British government increased their profits from the tea trade by auctioning Indian tea. In
India itself, tea sale auctions were held regularly in Calcutta from early 1862, and soon
after expanded to other locations in the colony.131 In Britain, the London Tea Auctions,
for example, were a weekly occurrence from 1839 and were held in the public Plantation
House on Mincing Lane, where prices initially fluctuated between 1s and 20s per
pound.132 After 1839 the rate of taxation on tea importation became temporarily stable,
although governmental revenue greatly increased. This is clear in an analysis of the levies
on the tea importation from both China and India into Britain between the late eighteenth
and the late nineteenth centuries.
130
Hunter, The Indian Empire, 455, 460, 603-604.
131
Ukers, All About Tea, vol. 2, 131.
132
Eden, Tea, 198; Ukers, All About Tea, vol. 1, 147.
44
In the third quarter of the eighteenth century, the tax on imported Chinese tea had
become so high that smuggled tea either equaled or exceeded four to five million pounds
of legal importation by the East India Company. Following the Commutation Act of
1784, the tea tax was lowered to one tenth of its previous rate, decreasing from 120 per
cent to 12 per cent, which quickly doubled legal importation and weakened the
smuggling industry.133 The Company was then forced to add ten new ships to its fleet of
eighty-odd ships currently in service or being built.134 The impact of the Commutation
Act was significant, especially in Great Britain, where it led to the rapid and continuing
spread of tea consumption among large swaths of the population who could previously
not afford it.
Tea was historically a favourite item of taxation by the British government from
the eighteenth century, in part leading to revolution in the American colonies. The postRevolution colonial tax policy adopted by the British and levies on tea importation
fluctuated consistently. Already in the last decade of the seventeenth century, the British
government had begun to distinguish between teas which were imported directly from
Asia and those which were brought in by European merchants in their taxation policy.
This policy would have significant ramifications in the eighteenth century as it would
ultimately limit profits of other European firms in the tea trade while establishing the East
India Company as a monopolistic firm with a high profit margin.135 As will be discussed
further in Chapter Two, the British government's involvement in military conflict often
triggered a surge in the taxation of various goods, especially tea. For example, due to the
133
Moxham, Tea: Addiction, Exploitation, Empire, 27.
134
Sutton, The East India Company's Maritime Service, 157.
135
Forrest, Tea for the British, 37.
45
Napoleonic Wars of the early nineteenth century, the duty on tea climbed to 100 per cent
ad valorem by 1819.136 In 1834, just before tea was brought from India to the London
market, the rate of tax was stabilized at 2s. 1d. per pound. After the tea tax increased
gradually until 1851, it was then reduced to 1s. 6d. per pound. However, the Crimean
War (1855-1856) again prompted its increase to 1s. 8d. per pound. After large quantities
of Indian tea were imported into Britain from the 1870s, its tax dropped to 4d. per pound
by 1890.137
However, the consumption of Indian tea exploded to almost six lbs per capita and
governmental revenues soared.138 Indian tea exports to the British Empire increased from
7,811,429 lbs in 1867 to 17,920,439 lbs in 1872. This quickly rose considerably in the
next year to 34,800,027 lbs, worth £3,170,118, and in 1882 reached 58,233,345 lbs,
which was valued at £3,738,842. In that year, the United Kingdom, Australia, and the
United States respectively imported 54,108,114 lbs, 2,772,461 lbs, and 676,507 lbs, of
Indian tea.139 Such trade provided significant portion of revenue for the British
government, especially its colonial authorities in India.
Thus, a large portion of the British government's tea-related revenue came not
only from tea importation into Britain from China and India but also from that into its
colonies. By the first decade of the twentieth century, annual tea imports into the United
Kingdom had reached 293,006,000 lbs, of which approximately 58 per cent, or 170
136
Ukers, All About Tea, vol. 2, 124.
137
"The National Taxes," New York Times November 22, 1865, 4.
138
Ukers, All About Tea, vol. 2, 124-125; Moxham, Tea: Addiction, Exploitation, and Empire, 191.
139
Hunter, The Indian Empire, 575.
46
million lbs, was Indian tea.
140
This figure constituted approximately 85 per cent of the
total amount of tea that was produced in India each year. Between 10-20 percent of
Indian tea imports into the United Kingdom were re-exported for profitable sale to North
America by 1900. The remaining thirty million lbs of Indian tea not transported to Great
Britain was imported directly into its colonies of Canada, Australia, South Africa, and
New Zealand as well as the United States, former British colonies that retained a portion
of the market for tea from British India.141
In 1900, India provided 31 per cent of the world's supply of tea, while China
provided 30 per cent. This figure from British India would rapidly increase to 38.4 per
cent and that from China would drop to 10.5 per cent by 1929.142 Thus, by the end of the
nineteenth century, tea from Indian plantations had already constituted a large portion in
the global market and set a pattern for further development thereafter, benefiting the
British both through commercial transactions and revenue generation.
Moreover, the plantation of mainly black tea in India and later Ceylon
symbolically enabled Britain to claim tea as a national beverage of England and of the
British Empire. Not only was such a black tea culture a favourite taste in the political
center of London, but it was reproduced by British colonists in Asia and within those
colonies where British nationals had settled. The colonization of Asian tea thus helped to
consolidate British patriotism among their global diaspora and assisted in the selfsustainability of the British Empire.
140
Ukers, All About Tea, vol. 2, 349.141 Moxham, Tea: Addiction, Exploitation, and Empire, 154.
141
Moxham, Tea: Addiction, Exploitation, and Empire, 154.
142
Ukers, All About Tea, vol. 2, 337.
47
Chapter Two
British Colonialism and Tea Politics in the American Society
British imperialism played a major role in the spread of tea culture in North
America. This chapter mainly addresses the impacts of British imperialism and tea
culture on the political history of colonial New England and later the United States before
and after the American Revolution in the 1770s and early 1780s. The primary focus is on
how the British utilized Chinese tea to fund their colonial Empire through the installation
of high taxes on the commodity from the eighteenth century, taxes which ultimately
triggered the escalation of tea politics in the American colonies and public insurrection
against British imperial rule. Nonetheless, tea continued to be consumed by the general
public in the United States, which also later imported the product from India, a choice
which was ultimately supportive of the British Empire.
The Spread of British Tea Culture in the American Colonies
The development of the British Empire in the Western hemisphere began with its
colonial expansion into North America and the Caribbean in the seventeenth century.
This expansion was significantly bound up with the spread of British tea culture in these
colonies. Particularly, the British generated a significant portion of imperial income
through the trade of Chinese tea to North America, which aided the colonial government
in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Meanwhile through its monopoly of the tea
trade between China and Britain, the British East India Company helped channel revenue
from the Asian tea trade into the imperial treasury. As a result, the tea trade with China
48
was not overly profitable for American colonists, although the tea smuggling carried out
by certain American merchants did generate substantial income among some colonial
companies.143
After the establishment of Newfoundland in 1583, Virginia appeared as the next
English colony in North America in 1607. By 1733 thirteen chartered colonies extended
southward from New England down to the Atlantic seaboard to Georgia. Cotton and
tobacco figured prominently in the colonial economies from Virginia southward by the
late-eighteenth century.144 Tea was first imported into America in the 1650s by Dutch
merchants in the colony of New Amsterdam, which had been established in 1626.145
Soon after its introduction, tea drinking became a popular custom in that colony among
the upper class, and contemporary evidence indicates that tea consumption among the
Dutch berghers in New Amsterdam paralleled that in Holland.146 Thus New Amsterdam
preceded even London in adopting the general consumption of Chinese tea. In 1664, the
British wrested control of New Amsterdam from the Dutch and renamed the colony New
York. Because the British East India Company monopolized tea importation from China
to Britain and its colonies, the company immediately assumed the role of tea supplier to
New York.147
Tea, cider, and rum first replaced beer in the seventeenth century as the American
population's favoured drink because of the poor state of the brewing industry in the early
143
Moxham, Tea: Addiction, Exploitation, and Empire, 154.
144
Hobhouse, Seeds of Change, 141-142.
145
Saberi, Tea: A Global History, 112-113.
146
Esther Singleton, Dutch New York (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1909), 132.
147
Saberi, Tea: A Global History, 113.
49
American colonies, a result of a lack of effective local agricultural development.
148
In the
colony of Massachusetts, tea was consumed as early as 1670. English law required that
each tea vendor receive a license from the colonial government, and by 1700 various tea
purveyors were established in Boston. In this early stage of colonial development in
America, only the wealthiest households consumed tea. However, by the second quarter
of the eighteenth century, tea-drinking in New England and throughout the American
colonies was rapidly becoming entrenched in upper and even middle-class households.
The social preferences helped establish tea as a primary choice of consumption first at
various high society events and parties, and later as a status drink enjoyed by the middleand lower-classes. The ritual of tea-making, including usage of the delicate and attractive
equipment necessary to prepare tea, rendered it a highly sought-after and desirable
commodity for the purpose of both entertaining guests and consuming privately at
home.149
The preparation of tea varied extensively in New England from the seventeenth to
the eighteenth centuries. In the colony of Massachusetts at Salem, an initial lack of
knowledge regarding tea preparation led some to boil tea leaves in water extensively and
then drink the bitter liquid, while others disposed of the water after boiling, salted and
buttered the leaves, and then ate them. Initially, the health benefits of tea-drinking were
not widely recognized, and tea received a bad reputation in some colonial publications as
a "detestable weed" and a "rank poison far-fetched and dearly bought."150 Gradually, this
148
Carole Shammas, The Pre-Industrial Consumer in England and America (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press,
1990), 55.
149
150
Saberi, Tea: A Global History, 113.
Alice Morse Earle, Customs and Fashions in Old New England (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons,
1894), 180.
50
original impression among colonists changed, and growing knowledge of correct
preparation in the early eighteenth century vastly improved the experience and taste for
many. In Plymouth, Massachusetts, for example, copper kettles were produced from
1702, and Carver, Massachusetts produced the first cast-iron tea kettles in the early
1760s. By the mid-eighteenth century, distinguished ladies in the American colonies were
engaging in social tea parties, while the health benefits and stimulating qualities of the
Chinese product were more readily recognized. Meanwhile, the proliferation of
fashionable chinaware, including teacups and saucers, secured tea-drinking as an
increasingly wealth-based social custom among middle and upper class colonists in the
first half of the eighteenth century.151
Between 1783 and 1855, over half of the ceramic drinking materials brought into
the United States were related to the preparation and drinking of tea and coffee, and by
the early-nineteenth century teaware was purchased by more families than any other type
of dining equipment.152 These statistics indicate that by 1800 tea had become a staple in
the diets of most middle- and upper-class Americans, as well as many poorer Americans.
Tea-drinking practice, and by extension, tea equipment, were perceived in the United
States to signify status and wealth.
This correlation is demonstrated by an example in Ohio. A study of Ohio's
Western Reserve found that many young women entering into marriage in the first
quarter of the eighteenth century were willing to ride on horseback for upwards of three
days in order to purchase teaware including kettles and crockery. Even along the
American frontier, immigrant women and new families depended on inexpensive articles
151
Ukers, All About Tea, vol. 1, 49-50.
152
Walsh, "Consumer Behaviour," 220, 239.
