1
The Market Empire in the Age of Victoria:
Selling South Asian Teas in India and North America
Erika Rappaport
Associate Professor, Department of History
University of California, Santa Barbara
Rappaport@history.ucsb.edu
NAVSA, Victoria, British Columbia
October 10-14th, 2007
Please do not cite or quote without permission of the author
[This is a draft chapter from my forthcoming book on the globalization of Indian tea. For those of you who
have the time and are interested, it might be helpful to read my chapter on adulteration and Chinese tea in
Frank Trentmann, ed. The Making of the Consumer: Knowledge, Power and Identity in the Modern World.
I will bring the chapter’s images with me to the conference. Thanks in advance for reading this long draft
and I look forward to seeing you all in Victoria~Erika]
In 1882 the directors of the Assam Company revealed to their shareholders that
the Indian tea trade was moving in a new direction. During the past year, the colony’s
planters had formed a syndicate “to open direct markets other than in England,”
specifically in the Colonies and America.1 It had been almost a half century since the
Assam Company had taken over the East India Company’s few struggling plantations.
Since the 1830s, dozens of others had conquered vast new lands for tea planting in both
Northern and Southern India, and more recently in Ceylon, but labor shortages, a lack of
knowledge, local resistance and the booms and busts of an unstable colonial economy
meant that it was only in the 1880s that India ousted China from the British teapot.2 Yet
almost as soon as the industry stabilized overproduction brought lower prices and profits.
Planters, importers, and retailers encouraged Britons to drink more of their “national
beverage.” They were not satisfied, however, with peddling their wares only in the
2
British Isles. In the 1880s the tea trade also embarked on a new kind of global marketing
campaign that had few parallels.3
The tea syndicate was one of several selling schemes that South Asia’s planters
launched during the fin-de-siècle. This chapter examines primarily those inspired and
directed by Ceylon’s planters and the Indian Tea Association, an organization of tea
producers that in one form or another advertised Indian teas on nearly every continent
throughout the late 19th and 20th centuries.4 Their efforts often failed. Nevertheless,
these early campaigns allow us to see how imperial rivalries and ideologies contributed to
the formation of a transnational business community. Late-Victorian colonial planters,
politicians and journalists conceived of the world as essentially a single, albeit
segmented, market and thought of consumers not as individuals but as national
aggregates. The tea trade fashioned consumers and markets in countless business
meetings, letters, reports, trade journals and the colonial press. Though tea was
understood as a “private” commodity, South Asia’s planters first approached retailers and
consumers in public, at exhibitions and lectures, in grocers and tea shops, and at bazaars
and festivals.5
In the last decades of the 19th century, then, colonial governments and business
communities reached beyond the European Metropole and within “native” societies to
create global markets, consumers and business communities. Multi-national
corporations were also becoming crucial players in the creation of the global economy in
these years, but this chapter emphasizes a slightly different arrangement. It highlights
alliances formed between planters, colonial governments, business elites, local retailers,
and a budding group of publicity experts. These authorities were often journalists or
3
retired planters, who had earned their expertise managing tea gardens or writing about
colonial economics. They traveled the world and set up offices from which they initiated
intense campaigns to teach people to enjoy this British-grown good.