51
of modest teaware to create a “separate sphere of feminine influence." These items were
cultural staples, a vital component of the home's upkeep and domestic atmosphere, and
were often purchased before other dining ware.153
Because basic teaware was less expensive than more lavish dining equipment,
many poorer urban and rural households purchased these items before other dining room
amenities as a signifier of social status and respectability. Moreover, tea was accessible to
the American poor as its preparation was easier than that of coffee, which required
roasting, grinding, and brewing, as well as more elaborate brewing equipment. In
comparison, tea could be made with little effort and basic equipment, adding to its
continuity as a staple of the American diet in the nineteenth century, especially among
the poor. As well, its utility could be extended longer than coffee, as mentioned above. In
this way, tea-drinking in the nineteenth century became a primary vehicle for the poor to
participate in a culture of propriety and respectability which was blossoming in the
United States.154 By the second half of the eighteenth century, crudely-decorated Chinese
porcelain, both legally imported and smuggled via Dutch networks, was used by many of
the American colonists on the eastern seaboard as regular dining ware. As well, a number
of factories were opened in Philadelphia which produced high-quality porcelain
throughout the eighteenth century. Such production continued after the Revolutionary
period.155
While tea consumption remained prevalent in American cities and in the
countryside from the second quarter of the eighteenth century, studies show that frontier
153
Walsh, "Consumer Behaviour," 224, 249.
154
Walsh, “Consumer Behaviour," 239.
155
Goldstein, Philadelphia and the China Trade, 21.
52
consumption exhibited similar pattern of tea and teaware purchase and consumption. In
frontier areas like Kentucky, consumers were more likely to buy stimulants and alcohol
rather than basic foodstuffs. A review of country store accounts in the state in the early
nineteenth century reveals that tea, sugar, teaware and whiskey were purchased much
more frequently than grain or maize, which farmers could grow themselves.156
As in Britain, sugar was used as an addition to tea among the wealthy in America
from its introduction in the seventeenth century, and by the mid-eighteenth century the
practice spread to the lower classes and within rural households. Tea and sugar both
began to be imported into the seaboard colonies around the same time and gradually
decreased in price over the next two centuries. Thus, the custom was both practicable and
increasingly accessible, and sweetened tea became a highly satisfactory and popular meal
supplement and a source of inexpensive nutrition.157 The affinity of the poor for
sweetened tea was a factor in the continual popularity of Asian tea in the United States
despite its political sensitivity during and after the American Revolution.
In New England, which included the British colonies of Connecticut,
Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island, the combination of the social benefits
of tea consumption as a projector of material wealth and substance within the colonial
community as well as its pleasing and stimulating effects led it to become an item of
general consumption among the settler population as early as 1721.158 The fact that more
than two thirds of Caucasian Americans had access to commercial tea stores suggests that
tea consumption had become a major and recognizable component of American life by
156
Walsh, "Consumer Behaviour," 249.
157
Walsh, “Consumer Behaviour," 238-239.
158
Walsh, “Consumer Behaviour," 239.
53
this period. Per capita tea consumption varied among colonists according to financial
resources and location. Additionally segments of the American Indian population,
including the Mohawk and Delaware Indians located in the colonial northeast, consumed
teas procured from American merchants.159
The American tea gardens which flourished between the mid-eighteenth and midnineteenth centuries were a distinct indicator of British imperial influence on American
tea culture. In London, a vogue for tea gardens existed from the early-eighteenth century,
and a number of tea gardens were established in the 1740s and 1750s, the most prominent
being Ranelagh (now in Chelsea), Vauxhall, and Marylebone, which were frequented by
the most affluent members of British society. Throughout England, tea gardens provided
a social atmosphere in which both sexes could openly partake in each other's company;
and the gardens thus helped to propel the rise of tea as a social beverage enjoyed by men
and women in British culture.160 It was not until the mid-nineteenth century that these tea
gardens gave way to smaller and more spatially amenable tea shops, where tea was
served and respectable men and women could enjoy a "cuppa" together.
Similarly, various tea gardens were opened from the mid-eighteenth century in a
number of northeastern American towns and cities including New York and Philadelphia,
which, before the advent of the railways, was the primary city in the American colonies.
As in London, American tea gardens provided a public space which was open to both
sexes, and they were frequented by a broad cross-section of the middle- and upperclasses. In New York, tea gardens supplemented existing coffee houses and a number of
gardens were established including those that took the names Vauxhall and Ranelagh,
159
Goldstein, Philadelphia and the China Trade, 17.160 Forrest, Tea for the British, 181-182.
160
Forrest, Tea for the British, 181-182.
54
which were opened in imitation of their well-known London counterparts. In total, three
gardens in New York ended up going by the name of Vauxhall, thereby articulating a
pronounced British tea culture. The first of these tea gardens was opened in the 1740s,
while the second and third were opened in 1798 and 1803, respectively, well after the
American Revolutionary War had taken place. In other words, as already noted, British
tea culture continued to influence American culture in the post-colonial era.161
Tea imports into the American colonies rose significantly in the late-eighteenth
century. Annual imports reached approximately two million lbs by 1768, and by 1773
two thirds of America's white adult population consumed at least one cup per day.162
Thus, on the eve of the American Revolution, British-style tea culture had become deeply
ingrained within the colonial psyche in America. It was signified by the consumption of
caffeinated black tea to which sugar and often milk were added, the observance of
afternoon "tea-time," the use of "proper" teaware including sets with small porcelain cups
and saucers, and the employment of tea as a sociable beverage which was present at
various political and social functions. Not only had tea infused British customs into
means of social interaction in the American colonies, but it had also helped expand their
direct commercial relations with Asia and China in particular.
The British Monopoly of Chinese Tea Importation and the American Revolution
By the mid-eighteenth century, Britain had made significant gains in the
consolidation of its colonial empire through commercial expansion and cultural
influence. The Seven Years' War (1756-1763) factored significantly in such colonial
161
Ukers, All About Tea, vol. 1, 50-51.
162
Walsh, “Consumer Behaviour," 239.
55
successes and in the subsequent spread of British tea culture in the North American
colonies. Through the defeat of France, Britain pushed French colonial forces out of
India, Quebec, and the Canadian Maritime Provinces. The Indian province of Bengal
came under East India Company rule from 1757 during the war, and Britain also gained
trading preeminence in Asia and North America. British sovereignty in North America,
and the East India Company's monopoly of the tea trade between China and Britain, were
secured after the war, except, as it would soon discover, from colonial insurrection.163
The British tax on Chinese tea would figure prominently in Britain’s colonial politics as a
catalyst for change and would incite popular unrest against British sovereignty, ultimately
leading to the independence of the United States.
In both Britain and its colonies, the British governments favoured tea as an item
to generate tax revenue because of its low weight and high volume as well as the
increasing demand for the product throughout the Empire. Additionally, it was an item
which was believed to encourage productivity (in comparison with alcoholic beverages)
and which increasingly bore the emblem of British commercial strength and capacity.
Tea imported from China had been taxed by the British government almost immediately
from its first introduction into Britain in the mid-seventeenth century. In 1669, English
legislation banned Dutch imports of tea into Britain, providing a monopoly for the East
India Company on British tea importation.164 As discussed previously, the taxation of tea
was used by the British government to fund various military campaigns. In the 1680s, the
British tea tax hovered at a modest rate of one or two shillings per pound, but in 1690 the
163
Robert Travers, "Ideology and British Expansion in Bengal, 1757-72," The Journal of Imperial and
Commonwealth History vol. 33, no. 1 (2005): 7-11.
164
Ukers, All About Tea, vol. 1, 42-43.
56
crushing rate of five shillings per pound was imposed by William and Mary on tea from
the ports of Surat and Madras. This rate was specifically raised for the purpose of funding
the new monarchs’ imperial Irish campaign that culminated at the Battle of the Boyne in
1690. That campaign succeeded in part due to the revenue procured from the British tax
on tea. After the war, the tax was quickly dropped to one shilling per pound in 1692.165
Throughout the eighteenth century, the sale of legally imported tea in Britain’s
American colonies needed a license and was taxed by the British government upon its
sale to American distributors. Under British colonial rule, American ships were forbidden
from trading directly with China or even from entering the South China Sea, as direct
engagement in the China trade would threaten the East India Company's monopoly and
profit margin and deprive the British crown of colonial revenue. These terms were
secured by the Navigation Act of 1651 and successive legislations.166 From this period
until the 1780s, tea that was legally imported into the American colonies had to be first
transported from China to London, where it was assessed by officers of the East India
Company and duties were levied according to its weight. Either American or British ships
would then transport the Chinese tea from London to America.167
The revenue generated from the taxation on Chinese tea in the American colonies
was instrumental in funding the colonial administration while also supporting the
maintenance of the Empire. In particular, the government of George III (r. 1760-1820)
determined that the Seven Years' War of 1756-63 had been fought on the colonies' behalf
to defend them against unwanted French influence, and thus they should bear part of the
165
Forrest, Tea for the British, 37.
166
Goldstein, Philadelphia and the China Trade, 17.
167
Saberi, Tea: A Global History, 113.
57
cost through the taxation of various imported goods, especially tea from China. The
Stamp Act of 1765 imposed a heavy duty on various indispensable goods. After its repeal
due to colonial opposition, the British Parliament passed the Act of Trade and Revenue in
1767, which placed a levy on a number of goods, of which the largest source of revenue
was imported tea. These actions galvanized public outrage over taxation in the thirteen
colonies along with discontent over the lack of American representation in the British
Parliament.168
As a result, British tea imports were boycotted at various intervals throughout the
1760s and 1770s. The persistent taxation by the British government on Chinese tea
imports soon led to an increase in illegal trade. The massive tea-smuggling industry
which imported Asian tea into America via Dutch and some Swedish traders had grown
throughout the early eighteenth century and continued to expand in the 1750s and 1760s
as more colonists abstained from British-imported Chinese tea. By 1760, more than three
quarters of the one million lbs of tea imported into Britain annually was smuggled.
Although the exact quantity of tea smuggled into America is unknown, in 1757 a
Philadelphia merchant estimated that only fourteen chests, or 8 percent, of the two
hundred chests of tea consumed annually in Pennsylvania were legally imported.169 By
1767, following the unpopular Stamp Act, the illegal American tea trade was almost
exclusively shifted into the hands of Dutch merchants, and smuggling became the
norm.170
168
Ukers, All About Tea, vol. 1, 51-52.
169
Goldstein, Philadelphia and the China Trade, 18.
170
Ukers, All About Tea, vol. 1, 52.
58
A number of American merchants accumulated substantial fortunes from the
illegal tea trade during this time. In 1767 Parliament in London enacted legislation which
provided that the British import duty should be repaid on all tea imported from England
into America, thereby temporarily pacifying the American public and greatly reducing
the tea tax to be collected by colonial customs. This led to an increase in legitimate tea
imports, and in 1768 the American colonies imported 900,000 lbs of duty-free tea from
England. At the same time, the British began to constrain smuggling more forcefully
between 1750 and 1775, and illegal tea imports fell.171
Despite such concessions from the British Parliament, by 1768 the East India
Company was finding it increasingly difficult to off-load its tea, and it became embroiled
in financial difficulties due in part to escalating smuggling of Chinese tea by American
merchants from which the Company made no profit. In addition to owing the British
government £1,000,000, the Company also had an overstock of 21 million lbs or a fouryear supply of tea. Parliament approved a large price reduction and permitted the East
India Company to sell tea directly to American customers via the Tea Act of 1773,
thereby excluding American merchant middlemen to increase profits. The tea tax levied
by colonial customs was reduced to a flat rate of 3d. from its previous rate of 100 per cent
of the tea’s value in an attempt to ensure the price of the legally-imported Chinese tea
was competitive with smuggled tea prices.172 At the same time, the Tea Act stipulated
that any Chinese tea imported into the colonies had to be transported by British ships,
emphasizing the connection between Asian tea and British imperialism in the colonial
mindset.