Globalization did not entirely absorb the local into a single homogenous world
culture.6 Yet it was the late-Victorians who first began to imagine this process in a
positive light and to act upon a vision of all people as potential consumers and all places
as latent markets. Boasting the benefits of South Asia’s teas, businessmen developed a
missionary-like belief that despite the world’s diversity it had the potential to like and
want the same things.7 This was not a democratizing or equalizing notion for as planters
became salesman they conceived of the creation of markets as akin to the process of
colonization. They explored unknown territories, sought to gain local knowledge, and to
civilize or improve the natives. Especially when discussing colonial consumers, planters
impregnated the rhetoric and methods of conquest into the sphere of market research and
advertising.8 These planters also used consumption to justify imperialism. For example,
they often countered charges that they were indulging in horrific labor practices by
suggesting that India’s impoverished populace would be saved by drinking tea.9 Empire
thus structured the methodologies of colonial business culture and by the twenties and
thirties many agencies argued that consumerism was a new kind of imperial citizenship.10
Empire and race sold commodities to British consumers.11 Such images were, I argue,
one aspect of a broader process in which competition between and within empires shaped
an emergent global consumer culture.12
The imperialistic aspects of globalization have been most often associated with
the United States in the era after World War II. In her recent book on the
4
Americanization of Europe, Victoria de Grazia argued that though America’s world
hegemony increased dramatically after the war, the essential features of it’s “Market
Empire” were built in early 20th century Europe. This empire was made up of a diverse
set of ideas, individuals, and institutions such as the Rotary Club, cinema, chain and
department stores. It was political and pleasurable, part of the everyday and the
spectacular. The businessmen and statesmen who created this empire believed that the
consumption of goods and services benefited producers and consumers. They responded
to local knowledge and cultures, but essentially assumed that “other nations” had only
limited sovereignty over their public space.”13 As de Grazia implied, American
consumer culture was not entirely the product of Americans. Here I want to illuminate
the British imperial contribution to both America’s consumer culture and to its expansive
qualities. Beginning in the 1880s a British Market Empire developed in concert and
competition with this American version. It reached out in many directions but was
especially directed at conquering, or one might say, constituting, North American and
South Asian consumers.14
London was one core of the British market empire, but so too were Calcutta,
Columbo and St. Louis, Missouri. Following South Asia’s tea thus reinforces Thomas
Metcalf and Sugata Bose’s recent argument that South Asia was a cultural, economic and
political center which united the Indian Ocean arena in the late 19th and early 20th
centuries.15 Yet thinking in terms of core and peripheries does not go far enough to help
us understand the ways in which the business and cultures of tea traveled within and
beyond the formal boundaries of nations and empires. It is better to think of this market
empire as a series of different networks or global flows. Cotton, sugar, cocoa, coffee,
5
porcelains, fashions and books traveled along avenues, which at times merged but also
could also go their own ways. Following particular commodities thus reveals the varied
paths that created mass consumption and production, and the parameters of distinctive
though interconnected empires.16 Frederick Cooper recently commented that historians
need to disentangle the differences between “long-distance” and “global,” recognize the
limits to a global framework, and avoid characterizing globalization as a unitary or
inevitable process.17 Nevertheless, I argue here that by focusing on the commercial
culture of a single commodity we can better see the Victorian contribution to today’s
global world and thereby “decenter” this Empire.18 We can distill what areas of the
world the Victorians emphasized and ignored and how they privileged certain consumers
while denigrating others.
Colonial commodities were among the most pervasive and everyday expressions
of the imperial project in Britain. As Piya Chatterjee put it in her ethnography of female
plantation labor in India, tea drinking illuminated the connectedness between Britain and
its colonial project in which the “desire to taste otherness” fueled colonial expansion.
“[T]eatime in the parlor and garden,” she argues, “became the living metaphors of empire
and the nation making it enabled.”19 The commonplace nature of such commodities
made them comprehensible metaphors of the complex political, economic and cultural
forces that define imperialism. In a wholesale rejection of this view, Bernard Porter
asserted that consumers are usually “ignorant of the sources of their foodstuffs” even
when their colonial origin is clearly printed on the label.20 This debate is not just about
empire for it also carries with it unexplored and long-standing attitudes about the
significance of commodities and consumption. What both positions have yet to
6
acknowledge is that in the nineteenth century industrialization and globalization
disconnected production and consumption and created consumers’ and retailers’
ignorance about objects. Scholars need to explore this process and the ways in which
consumers and others responded to their literal and figurative distance from the means of
production.21 Moreover, the debate on the significance of imperial commodities would
be enriched by considering this question within a broader global political economy and
culture. Imperial consumer culture was often produced and sold in seemingly unlikely
places such as a grocer’s shop in Topeka, Kansas.
“All the world is intent on supplying all the rest with tea.”
The mid-Victorians were especially excited by tea, not only as a drink but also as
a crop and an investment. During this period, growers dreamed of a good with almost
limitless possibilities. They assumed that a taste for the beverage was essentially natural,
easy to cultivate and increase. Certainly in the 1860s, the market was yet to be sated.