171
Goldstein, Philadelphia and the Tea Trade, 20.
172
Ukers, All About Tea, vol. 1, 52.
59
It was in this heated political atmosphere that the Boston Tea Party took place, the
famous event in which a group of pro-independence colonists destroyed ninety-seven
chests of tea that was imported by the British from China and intended for sale in Boston.
When this incident happened in the port of Boston on December 16, 1773, it was cheered
on by a crowd of more than one thousand people.173 This was soon followed by the
destruction of other cargoes of British-imported Chinese tea in similar circumstances in
the towns of Greenwich, Charleston, New York, and other port cities along the Atlantic
coast in late 1773 and 1774.174 Despite these anti-British actions, the East India Company
was soon able to sell its surplus of tea.175 In retaliation for the destruction of tea in the
colonies, the British government enacted the Intolerable or Coercive Acts in 1774, further
igniting political consciousness among colonists and crystallizing public opinion in
favour of independence.176
With a focus on the British monopoly of Chinese tea and the subsequent tea
taxation, the anti-imperial "tea parties" being held in the colonies were indicative of a
deeper ideological struggle over how much political autonomy the American colonies,
comprised of many who identified themselves at least in part as English, should be given
by their British overlords. In the decisive decade of the 1760s, many prominent
politicians in both the Whig and Tory parties disagreed about whether or not the British
Parliament had the right to tax the American colonies without their assemblies' consent.
Parliament ended this indecision through the Declaratory Act of 1766, which asserted
173
Ukers, All About Tea, vol. 1, 57-65.
174
T.H. Breen, American Insurgents, American Patriots: The Revolution of the People (New York: D&M
Publishers, 2010), 202.
175
Forrest, Tea for the British, 67-68.
176
Breen, American Insurgents, 53.
60
that colonial taxation was within the government's right, although such a right remained
an issue of debate both within Parliament itself and within the American colonies.177
As demonstrated by the Boston Tea Party and further destruction of tea shipments
later in 1773 and 1774, the British colonial tea tax catalyzed existing tensions and
became a focus of contention around which colonists could rally and articulate popular
opposition to the imperial British administrative presence in the colonies. As a matter of
fact, this anti-British movement was intrinsically linked to the taxation and consumption
of Chinese tea. The Boston Tea Party led directly to aggressive legislation of the British
Parliament, which politicized formerly neutral colonists and united the population in antiBritish sentiment. By refusing to consume tea, the colonists were articulating a politics of
power which was secured through their role as consumers. In this way, their collective
refusal to consume the Chinese tea, which had been a major item of British importation
and taxation from the establishment of the first British colonies in the seventeenth
century, constituted political action. Thus, for many residents in the American colonies,
the British-monopolized Chinese tea had become a symbol of exploitation and oppression
under colonial rule.178
Moreover, the mass boycott of British-monopolized tea stimulated the rise of a
new American identity separate from Britain, giving colonists a moral, ideological, and
political foundation to denounce British colonial sovereignty and demand independence.
Thus, the spread of British tea culture to colonial America did not simply facilitate the
establishment of imperial cultural hegemony in these colonies but also led to anti-British
177
178
Robert J. Chaffin, “The Declaratory Act of 1766: A Reappraisal,” Historian 37:1 (1974): 6-10.
Moxham, Tea: Addiction, Exploitation, and Empire, 46-49.
61
sentiment. In particular, the British aim to use Chinese tea to increase revenues in the
American colonies unintentionally prompted the development of a sense of solidarity and
identity among American colonists.179 Ultimately, this new sense of political unity would
lead to the expulsion of British political rule from the American colonies after the final
military defeat of British troops, during the American Revolutionary War, in 1783.
The Boston Tea Party, a major event on the path to revolution, was a result of
popular opposition to colonial taxation on imported goods without elected representation
of the American colonists in the Parliament in London. Tea thus became a flagship issue
and was directly linked to imperial tea politics in Asia in which Britain sought to
maximize commercial profits and also raise government revenue in colonies. The
enactment of the Declaratory Act, the Sugar Act of 1764, and the Stamp Act of 1765 was
in part brought about by Britain's colonial wars of expansion in India, and aimed to
finance the wars through colonial revenues.180
Per capita consumption of Asian tea would not recover in the United States until
the mid nineteenth century, potentially due to a resurgence in popularity of British-style
tea culture but certainly due to a preference for the taste of Asian tea over domestically
produced herbal blends. As the American-China trade became established in the century
following American independence, tea assumed predominance, rising from 36 per cent of
total American imports from China in 1822 to 65 per cent in 1760.
By 1850, trade between Britain and the United States had recovered to the extent
that of the 70,303,664 lbs of tea exported to England from China, 6,418,794 lbs was
179
J.H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492-1830 (New Haven,
Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2006), 315.
180
Ukers, All About Tea, vol. 1, 61, 78.
62
purchased by the United States. Annual tea sales from England to the United States
thereafter steadily expanded to 26,219,654 lbs by 1863.181 These figures do not include
the substantial imports managed by American firms which traded directly with China and
other vendors of Chinese teas, including the Dutch, on private ships. Chinese tea imports
throughout the British Empire and in the United States remained consistent until the last
decades of the nineteenth century, when industrially-produced, inexpensive Assamese
teas devastated the export market in China.182
Britain's imperial relationship with China allowed her to use the East India
Company’s monopoly of highly demanded Chinese products to generate revenue in the
American colonies through excise taxes and commercial profits and thus to finance
imperial ventures to some extent. But it also incited reactive politics that ultimately
resulted in the American Revolution. In spite of such political setback, the British style of
tea culture left a long-term legacy in the United States after its independence.
The Legacy of British-style Tea Culture in the in the United States
During right after the American Revolution in the late eighteenth century,
consumption of Chinese tea became widely identified with loyalist sentiments. After
American independence, localized anti-tea campaigns ensured that tea-drinking customs
in many American towns continued to remain censured. During the early nineteenth
century, coffee consumption surpassed tea in the United States. Despite the United States
became the only Anglo-Saxon nation that did not choose tea as its principal non-alcoholic
beverage, the British-initiated tea culture made a significant recovery in the nineteenth
181
William Elder, "Statistics of the Foreign and Domestic Commerce of the United States," (United States
Department of the Treasury. U.S. Government Printing Office, 1864), 34.
182
Macfarlane and Macfarlane, Green Gold, 199.
63
century, and tea-drinking was reinstalled as an American social custom and an indicator
of economic wealth and respectability among a large cross-section of society less than
fifty years after the American Revolutionary War had begun.183
The China trade was an increasing source of income for the American
government in the nineteenth century. The staple imports from Canton to the United
States in the nineteenth century were tea, silk, and nankeen cotton cloth. In particular, the
American government gained significant income through taxation of tea imports, and
such revenue was reinvested into various regional projects aimed at improving
communications and transportation between major cities, coordinating banks and
insurance companies, and establishing more contact between trading firms.184
As already noted, during the revolutionary period, boycotts of Chinese tea were
widespread. Many boycott societies emerged throughout the colonies, and they were
made up of both men and women who condemned tea-drinking customs and stigmatized
the use of Chinese tea as a reprehensible and unpatriotic act because of its connections
with British taxation. In particular, many women played an active role in the boycott of
the British-monopolized tea. Because women often managed the domestic grocery
accounts within the family, they were also responsible for choosing to exclude tea from
their purchases. In Boston, five hundred women formed such a boycott group in the mid1770s, and they collectively pledged to avoid purchasing or drinking Asian green or
black tea.185
183
Hobhouse, Seeds of Change, 113.
184
Goldstein, Philadelphia and the China Trade, 37.
185
Earle, Customs and Fashions, 180-181.
64
However, by the early 1770s, imported Chinese tea was consumed at least once
daily by approximately two-thirds of the white American population, and its consumption
had become so deeply ingrained within the quotidian routines of the majority of
American colonists that the absence of the beverage necessitated creativity to find a
suitable alternative.186 Various locally-grown plants were substituted for Asian tea and
widely consumed in the American colonies during the revolutionary period. The most
popular of these was the aptly-named Liberty Tea, which consisted of boiled, basted, and
dried leaves of loosestrife, a species of American flowering plant. Other American teas
included Ribwort, a simple mix of currant and strawberry leaves, as well as sage and
other strong herbs. Also consumed was the so-called Hyperion tea, which was steeped
raspberry leaves. Thus Americans went to clear lengths to distance themselves
ideologically and politically from the perceived 'British-ness' of Asian tea and its
consumption. A contemporary advertisement in an American publication emphasized
how American teas were "coming into vogue among people of all ranks" by the late
1770s. The aforementioned Liberty Tea was sold for six pence per pound during the
revolutionary period and was widely consumed in female and male working-class circles
as well as in upper-class society, particularly in New England.187 The preparation and
sale of these indigenous herbs thus allowed colonists to continue to sip “tea” while
maintaining a strict boycott of British-imported Chinese tea.
As a result, tea importation from China into America dropped drastically from
1776 until the early 1790s. However, American autonomy in trade matters in the postindependence era led to the early establishment of robust importation of Chinese goods.
186
Walsh, “Consumer Behaviour," 239.
187
Earle, Customs and Fashions, 181.
65
In 1786, the first transpacific ship returned from Canton to the newly independent United
States with a large quantity of black teas and Young Hyson, a higher quality green tea.
Also in that year, the American government levied a tax of fifteen cents and fifty-five
cents per pound on each item, respectively. Two years later, another ship carrying a large
amount of tea returned to America from China with a cargo valued at 500,000 dollars.
Subsequently, there was an immediate rush among American merchants to establish
commercial connections with Canton and reinstall American imports of Chinese tea due
to the widespread recognition of its potential profitability following the end of the
American Revolutionary War.188 In 1789, the control of state tariff regulations passed to
the federal government, which enacted the First Tariff Act, effectively securing a
monopoly in the China trade for American merchants and protecting American firms
which transported tea to the U.S. directly from Canton by allowing them to pay a lesser
duty than foreign ships.189
A number of events then occurred which led to the establishment of the American
tea trade in Europe, China, and North America. In the late 1780s, the American merchant
marine discovered that furs purchased in the Pacific Northwest were in high demand in
China. This realization provided a lucrative opportunity which allowed these merchants
to purchase tea and other goods from China without expending America's limited
supplies of specie.190 Then, the French Revolution erupted, leading to wars in continental
Europe which disrupted the commercial equilibrium and allowed American merchants to
become regular carriers of tea to Europe. The first successful voyage which attempted the
188
Ukers, All About Tea, vol. II, 248.
189
Goldstein, Philadelphia and the China Trade, 36.
190
W.T. Easterbrook and Hugh G.J. Aitken, Canadian Economic History (Toronto: The Macmillan Company
of Canada Limited, 1967), 328.
66
fur-for-tea exchange took place in 1787 and was organized by a group of Boston
merchants. In response, trading firms in New York, Philadelphia, Providence, and Salem
organized similar merchant voyages to China.191
The fur trade provided American merchants with a crucial link to the China trade
by supplying them with a commodity which could be used to buy vast quantities of tea
for domestic distribution and consumption, thereby inspiring a highly lucrative
independent American China-trade. As no American trading bases existed on the Pacific
coast, each voyage was completed in about three years and followed a route from an
Atlantic port, usually Boston, around Cape Horn to the Pacific northwest to acquire furs,
and then on to China.192 By 1800, American traders transported over 100,000 seal skins
and over 10,000 sea-otter furs to China each year. Five years later, the trade had risen to
over 140,000 seal skins and almost 17,500 sea-otter pelts, in addition to 34,464 beaver
pelts and skins of a number of other animals including rabbits in the 1805-1806 period.
Between 1804 and 1818, total fur trade imports into China had generated a contemporary
value of $7,770,770 in sales.193
American fur exports to China continued to generate significant income
throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, and helped to facilitate the importation
of Chinese tea. New York, which developed a monopoly of the green tea in China trade
in the nineteenth century, also controlled a large portion of the interior Canadian fur trade
from the late eighteenth century. This trade between New York merchants and Canada as
well as the colonial trade between New England and the Maritimes led to increasing
191
Easterbrook and Aitken, Canadian Economic History, 328.
192
Easterbrook and Aitken, Canadian Economic History, 328.
193
Latham and Heita, eds. Intra-Asian Trade and the World Market, 39-40.
67
conflict with the British under the terms of the Navigation Acts, which restricted
Canadian trade to British ships. At the same time, the American tea trade helped to pull
the United States out of near-bankruptcy by establishing vital commercial relations and
securing considerable profits. By the 1830s, the tea trade was concentrated under the
control of several magnates and was an established exemplary case of the lofty ambition
of American capitalism.194
Even though the War of 1812 again slowed American commerce momentarily,
Sino-American trade, including tea trade, soon began to thrive. Like the British colonial
authorities on the eve of the American Revolution, the American government also
imposed an increasing tax on tea and other items in the China trade, thereby gaining
valuable revenue for the U.S. treasury.195 Tea imports meanwhile rose to 6,873,000 lbs by
1830,196 and by 1840 consumption had reached 1.5 cups for the entire population.197 As
the American population rapidly grew, the imports of tea similarly increased to
76,534,000 lbs by the 1880s. Meanwhile, in the Canadian colonies, colonists drank
approximately one cup per day by 1793, although imported black tea consumption
increased at a faster rate per capita than American consumers throughout the early
nineteenth century.198 Therefore, in the nineteenth century tea consumption explicitly
benefited the American government. After the large-scale production of tea began in
194
Ukers, All About Tea, vol. II, 248-249.
195
Goldstein, Philadelphia and the China Trade, 36-37.
196
Francis S. Drake, Tea Leaves: Being a Collection of Letters and Documents Relating to the Shipment of
Tea to the American Colonies in the Year 1773, by the East India Tea Company (Boston: A.O. Crane,
1884), 219; Ukers, All About Tea, vol. 2, 351.
L.S. Walsh, “Consumer Behaviour, Diet and the Standard of Living in Late Colonial and Early Antebellum
America 1770–1840,” in American Economic Growth and Standards of Living before the Civil War, ed. by
R.E. Gallway and J.J. Wallis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 239.
197
198
Hobhouse, Seeds of Change, 113.199 Walsh, “Consumer Behaviour," 239.
68
India in the 1870s, American tea consumption and trade even facilitated the British
imperialist interest in Asia.
In the United States, although coffee consumption underwent a sharp increase
during the nineteenth century, tea consumption also rose consistently. Significantly, tea
continued to outsell coffee until coffee consumption began to increase dramatically in the
early 1830s. More than any political factors, the impact of price fluctuations on the two
goods was a major cause of the popular shift to coffee in the United States. While coffee
prices fell steadily after 1830 due in part to increased coffee production in Latin America,
tea prices remained relatively higher due to the high cost of Chinese tea imposed by the
Chinese government as well as the American government's taxation of Chinese imported
goods.199 Despite its higher prices, the use of tea could be stretched longer than coffee as
it could be steeped repeatedly throughout the day, while coffee is extinguished upon the
first brew. Thus, the calculation of consumption per serving can be misleading as it does
not account for those individuals who consume many cups of tea per day with one
portion.200
Evidently, after the United States achieved independence, the remaining impact of
British tea culture ensured that the nation continued to be an important market for Asian
tea including that from British India. Between 1822 and 1823, American imports of tea
from Canton reached approximately 17,769,080 lbs and continued to fluctuate around
that number throughout the 1820s.201 By 1840, quantities of tea consumed on a daily
basis as well as the number of people engaging in tea-drinking had risen substantially,
199
Walsh, “Consumer Behaviour," 239.
200
Saberi, Tea, 102.
201
"We have received New York and Washington papers: the first to the 23d of June, the latter to the 22d,"
Times (London, England), 20 July 1827: 2.
69
and per capita tea consumption in the United States had doubled from 1773 when two
thirds of the population consumed one cup daily.202
Meanwhile, data from local grocery inventories suggest that at least half of the
American population had tea-preparation equipment by the beginning of the nineteenth
century, and the majority of the wealthier two thirds of society owned teaware. Increase
in teaware sales took place first among the wealthy, and was simultaneous with the
popularization of the tea-making ritual among upper class circles. As the eighteenth
century progressed, the elite became more attentive to the proper method of tea
preparation as attitudes towards cosmopolitanism shifted. The focus increasingly moved
to the quality of tea, sugar, and preparatory equipment, which all signified social
status.203
From the 1660s until the 1890s, China remained the largest source of tea imports
into America. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, aside from the major imports
of Chinese tea, five to six hundred chests of oolong tea, a greyish-green tea that was
traditionally oxidized half way between green and black tea, was imported annually from
Formosa, as well as a smaller quantity of tea from Japan.204 The American China- trade
continued to flourish throughout the late nineteenth century. By the last quarter of the
nineteenth century, communication and transportation among major American cities had
improved to such a degree that New York lost its monopoly of the tea trade, and other
centers, including Boston, San Francisco, and Chicago also became major distributors of
202
Walsh, “Consumer Behaviour," 239.
203
Walsh, “Consumer Behaviour," 224, 239.
204
Hohenegger, Liquid Jade, 202.
70
Chinese tea.
205
While American tea culture retained many aspects of its British background, a
shift took place in the second half of the eighteenth century. In Britain green tea was
consumed in greater quantities than black tea until the 1720s, when the addition of sugar
to black tea became prevalent.206 By contrast, bohea, or black tea, was the only type of
tea to be consumed in the American colonies until 1712, when green tea was first sold in
Boston.207 Thereafter, the consumption of Chinese green tea gradually surpassed that of
black tea throughout the American colonies and the later United States. Although British
tea culture, and especially its preference of consuming black tea with sugar, remained a
common feature throughout American tea-drinking history, green tea, imported mainly
from China, became increasingly popular following the American Revolution and
remained so until into the twentieth century. By 1922 annual black tea imports from
China to the United States were 13,333 piculs, the equivalent of about 1,777,289 lbs.
Green tea imports were much higher at 36,668 piculs, or 4,887,844 lbs.208
The shift towards green tea consumption resulted in part from the growth of the
Sino-American commercial relationship in the early nineteenth century, which ensured
the continuous importation of a high volume of Chinese tea. Although China did possess
a substantial black tea industry that was aimed at the Western market, it was dwarfed by
the production of traditional green tea, which was widely favoured by the indigenous
Chinese and was easily available to American merchants. Furthermore, the majority of
black tea available at Chinese ports was purchased by the East India Company, private
205
Ukers, All About Tea, vol. 2, 268-269.
206
Singleton, Dutch New York, 132; Saberi, Tea: A Global History, 91; Mintz, Sweetness and Power, 113.
207
Earle, Customs and Fashions, 180.
208
Tuck, ed., Britain and the China Trade, 4.
71
British traders, and Dutch smugglers for exporting to Britain until high-volume and highquality black tea began to be produced in India in the last quarter of the nineteenth
century.
British India, which became a major black tea producer after 1870, did not export
the product to the United States in significant quantities until 1882. Throughout the
1890s, Americans remained a nation of green-tea drinkers, as the tea commissioner in
Ceylon reported to his committee in 1895.209 Thus, a concerted effort was made to gain a
portion of the growing American consumer market for Indian black tea. Beginning in
1890, the British colonial government in India launched a spirited advertising campaign
in major tea-consuming nations including the United States, promoting British-grown
teas from India and Ceylon. In America, the purpose of these campaigns was to reduce
and even eliminate sale of Japanese and Chinese green teas. The success of the British
marketing efforts was almost immediate, and the popularity of the new black tea from
British India caused another shift in American tea consumption to this product and away
from Chinese green tea by the early 1900s.210
As the British colonists had done through colonial propaganda, American
merchant firms utilized the American press to advertise Chinese tea vendors in the United
States. Various popular publications including the New York Times and the Public Ledger
frequently ran such advertisements in preferred sections where they were viewed by a
large number of readers.211 By the 1860s, interest in the developing Indian tea market was
growing among American investors. Advertisements and informative news articles on the
209
Ukers, All About Tea, vol. 2, 278-279.
210
"The Tea Trade: America Wants Pure Teas - Are Ceylon and India Teas Supplanting Chinese and
Japanese?" The New York Times, July 12, 1897, 6.
211
"Additional Foreign News; Tea Trade of India," New York Times, November 8, 1863.
72
Indian tea trade began to appear increasingly in American newspapers from the last
quarter of the nineteenth century.212 In return, British expenditure on marketing Indian tea
in America from the late nineteenth century was substantial. By 1930, the Indian colonial
government had spent a total of $2,000,000 on this campaign aimed at the American
market.213 However, green tea imports into the United States in the 1920s still averaged
almost three times black tea imports and had reached almost five million lbs annually by
1930.214
Meanwhile, the New York Times ran an article in June 1895 which commented on
how the British were attempting to reduce the Chinese share of the market with their
Indian and Ceylon tea industries. The article reported that there appeared "to be a fund
subscribed by the planters [in India] for opening new sources of trade." It continued
stating,
"Large amounts of money have been spent in creating a demand in the United
States and Canada. The English circulars say the progress has been slow, and now
the consumption, 'after seveal years of anxious work and costly expenditure,' has
nearly doubled - from about 1,300,000 pounds to about 2,390,000 pounds a year.
The Australian colonies appear to be relied on to drink the British product from
patriotic motives. The figures seem to show a strong love for the mother country
as well as for tea."215
What is evident from this article is the awareness of an American journalist for
the seemingly obvious correlation between British imperialism and Indian black tea.
Although he points more to Australia as the focus of these conclusions, the strong
212
Ukers, All About Tea, vol. 2, 297.
213
Ukers, All About Tea, vol. 2, 297, 299.
214
Tuck, ed., Britain and the China Trade, 4.
215
"To Supplant China Teas: India and Ceylon Striving to Conquer the Markets of the World," New York
Times, June 23, 1895, 22.
73
correlation between British patriotism and consumption of British tea is still tangible,
even in the United States.
American independence, then, did not eliminate British-style tea culture in the
United States. Certain changes to this culture were entailed, with certain aspects
simultaneously rejected or appropriated depending on the social group and circumstances
of consumption, but ultimately such cultural impacts were still visible in American
society. Moreover, independence did not prevent the British from benefiting from such an
entrenched cultural practice thereafter because the United States still was an important
market of the black tea from British India.
Overall, British tea culture remained a major component of American culture up
to the twentieth century. Despite being a major target of the American Revolution in the
1770s and 1780s, tea culture was quickly reinstalled in the newly independent United
States as a practice that helped to determine and establish social relations in the public
and private spheres. Moreover, the American government followed the same policy of the
British colonial authorities to tax the imported tea from China, a policy which helped
finance not only various regional projects but also the building of the new nation. At the
same time, American perceptions of British-style tea culture also turned from rejection
during the Revolutionary period to appropriation of its various elements from the lateeighteenth century. This happened even though Americans sought to form their own
commercial connections with Asia outside of British influence and to establish an
independent commodity culture. The British tea culture left even more important impact
on Canadian society.
74
Chapter Three
British Impacts on the Tea Trade and Culture in Canada
As in the American colonies, Anglophone communities in Eastern and Western
Canada adopted facets of British-style tea culture at varying intervals. This chapter
reveals the impacts of the British-imported Asian tea on the cultural life and identity of
Canada down to the early twentieth century. It seeks to demonstrate how the acceptance
of British tea culture in Canada was indicative of an implicit acceptance of British
sovereignty. It also assesses how colonial demand for different types of Asian tea,
especially that from India, served the interests of British colonialism in both Asia and
North America, especially Canada.
British Interests and Asian Tea Trade in Canada
The tea trade in colonies and later dominions was a profitable venture for the
British Empire from its beginning until the mid-twentieth century. Such trade was also
fostered by the influence of British tea culture and imperialist policy of providing stable
and self-sustaining markets for colonies. Canada provides a typical example of how the
British imperial relationship with its colonies translated into reciprocal economic
arrangements and mutual benefits.
Indeed, the colonists of the British Empire were linked to their homeland through
both consumption of familiar commodities and the export of imperial culture, including
tea culture.216 As the Empire expanded, the British diaspora maintained not only material
but also symbolic ties to England. British rule over Canada and other colonies was
216
John K. Fairbank, Chinese-American Interactions: A Historical Summary (New Jersey: Rutgers University
Press, 1975), 19.
75
confirmed and perpetuated by consumption of items such as Chinese tea, which was
increasingly recognized as a product of British commercial power. Thus, tea-drinking
culture extended British imperial influence into the heart of Canadian society, while
taxation and trade of the commodity ensured reciprocal economic benefits for the
colonial governments and Great Britain.217 Although American merchants provided a
potential challenge to British control of the tea trade, especially in Canada, Britain was
able to maintain a firm enough grip on the tea trade in Canada into the early twentieth
century ensuring continual economic gain from its colonies and Dominions.
France had established its first European settlements around Quebec in Canada in
1609, and following the French defeat in the Seven Years' War (1756-1763) the British
assumed control of all the Canadian colonies. The British colonies of Upper and Lower
Canada were formally established in 1791, and they contained both English- and Frenchspeaking settlers. Canadian Confederation in 1867 brought together the colonies of
Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick as four provinces.218 Other Englishspeaking colonies in Western Canada would later join the Dominion of Canada. In
particular, British Columbia became a province of Canada in 1871, and it would play a
vital role in Canadian commerce and the tea trade with both British and American
merchants.
Tea had been a component of the dietary repertoire for the European colonists in
Canada from the late seventeenth century, and it remained the major non-alcoholic
beverage of choice into the twentieth century. By 1800, tea consumption was a consistent
217
Jason Goodwin, A Time for Tea: Travels through China and India in Search of Tea (New York: Knopf,
1991), 201-202.
218
Kenneth Nowrie and Douglas Owram, A History of the Canadian Economy (Toronto: Harcourt Brace &
Company Ltd., 1996), 210-211.
76
ritual in both urban areas and rural townships throughout the Canadian colonies.
219
While
English-speaking colonies of Canada are the main focus in this chapter, cultural
competition between them and that the Francophone communities in Quebec and Eastern
Canada made them keep a different relationship with the British-style tea culture. The
initial rarity of chocolate, coffee, and other stimulant-based drinks in Canada ensured a
strong tea-drinking base throughout all the colonies of Canada, and while specific
consumption patterns in French Canada are not studied here, there is evidence that many
French-Canadians regularly engaged in tea-drinking by the nineteenth century.220
Whether French communities acknowledged in the same way the British influence on tea
consumption and tea-drinking rituals is an item for discussion in another paper.
On the western coast of Canada, British explorers in search of new lands and
wealth discovered what would be called Vancouver Island at least from the time of
Captain Cook’s voyage to the Pacific Northwest around 1778. This island provided the
basis for subsequent British colonization of present Pacific Canada thereafter. The
Hudson's Bay Company during the first half of the nineteenth century controlled the fur
trade throughout present-day British Columbia, Washington and Oregon. British
territorial claims in the area were strengthened by the exploration efforts initiated by the
North West Company and independent explorers, and in 1849 Britain established
Vancouver Island as a crown colony.221 The Hudson's Bay Company was granted control
of colonization efforts in Vancouver Island, and a company official, James Douglas,
219
Douglas McCalla, "A World without Chocolate: Grocery Purchases at Some Upper Canadian Country
Stores, 1808-1861," Agricultural History 79: 2 (, 2005), 167.
220
221
McCalla, "A World without Chocolate," 148.
Alan F.J. Artibise, "Vancouver Island," The Canadian Encyclopedia (Regina: Canadian Plains Research
Center, University of Regina, 1981).
77
became the colony's governor in 1851.
222
To accommodate and better police the large
influx of immigrants associated with the mid-century gold rush along the Fraser River
valley, the British government established the mainland colony of British Columbia in
1858 and New Westminster as that colony’s capital in 1859. Following the decline of the
gold mines in the late 1860s, the colonies of Vancouver Island and British Columbia
were united into the colony of British Columbia in 1866 to limit administrative expenses
before being admitted into the Canadian Confederation as a province in 1871.223 The
continuation of imperial cultural sovereignty in British Columbia was linked to the
popularity of British-style tea culture both before and after the province joined the
politically autonomous Dominion of Canada. That rise was in part linked to the tea trade
which by 1882 was accelerating rapidly between British India and the Dominion of
Australia.224
The Navigation Acts were first enacted as early as 1651, and ensured British
control of colonial trade by restricting colonies' commercial transactions with the
Netherlands and other European countries. The Acts limited colonial trading rights to the
East India Company and other British companies and traders. In Canada, the Navigation
Acts limited foreign trade to British ships until the Acts’ abolishment in 1849, although
Canadian merchants were permitted to manage their own commercial activities on the St.
Lawrence and Great Lakes, among other inland waterways. 225 After 1849, the share of
222
Geoffrey Molyneux, British Columbia: An Illustrated History (Vancouver: Raincoast Books, 2002), 12-14.
223
Molyneux, British Columbia, 22.
224
Frankema, "Colonial Taxation," 20-21.
225
Wallace, "Economic History," 155-160.
78
Chinese tea imported by American merchants into Canada grew, and British tea imports
from China and later India in the late nineteenth century continued unabated.226
Tea imports into Canada were subject to a high duty until the American
Revolution when the British government, cautious of excessive taxation of colonial
goods, began to collect revenue through other means. In Canada, the most significant
forms of revenue were through land tax, customs revenues, fees from public utilities, and
later income tax. The East India Company and British private traders were significant
sources of the official tea revenue in Canada during the nineteenth century. Throughout
the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the East India Company biannually
held public auctions of Chinese tea in Montreal and Quebec City because of the two
cities' accessibility to other parts of Canada along inland water routes. The British
government continued to benefit financially from the colonial tea trade both during the
East India Company's monopoly of trade between China and Britain, which lasted until
1833, and throughout the nineteenth century as it remained the major importer of teas to
Canada.227
From the seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century, the British control over trade
in Canada, especially that on inland waterways and coastal regions, also relied on the
Hudson's Bay Company. As the oldest commercial corporation in North America, the
Hudson's Bay Company played an active role in the governance of Rupert's Land
between 1670 and 1870, which included parts of present-day Quebec, Ontario, Manitoba,
Saskatchewan, Alberta, and Nunavut, as well as the Pacific Northwest which would later
226
Canada Year Book, 1885, 127.
227
Innis, An Economic History of Canada, 156.
79
be divided among British Columbia and the states of Washington and Oregon.
228
The
Hudson's Bay Company at first specialized in fur trade with the indigenous First Nations
population. Gradually, however, it faced competition from American merchants, who
offered indigenous groups better terms of trade such as larger quantities of desired goods
including alcohol and guns which were prohibited or limited by the Company’s traders.229
After the American Revolution, the conflict between British and American
commercial interests continued via issues regarding trading rights and duties in the
remaining Canadian colonies. The tea trade was a major arena of competition which was
compounded by the fact that tea importation from China to Canada was restricted to the
East India Company until the early nineteenth century. Following the successive Colonial
Trade Acts passed by British Parliament in 1822 and 1825, the Canadian colonies were
given more freedom to trade with the United States and other countries, although many
restrictions remained and foreign ships could still not legally transport foreign goods
including Asian tea from one colonial port to another. In certain cases they were
permitted to import goods into a colonial port.230 A heavy duty on American imports into
Canada including Chinese tea also restricted imports and generated much objection
within the colonies. Aside from disrupting the necessary importation of salted beef and
pork from the United States, the duty impeded Canadian exports of lumber, flour, and
other goods. Due to Canadian colonies’ backlash against the duties, the British
228
Peter A. Baskerville, Ontario: Image, Identity, and Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 127.
229
Easterbrook and Aitken, Canadian Economic History, 328.
230
Innis, An Economic History of Canada, 155-157.
80
government revised some regulations and allowed the "indispensable" CanadianAmerican trade to continue.231
Despite recurring restrictions, smuggling of tea and other items from the United
States remained a common fixture in Canadian-American trade due to profitability and
proximity.232 Transactions of convenience regularly occurred. American merchants who
regularly fished along the Eastern Canadian coast including the colony of Nova Scotia
often sold local inhabitants available goods such as Chinese tea from the late eighteenth
to the mid-nineteenth century.233
Lower Canada played an important role in the Canadian tea trade with the United
States in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Because of the frequency of
cross-border trade, duties enacted by the British Parliament on American imports into
Canada were not always upheld. In particular, the United States in that time had
established a robust trade with Canton, and thus American merchants consistently
smuggled Chinese tea into Canada along the St. Lawrence River and on the eastern
coastal line, giving Canadians access to inexpensive tax-free Chinese goods, primarily
teas and silks. Thus, Lower Canada, which was more accessible than Upper Canada to
American and British ships carrying goods from Canton because of the St. Lawrence
River, was a significant gateway for the illegal trade of Chinese tea in the Canadian
colonies. At the same time, Upper Canada received a substantial quantity of tea and other
231
H.A. Innis, ed. Select Documents in Canadian Economic History, 1497-1783 (Toronto: 1929), 328.
232
Innis, An Economic History of Canada, 156.
233
Journals of the House of Assembly of Nova Scotia, July 6, 1797, 270; cited in Innis, An Economic History
of Canada, 86.
81
Chinese goods through inland trade routes which extended into multiple districts of the
colony.234
Canadian import figures from the United States expanded throughout the second
half of the nineteenth century. In 1851, Canada imported $803,216 worth of tea from the
United States, which accounted for 10 per cent of the total value of trade between the two
countries.235 Beginning in the 1850s, the colonial government of Canada began to impose
protective tariffs on cross-border trade in order to stimulate domestic manufacturing.
However, the duty on tea imports was lowered from 15 per cent per pound? In 1859 to 5
per cent in 1862, to encourage imports as well as tea consumption within Canada. This
new policy further encouraged commerce from China via British traders and from the
United States.236 The rate of taxation would continue to fluctuate throughout the
remainder of the nineteenth century, although levies varied among colonial governments.
Following increases in smuggling between Canada and the United States, the
British Navigation Laws were repealed in 1849, and Canadian and American merchants
began to engage in legal trade not only with each other but also with China.237 By the late
nineteenth century, China's export trade of tea had dropped significantly because British
India and Ceylon had replaced China as the major exporter of teas to North America and
the British Empire. At the same time, the Hudson's Bay Company did still engage in
some direct trade with Canton, and direct Canadian imports from China expanded by the
1860s.238 Canadian imports from the United States in that year equaled $731,162,090, or
234
Innis, An Economic History of Canada, 156.
235
D.D.A. Lillie, Canada: Physical, Economic, and Social (Toronto: Maclear & Co., 1855), 184-185.
236
Easterbrook, Canadian Economic History, 372-373.
237
Moxham, Tea: Addiction and Exploitation, 83.
238
Canada Year Book, 1895 (Ontario: Dominion Bureau of Statistics, 1867), 577.
82
$11.37 spent per capita, a significant portion of which was tea imported via the United
States from China and India.239
By the time of Canadian Confederation in 1867, tea was a principal import in
terms of value, along with cotton and woolens. In 1866, 6,775,501 lbs of tea, valued at
$2,313,307, was imported into Canada from China, of which the quantity was second
only to imported cotton and woolens. In 1867, tea and sugar were the largest "tropical"
imports into Canada and higher in value than any other single import, excluding basic
foodstuffs such as grain and meal.240 At that time, the Canadian population rested at
3,295,706 and the per capita consumption of tea was 2.05 lbs per person.241 In the 1880s,
total tea imports into Canada from China and India continued to increase steadily,
although Indian tea imports soon began to overtake that from China. In 1883, taxed tea
imports from China and other countries outside of the Commonwealth were valued at
$299,422, while "free" tea imported by Britain from India was worth $3,238,974 in 1885,
up from $2,937,424 two years earlier.242 In 1925, Canada further imported 7,951,000 lbs
of tea from India, and over 20 million lbs from British Ceylon.243
Therefore, the tea trade in Canada generated revenue for the British government
through the sale of the Asian commodity, especially that from India and Ceylon. In this
way, it was not only the taxes imposed upon Asian tea in Canada but also the guaranteed
sale of large quantities of Chinese and later Indian and Ceylon tea that ensured British
economic gain. British control over the tea trade in Canada still faced competition,
239
Canada Year Book, 1895, 564.
240
Canada Year Book, 1867, 91.
241
Canada Year Book, 1867, 76.
242
Canada Year Book, 1885, (Ontario: Dominion Bureau of Statistics, 1885), 131.
243
Ukers, All About Tea, vol. 2, 349.
83
mainly from American traders in the United States following its independence. But in
general British imperial policy was more successful in Canada than it had been in the
thirteen American colonies because it effectively positioned first Chinese tea and then
Indian or Ceylonese teas as a chief cultural symbol while establishing a reciprocal
economic arrangement based on this commodity.
The Influence of British Tea Culture in Canada and Canadian Cultural Identity
While tea became increasingly important in trade and in popular consumption
throughout Canada, it quickly assumed various social, political, and cultural functions
which allowed colonists originating from the British Isles to build and maintain a strong
cultural relationship to their homelands. The rapid spread of British-style tea culture in
Canadian society demonstrated the acceptance of British influence and sovereignty
among different colonial communities. Canadian society even absorbed cultural cues
from Britain to utilize imported Chinese and later Indian tea to facilitate certain political
and social functions in domestic life, societal gatherings, and political ceremonies. In
particular, consumption of sweetened black Asian tea both financially supported the
Empire and in some circles signified approbation of British sovereignty. Imperial
holidays such as Queen Victoria's birthday were regularly celebrated in communities
throughout Canada and tea-drinking was a major part of those ceremonies. Consumption
of Asian tea in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries became a major component of
different Canadian communities' heritage and identity, first in the colonial era and later as
member of the Commonwealth.
84
The influence of British-style tea culture was most prominently expressed in the
colonies of Upper Canada, Vancouver Island and British Columbia, which became the
provinces of Ontario and British Columbia in 1867 and 1871, respectively.244 After
Canadian Confederation came into being in 1867, the promotion of tea consumption as a
staple in the diet of Canadians remained in the best interest of the British Empire, in
respect to both monetary gain and cultural influence.245 Through the consistent
importation of Chinese and later Indian tea, British traders, the active agents of their
empire, propagated its popularization there through the regular sale of the product to
Canadians.
By the late eighteenth century, tea had been consumed in Upper Canada on a
daily basis by the majority of the population, which was estimated at around 10,000
people in 1791.246 As early as 1793 tea consumption in Upper Canada was documented in
the published work of Patrick Campbell, a British travel writer, who noted that tea was
considered a necessity in Upper Canada by this time and was consumed on a daily basis
by many colonists.247 Upon meeting the wife of one of his hosts, Campbell noted that the
woman drank "souchong," a black tea which was popular throughout the British Empire,
and that "ladies here, as well as in other parts of the world, are taxed with being governed
by a passion for trifles of this kind." Moreover, he wrote, the fashionability of tea granted
ladies esteem among their circle, while the quality of their tea demonstrated knowledge
"of good taste," which in the colonies was just as important of a social issue as in the
244
Hobhouse, Seeds of Change, 113.
245
Moxham, Tea: Addiction and Empire, 83.
246
Gerald Hallowell, "Upper Canada," The Oxford Companion to Canadian History (Oxford, UK: Oxford
University Press, 2004).
247
Patrick Campbell, Travels in the Interior Inhabited Parts of North America in the Year 1791 and 1792
(Edinborough, 1793), 299.
85
cultural epicenter, London. Campbell also suggests that the expense of the Asian tea was
part of the appeal among ladies of wealth and consequence, and some wealthy colonial
women preferred it to 'inferior' herbal variations produced in Canada for this reason.248
Souchong in particular, which was a black tea cultivated in Fujian province in China
mainly for the Western market, was in high demand in the Canadian colonies as a rich
and superior exotic blend.249
The populous urban areas throughout Upper Canada initially represented the most
important markets for Asian tea. By the nineteenth century, many individuals from a
range of economic backgrounds in these areas could afford to drink tea regularly. A
contemporary missionary described how one typical pioneer in York in the midnineteenth century drank tea consistently despite subsisting on a limited income and diet.
When he moved to a remote fur-trapping cabin in the winter months, he brought with him
four "requisite" articles, as he identified them, two of which were black tea and sugar.
This demonstrates the considerable importance of both tea and sugar, consumed in the
British style of sweetened black tea, in the fairly limited diet of a Canadian at this time.
Thus, tea taken with sugar in the British tradition was a staple in the diet of many Upper
Canadians living in both densely and sparsely populated areas.250 As a highly significant
aspect of British national culture and identity from the late-eighteenth century, the
prevalence and growth of tea consumption in Upper Canada during this period is
indicative of the acknowledgement of a recognizable cultural link between Upper
Canadians and the British Empire.
248
Campbell, Travels in the Interior, 322.
249
Campbell, Travels in the Interior, 213, 215.
250
William Stewart Darling, Sketches of Canadian Life, Lay and Ecclesiastical (London, UK: David Bogue,
1849), 66.
86
In the first half of the nineteenth century, grocery store accounts from throughout
Upper Canada show that tea and tobacco were the most popular items purchased among
rural farm families. These stores were often simple wood or masonry constructions with
an assortment of domestic foodstuffs, foreign imports, and at times medicinal items and
other common-use goods and foodstuffs.251 The frequency and quantity of purchases in
these stores revealed that the majority of customers consumed tea on a daily basis, while
the remainder, possibly due to economic restrictions, consumed tea only on occasion.252
By the mid-nineteenth century, store records in Upper Canada indicated that tea
was purchased between two and nine times per year by a rural family, and was probably
consumed by those who purchased it on a regular basis. Coffee was purchased much less
frequently than tea, although records show that it was available as early as 1808. Tea, as
seen in a grocery store’s account book in 1861, could also be purchased in large
quantities by buyers intending to share their stock in rural common rooms, as was the
case for other goods including sugar and tobacco. In 1861, a logger named David Rose
purchased sixty pounds of tea and another ten pounds three months later to supply his
logging shanty, a common house utilized by lumbermen for relaxation. This indicates that
individual purchases could also be used to supply a number of persons living in rural
areas.253
Tea's popularity in Upper Canada also resulted from the shift in collective cultural
tastes. As Jan Noel describes in her foundational work on the Canadian temperance
movement, the increasing availability of flavoured beverages in the mid-nineteenth
251
Rae B. Fleming, General Stores of Canada: Merchants & Memories (Toronto: Lynx Images, 2002), 37-.
252
McCalla,"A World without Chocolate," 167.
253
McCalla,"A World without Chocolate," 147, 154, 166, 167.
87
century, such as sweetened fruit juices, coffee, and tea facilitated a higher rate of
abstinence from alcohol in Canada East and Canada West.254 Most alternatives to alcohol,
however, are relatively insignificant when compared with tea, which was both widely
available and frequently purchased by that time, and which ultimately played a larger role
in the temperance movement in Canada as a familiar and culturally vetted beverage.255
In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, loyalty to Britain was a major
component of the Upper Canadian cultural fabric.256 In areas with high British-Canadian
populations, tea consumption was often utilized as the social expression of loyalist
sentiment. These sentiments were originally envisioned in North America by the
American-expatriate United Empire Loyalists following the failed British effort in the
American Revolution.”257
Among the populations of colonial and post-colonial Vancouver Island and
British Columbia, the popularization of tea consumption and tea-drinking culture also
reflected the prevalent British influence. The majority of settlers throughout the
nineteenth century were first generation of immigrants from Britain. By 1870, the
population of British Columbia had reached 10,587 settlers, over 80 percent of whom
were born in Great Britain or were the children of British immigrants.258 Because of the
cultural proximity of the provincial population to Great Britain, local society became
closely aligned with British tea culture in the nineteenth century. As the cultural,
254
Jan Noel, Canada Dry: Temperance Crusades before Confederation (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1995), 222-223.
255
McCalla, "A World without Chocolate," 167.
256
Carl Berger, The Sense of Power: Studies in the Ideas of Canadian Imperialism, in Interpreting Canada's
Past: A Post-Confederation Reader, ed. J.M. Bumsted and Len Kuffert (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University
Press, 2005), 95.
257
Berger, The Sense of Power, 96.
258
Canada Year Book, 1870, 14-15.
88
administrative, and commercial center of British Columbia in the second half of the
nineteenth century, Victoria, the provincial capital, is of particular significance in
assessing the development of British tea culture in the province.
The first British settlers immigrated to the colonies of Vancouver Island and
coastal British Columbia in the early nineteenth century after the fur trade in the region
began to develop in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. The Fraser Gold Rush from
1858 to 1862 led to the establishment of permanent settlements along the Fraser River
and up to the Cariboo mountain region in the northern and eastern parts of the province.
The largest non-European settler group in British Columbia during this time was that of
Chinese-Canadians, who first immigrated there as gold miners in the mid-nineteenth
century and then assisted in the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway in the
1880s.259 Chinese tea culture was already deeply embedded within this population from
China. The traditional favourite of Chinese immigrants was green or oolong tea rather
than black tea, although its purchase in British Columbia still stocked imperial coffers
through the taxes on the traders who imported these items to Western Canada.
Tea was first imported for commercial sale in the West Coast colonies in the
1840s through supply lines controlled by the Hudson's Bay Company. The Company
initially acquired tea exclusively from the East India Company and British traders at
terms favourable to the British government, but American merchants also smuggled tea
directly into western Canada. The economy of the new province of British Columbia
continued to expand throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, and by 1885
the province was importing $4,023,452 worth of goods annually and was the fifth highest
259
Artibise, "British Columbia," The Canadian Encyclopedia.
89
importing province in Canada, after Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia, and New
Brunswick.260 The provincial capital, which had been established as Fort Victoria in
1843, was the center of culture and commerce from 1860 until 1890, when Vancouver
became the western terminal of the Canadian Pacific Railway and increasingly
overshadowed Victoria in terms of population growth and commercial connections.261
The city of Victoria developed a particularly robust tea culture which celebrated
British imperial influences and tea-drinking as a major social custom and daily routine.
Significantly, society in Victoria developed parallel to that in Victorian England; it was
thus a hierarchal society where tea-times were regularly observed by the middle- and
upper-classes, and tea was strongly linked with propriety and respectability.262
Many
prominent Victorian families participated in tea-drinking both privately and publicly. The
family of Dr. John S. Helmcken, who was appointed main surgeon to the Hudson's Bay
Company in the province after his arrival in Victoria in 1850, frequently consumed tea
sweetened with sugar within the home and had a wide array of porcelain china and
teaware. The Helmcken family's house was the site of numerous garden and tea parties in
which many local Victorians participated.263
Britons who visited the colonies of Vancouver Island and Victoria to explore the
landscape became acquainted with Hudson's Bay Company employees and other families
inhabiting the area as well as their tea parties. The English travel writer, Richard Mayne,
wrote of his visit to Fort Victoria in the late 1850s. He described how "in fine weather,
riding-parties of the gentlemen and ladies of the place were formed, and we returned
260
Canada Year Book, 1885, 127.
261
Norrie and Owram, A History, 232.
262
Forrest, Tea For the British, 186.
263
Patt, World Tea Party, 58-59.
90
generally to a high tea, or tea-dinner, at Mr. Douglas's or Mr. Works's [sic], winding up
the pleasant evening with dance and song."264 By this time tea was consumed consistently
and at repeated intervals throughout the day among many settlers living in the colonies of
Vancouver Island and British Columbia. In his accounts, Mayne frequently mentioned his
participation in tea-drinking with different hosts, usually during lunch, at supper, and
before bed. Its significance as a social medium through which subjects of the British
Empire and later the Commonwealth could interact was recognizably linked to British
culture.265 Because tea was a prized component of British culture in the imperial age, its
use by Victorians in the provincial capital in the second half of the nineteenth century
both approved of and validated that imperial power within British Columbian society.
Opportunity for private investment in Canada led a number of British immigrants
in Victoria to engage in entrepreneurial activities and establish businesses in the
nineteenth century. One such immigrant from Wales, David Spencer, founded a small
grocery store / library in the city in 1864 and, following its success, opened two
additional stores in 1873 and 1882. In addition to basic foodstuffs, Spencer sold different
types of Chinese black tea to the local population. Although Spencer is one of the first
known merchants to sell tea in Victoria, many other small businesses established in the
1860s and 1870s also sold the highly desired item to the city's inhabitants, many of whom
considered it a dietary staple and intrinsic part of Victorian social and cultural events and
relations.266
264
Richard C. Mayne, Four Years in British Columbia and Vancouver Island: An Account of their Forests,
Rivers, Coasts, Gold Fields, and Resources for Colonisation (London, UK: John Murray, 1862), 31.
265
Mayne, Four Years in British Columbia, 62, 257, 413.
266
Patt, World Tea Party, 56-58.
91
Local political figures frequently utilized tea to signify their own wealth and
cement their social standing and authority as bastions of British imperial culture and
authority within the provincial center. Peter O'Reilly, a local politician who was married
to the daughter of British Columbia's first Lieutenant Governor, Joseph Trutch,
frequently hosted garden and tea parties at his Point Ellice House on the city's famed
Gorge waterway. At these parties, tea and sugar in finely-crafted Chinese porcelain
teacups and saucers were served as in the British fashion.267 Both sexes were welcome to
these parties, allowing women and men to mingle and socialize in a setting which
mirrored London's social parties.268
Private tea parties were hosted in the houses of local magnates throughout the
second half of the nineteenth century including that of coal baron Robert Dunsmuir and
Premier Richard McBride. At these parties tea was often served with baked goods such as
crumpets and scones to complement the beverage according to the taste and fashion
established in London. In addition, many local businesses served tea in restaurants,
bakeries, and hotels, the numbers of which rose rapidly in the early twentieth century as
the population grew.269
Among the middle and upper classes, five o'clock tea-time was an established
ritual in Victoria by the 1860s. Tea in Victoria, as in Britain, allowed female hosts within
the home to offer a stimulating and still "exotic" beverage infusion to their guests, which
was almost universally liked and was in high fashion amongst local society's most
267
Judith Patt, World Tea Party, Victoria (Victoria: Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, 2004), 57.
268
Macfarlane and Macfarlane, Green Gold, 83-86.
269
Patt, World Tea Party, 59, 60.
92
esteemed figures.
270
This served to promote tea through a hierarchal social framework in
which tea consumption exhibited the wealth and respectability of a family or household
within their community. Certainly, tea became a symbol that not only reflected familial
respectability and position within local society but also represented an authoritative
kinship link to Great Britain.
Queen Victoria's birthday, May 24th, was used to demarcate the start of the social
season among the middle and upper-class in Victoria and from 1867 was celebrated with
an annual regatta and later carnival. Such events were frequented by thousands and teadrinking was, again, a primary feature. During the festivities, different houses along the
Gorge waterway, where the event was held, would host public tea parties, charging a
small sum for admittance to account for the cost of the Chinese tea which was served.271
These events not only celebrated British cultural influence in Victoria and Canada, but
also allowed the local society to interact in a setting which was founded and modeled
upon the imperial culture of the British Empire.
The celebration of British imperialism and tea culture in Canada existed in stark
contrast to the rejection of British influence in the American colonies during the
Revolution and points to the varied impacts of British imperialism in the North American
colonies. This divergence, which did not go unnoticed by the American population,
became especially evident during the era of Canadian Confederation in which Britain
supported the process toward Canadian independence. One New York Times journalist
complained that Canadians had an "indifference to their political destinies which cannot
but shock us," and reprimanded Canadians for not demanding their own independence
270
Patt, World Tea Party, 57.
271
Patt, World Tea Party, 59.
93
and instead allowing England to decide the manner and terms proceeding towards
Confederation.272
Into the twentieth century, a wide array of British Columbian newspapers used a
number of ways to represent Chinese and Indian tea and the correlation between such as
product and imperial loyalty and legitimacy. Tea was even tied to imperialism in terms of
wartime rhetoric and propaganda. In a letter to the British Columbian newspaper
Greenwood Weekly Times in 1900, a commenter called on the "Ladies of Canada" to
support the Boer War (1899-1902) through the consumption of British teas, stating that:
The world has never seen such an exhibition of patriotic sentiment as the African
War called forth. Canadians, Australians, and the splendid youth of Natal fought
side by side with British tea planters of Ceylon and India. Australia drinks the teas
of Ceylon and India, while Canada already drinks their black tea. Drinkers of
Japan tea should try their green teas. Up-to-date tea merchants (the Salada
company, for instance) now sell them entirely on merit. 'Middle-of-the-road men'
are only waiting for supplies. While 'sit-on-the-fence men' are waiting to see how
the cat will jump. Ladies of Canada, we pray you aid the British planter.273
This commentary demonstrates how conceptions of tea were caught up not only in
ideals of imperial duty and expansion but also with militaristic anxieties surrounding the
quest for empire building. Canada and Australia are portrayed as being dutiful members
of the British Empire, as Australia drinks "the teas of Ceylon and India, while Canada
already drinks their black teas." It also references "up-to-date tea merchants" such as "the
Salada company, for instance," thus implying that commendable British tea merchants
should by now be promoting and selling Indian- and Ceylon- produced British teas rather
than Chinese teas, which were not cultivated by British producers. Those who supported
272
"Canadian Confederation: The People Mercenary and Apathetic," The New York Times, September 29,
1865.
273
"Let Deeds Ratify Sentiment," Greenwood Weekly Times, November 14, 1900, A9.
94
Indian and Ceylon teas, the article hints, were actively supporting the Empire, a position
to which all decent citizens within the imperial fold should strive to adopt.
Thus, the Canadian case typically demonstrated how Asian tea was utilized as a
symbolic link between British colonists and their homeland. In particular, the
consumption of black tea from British India and Ceylon became an effort to promote the
imperialist interests in both Asia and North America.
The Prevalence of British Indian and Ceylon Tea in
Canadian and Global Markets
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the increasing popularity of
Indian and Ceylonese teas in Canada and the world market resulted largely from media
promotion. In particular, a growing discourse in newspapers, journals, and other mediums
of popular culture within the British Empire stressed the association between tea and
notions of imperial might and authority.
The correlation between tea and the Empire was further accentuated after the firm
establishment of the Indian tea industry and beginning of mass exports in the 1880s,
which was a vital component of India's status as the British Empire's brightest jewel. As
these processes were taking place, ideals of empire were increasingly associated with
strength, progress, and material wealth among its subjects. 274 These views were
propagated in the colonies, especially Canada, through advertisements for imperial
goods, including Indian and Ceylonese tea beginning in the 1870s, and in contemporary
274
Bonnie G. Smith, Imperialism: A History in Documents (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 33.
95
news publications and journals.
275
In this way, journalists and writers of the new global
culture helped to construct public conceptions and guide ideological views of empire and
the social, cultural, and political expectations surrounding tea in the nineteenth and early
twentieth century.
As the Indian and Ceylonese tea industries expanded in the second half of the
nineteenth century, significant quantities began to be imported, first into Great Britain
beginning in the 1870s, and then throughout the British Empire from the 1880s. By 1890,
the market for Chinese and Japanese teas had cooled in Canada and throughout the
British Empire, and a shift toward Indian and Ceylonese teas had begun to take place.276
In 1864, China had produced and exported over 95 percent of the world's tea supply,
while India provided only three per cent.277 Over the next thirty years, this balance
changed rapidly. By 1888 Chinese tea had been outstripped in the global economy by
Indian tea, which by then accounted for 57 per cent of the British market.278 Between
1882 and 1897, consumption of Indian and Ceylonese teas in the United Kingdom rose
from 40 million lbs to 210 million lbs. In contrast, Chinese exports of tea decreased from
282 million pounds in 1884-6 to 202 million pounds in 1898-1900, falling 28 per cent.
Ceylonese exports of tea increased from 2 million pounds in 1884 to 150 million pounds
in 1900.279
275
Daniel R. Headrick, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth
Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 11.
276
"China Teas Disappearing," The Washington Post, November 13, 1892, 9.
277
"Where Our Tea Comes From," The Washington Post, October 31, 1890, 4.
278
Jayeeta Sharma, "British Science, Chinese Skill and Assam Tea: Making Empire's Garden," Indian
Economic Social History Review 43 (2006): 430.
279
"The World's Teapots.; What the Various Nations Put Into Them and Take Out of Them," New York
Times, June 1, 1902, 17.
96
Annual consumption of Chinese tea in Britain fell from approximately 90 million
lbs in 1887 to 52 million lbs five years later, while the importation of India and Ceylon
tea, which reached 10 million lbs in 1887, skyrocketed. By 1892 Britain was importing
75 per cent of its tea from India and Ceylon, with 50 million lbs coming from Ceylon and
100 million lbs from India.280 By 1905, Chinese tea consumption in Britain was almost
negligible.281
In contemporary North American media, Ceylonese and Indian teas were touted
as "pure" teas which were cleaner than Chinese or Japanese "tainted hand-twisted teas."
British advertisers marketed the "machine-made" teas that were produced on industrial
tea plantations in British India and Ceylon, stressed their superior to the less
technological, hand-made teas of China and Japan.282 Because of their supposed better
quality, claimed British advertisers, Indian teas were worth higher prices than Chinese
teas.
283
One contemporary American journalist noted that "Indian teas have always
[been] sold at higher prices than Chinese," and that "advocates of the Indian produce say
that many discard Chinese for our Eastern teas [the Indian variety], but never the other
way around." At the same time, he wrote, the quality of the hand-made Chinese teas was
actually higher, and he claimed that British advertisers had fooled local populations,
especially those in the British Empire where tea consumption was highest, that Indian
teas were better in flavour than Chinese. The author stated that Chinese teas were actually
superior, but “the public have, little by little, been educated to appreciate the Indian
280
"About Tea," The Victoria Daily Colonist, January 27, 1892, 4.
281
"Ceylon and India Teas.; Their Popularity in Australia and Great Britain," New York Times, April 1, 1897.
282
"Ceylon and India Teas," New York Times, April 1, 1897.
283
"The Tea Trade: America Wants Pure Teas - Are Ceylon and India Teas Supplanting Chinese and
Japanese?" The New York Times, July 12, 1897, 6.
97
flavor."
284
Here the author is stressing the importance of British marketing in helping
imperial Indian teas appeal to a mass market, the most important of which beyond Britain
turned out to be its colonies and Dominions, such as Canada.
Canadian media at that time often carried commentaries on the popularity and
superiority of the British-grown Indian and Ceylon teas. In 1892, one British Columbian
journalist reminisced that "there was a time when the words 'China' and 'tea' seemed to be
naturally and inseparably connected... but those days are gone," while India's progress "as
a tea-producing country has been very rapid." The article went on to speculate that Indian
tea had "recommended itself to the taste of the mass of the British people" because it "is
stronger than that of China tea and, consequently, it is considered more economic to use."
This article represents a clear use of journalistic power in guiding public opinion about
Indian tea, and its alleged preferable flavour and quality.285 Advertisers in Canadian
media often used the same scheme to market Indian and Ceylonese tea, boasting that
"there is a deal of difference between a 'good tea' and a tea that is the 'best for the
money.'"286
As a result of such media promotion, Indian tea prices rose as its popularity
accelerated, and one contemporary British Columbian publication remarked that in
Canada "pekoe Souchongs... are in very strong demand."287 Thus, Canadian advertisers,
via British-affiliated companies, often influenced public opinion in the Dominion by
284
"Indian Tea and Chinese," New York Times, April 24, 1882, 1.
285
"About Tea," The Victoria Daily Colonist, January 27, 1892, 4.
286
"There is a deal of difference," The British Colonist, June 1, 1899, 3.
287
"Commercial Paragraphs," The British Colonist, July 5, 1890, 6.
98
promoting the 'superior' quality and benefits of India and Ceylon teas, as was done in
publications in Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa.288
By the late-1880s, Canadian newspapers began to consistently publish
advertisements for Indian-grown teas. The Toronto Star and the Globe both began to
publish advertisements for "Ceylon and Assam teas" beginning in the early 1890s. 289 The
British Colonist, a major newspaper published in the provincial capital of Victoria, began
to print advertisements for the product regularly beginning in the late 1890s.
Advertisements published at the turn of the century boasted of how "the demand for
[Indian tea] now is such that [storekeepers] gladly make room for it and recommend it to
customers."290 “Star of India,” a brand of black tea, was advertised frequently in the
British Colonist for various health benefits including relief of "that tired feeling."291
In Canada, especially from the mid-nineteenth century, a major and often
unacknowledged benefit of purchasing tea from British rather than American traders was
that acquisition of adulterated teas was less likely when the tea was from India or Ceylon
or was shipped by British middlemen. One article in an American newspaper claimed that
"10,000 packages" of adulterated tea had been imported into Canada and were now
"flooding" the country, lowering trust for American sellers. "It looks," the reviewer
wrote, "as if Canada were to be made the dumping ground for all teas that are unfit for
Americans to drink."292 Another journalist concurred, writing that Indian teas were
288
See Sydney Herald (est. 1831), Lake Wakatip Mail (est. 1863), Mt Benger Mail (1881-1920), and Cape
Town Gazette (est. 1800).
289
"Display Ad 91 - No Title," The Globe, January 13, 1900, 27; "Edition Front Page," The Star, January 6,
1894, 1; "News," The Star, February 16, 1895, 4; "Display Ad 10," The Globe, March 22, 1900, 6.
290
"There is a deal of difference," The British Colonist, June 1, 1899, 3.
291
"Star of India Tea," The British Colonist, July 7, 1899, 6.
292
"Canada Flooded with Poor Tea," New York Times, June 6, 1897, 2.
99
"known to be pure and unadulterated, and so much cannot always be said for the Chinese.
Some teas are yearly officially condemned, but we believe this has never once occurred
in the case of Indian teas."293
Such media promotion of the tea from British India and Ceylon eventually led to
its prevalence over Chinese tea in Canada, the British Empire and the global markets.
Between 1884 and 1900, Tea import into Britain rose from 173 million pounds to 250
million pounds, and the per capita consumption of tea in the United Kingdom by 1900
was over six pounds, calculated on the total population of men, women, and children.294
These figures seem to have reflected the same pattern of team consumption in England
from the mid-seventeenth century and its increasing tea importation of Asia tea
thereafter. But the new trend in the tea consumption and importation in Britain is that the
Asian commodity came mainly from British India and Ceylon rather than from China,
and it directly promoted the British imperialist interests in the two South Asian countries.
Ironically, Canada and other Britain’s colonies or dominions contributed more to
the British imperialist cause in South Asia than the homeland itself. As early as 1886 one
journalist wrote that "the popular idea that the people of Great Britain consume more tea
on an average per head of the population than any other country in the world is now
shown to be erroneous." In fact, per capita consumption in the colonies was highest
among Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Newfoundland; the first two of which were
substantially higher than the United Kingdom.295 This judgment was made solely in
regard to European countries and their colonies, and ignored consumption rates in Asia
293
"Indian Tea and Chinese," New York Times, April 24, 1882, 1.
294
"The World's Teapots," New York Times, June 1, 1902, 17.
295
"The World's Tea Drinkers," New York Times, May 16, 1886.
100
and particularly China. But it was no doubt that these colonies consumed increasing large
amount of tea from the British India and Ceylon.
In the early 1900s, one American newspaper article again noted that "...it is
remarkable that British colonists on the other side of the globe beat the mother country in
tea drinking." In terms of annual tea consumption in these colonies, "Australia averages
7.81 pounds per head (Western Australia rising as high as 10 pounds) and New Zealand
6.78, while Canada [consumes] 4.64 pounds" per capita.296 In comparison, countries
unaffiliated with the British Empire consumed a fraction of those figures: The order of
consumption rates had Holland consuming 1.48 lbs of tea per capita, the United States
1.48 lbs, and Russia 0.93 lbs.
It is necessary to stress that both the British Empire, including Canada and other
countries beyond the Empire consumed more and more tea from British India and Ceylon
rather than China and other Asian countries. In other words, up to the early twentieth
century, tea trade and consumption in both the British Empire and the whole world
mainly reflected and reinforced the British imperialist tea enterprises in South Asia.
296
"The World's Teapots," New York Times, June 1, 1902, 17.
101
Conclusion
This study has sought to provide a transnational analysis of imperialism and
globalization through a case study of the interactions between British imperialism and tea
culture, including tea production and trade in Asia and tea consumption in Europe and
North America between 1650 and 1950. In particular, it demonstrates that British
imperialism exerted complicated influences on the globalization of tea culture in both
Asia and North America between the mid-seventeenth and mid-twentieth century.
Previous historiography has long condemned the negative impacts of British
imperialism on the history of Asian countries. This study confirms this line of scholarship
by showing how demand for Asian tea from Britain and its colonies led to the notorious
Opium Wars with China and British efforts to control the Indian economy ranging from
cotton and opium production to tea plantation in India. In the case of the globalization of
Asian tea, however, British imperialism was also a positive force for change in these
Asian countries, through for example the stimulation of black tea production and trade in
China as well as tea plantation in India through its spread of tea consumption in North
America. It even led India to replace China as the largest exporter of Asian tea in the
global market by the early twentieth century.
Moreover, the deliberate export of Asian tea to North America also led to
significant changes in the social and cultural fabric of the colonial and postcolonial
societies there. Although the British imperialist policy of levying a heavy tea tax led to
the American Revolution, the policy later shifted to a more reciprocal economic
relationship and promoted economic exchange between Britain and its colonies, such as
102
with Canada. In both Canada and the United States, British tea culture became entrenched
in the daily life of both the elite and popular classes up to the early twentieth century.
Thanks partly to the British imperialist policy toward Asian tea, the number of tea
drinkers throughout the world also increased exponentially, to the point where tea
drinking became a global phenomenon and is now one of the most popular beverages
consumed worldwide.
103
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Appendix
American Revolution............. 2, 7, 8, 22, 26, 30, 47, 52, 54, 61, 62
Australia................................. 4, 22, 39, 40, 42, 45, 46, 72, 77, 93, 99
Black tea................................. 4, 6, 9, 12, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 21, 23, 35, 36, 39, 46, 54,
63, 65, 67, 69, 70, 71, 84, 85, 88, 90, 93
Bohea.................................... 16, 35, 70
Boston Tea Party................... 59-61
Coffee houses........................ 13, 14, 53
Cotton..................................... 3, 5, 24-26, 30, 48, 63, 82, 101
Dutch East India Company.... 33
British East India Company............... 4, 5, 13-14, 19, 20-21, 22, 24, 25-34, 37, 44, 47,
55, 56, 58, 62, 78-79, 88
French Revolution.................. 7, 25, 65
Fujian...................................... 3, 4, 85
Green tea................................. 15, 16, 18, 23, 35, 39, 65, 66, 69, 70, 71, 72, 120
Java......................................... 13
Opium..................................... 1, 3-5, 20, 25, 28-31, 101
Opium Wars............................ 1, 3, 5, 20, 29, 31, 101
Netherlands............................. 77
New Zealand........................... 39, 40, 46, 98-100
Porcelain................................. 16, 24, 51, 54, 89, 91
Silk.......................................... 3, 9, 20, 24, 30, 63, 80
Silver....................................... 26-28, 30
South Africa............................ 39, 40, 46, 98