Journals such as The Grocer frequently argued that the British could take more tea, but so
too could “America, The Continent of Europe, and our Colonies.”22 Supply had not yet
satisfied demand so that even in 1881 when Samuel Baildon published his well known
tract on the “The Origin and Future Prospects of Tea in India,” he could confidently write
that “There is land in India sufficient not only to supply the requirements of the United
Kingdom, but the wants of the world.”23 Of course, tastes were not natural and tea
cultivation was actually quite difficult, but such exuberance was endemic in the mid-
7
Victorian tea trade, despite the fact that tea mania had led to a crash in India in the early
1860s.
Growers and investors in warm climates across the globe enthusiastically and
perhaps foolishly planted tea in Southern Africa, South America, the Caucuses, Azores,
Fiji and even Coastal California.24 As early as 1866, when writing about Brazilian tea,
the Grocer quipped: “All the world is intent on supplying all the rest with tea.”25
Enterprising cultivators toiled for decades to turn Brazil into a tea-growing nation, while
others were certain that North America would soon become a producer.26 The Maharajah
of Jahore established plantations in the Malay Peninsula. Articles in popular journals
such as the Standard posited that tea would soon flourish in the “hilly countries on the
shores of the Mediterranean.”27 In 1864, The Grocer reported that in San Francisco,
“nurseries near the Mission Dolores had succeeded in raising several thousands of the tea
plant during the last twelve months.” “There can be little doubt,” the journal suggested,
“that before long it [tea] will be cultivated hereafter for household purposes at least on
every farm in the State.”28 In 1871, the Grocer also mentioned that Japanese tea had
been transplanted to Calistoga in the heart of the Napa Valley; and, in 1872 the wealthy
and innovative landowner Col. W.W. Hollister introduced 50,000 plants at his ranch in
Santa Barbara.29 Of course, today California is hardly known for its tea. However,
English grocers, Indian planters, and American businessmen assumed that because the
state had a ready-supply of “Celestials” to work in the plantations it would soon be
covered with tea gardens.30
Politicians and local elites often initiated these agricultural experiments. The
United States’ government, for example, had supported tea’s cultivation and consumption
8
since at least 1832, when it had removed all duties on the commodity. Though they
would later return with the Civil War, when debating the issue, Members of Congress
apparently were swayed by the argument that tea contributed to “temperance and to the
social comforts of the people.”31 In the 1870s, the American Department of Agriculture
was interested in establishing a tea culture in the South and the West so it distributed
numerous plants to farmers in South Carolina, Georgia and California.32 The New York
correspondent for the Colonial Empire and Star of India anticipated that quite soon
“hundreds of thousands of plants will be growing in this country,” especially since the
introduction of tea cultivation into America was one of the “pet hobbies” of General Le
Duc, the Commissioner of Agriculture.33 A Mr. Jackson, a “Scotch gentlemen now
settled in America” and former manager for the Scottish Assam Company,” had evidently
convinced Le Duc that he should encourage a U.S. tea culture.34 Thus, North America’s
tea industry was partly a cosmopolitan enterprise. Labor costs were of course expensive
in the U.S. but experts imagined that American ingenuity might solve this problem and
hypothesized that “inventive” Americans might “by the use of machinery” make the
industry pay.35
Though they hardly expected to sell “American tea” to British consumers,
American politicians and planters had faith in the domestic market. Per capita tea
consumption of tea in the U.S. was quite small compared to Britain but it had grown
dramatically at mid-century.36 The tea trade argued that Americans were natural
consumers whose tastes had simply veered off course since the Revolution. Both planters
and politicians obsessively wanted to recapture this “lost” market. They surmised that
flavor not price or politics was the real problem, supposing that Americans drank an
9
unsavory brew of cheap tea steeped too long in “unsuitable water.”37 The industry
argued that if the market were not flooded with low quality adulterated teas and if they
could teach Americans how to properly brew the beverage consumption would rise. The
American Revolution may have turned the nation into coffee drinkers, but most
businessmen argued that tea’s association with tyranny was no longer relevant. In fact,
the Revolution was more a source of humor than concern. The New York publication,
The Merchant’s Magazine and Commercial Review, for example, merely joked about the
“tea party…held by His majesty in Boston Harbor…which resulted in the use of
gunpowder exclusively for a season.”38 Of course, a U.S. tea industry never materialized
but British Victorians could not yet be certain of its failure. They certainly agreed with
American tea experts that tea consumption if not tea plants could and should be cultivated
in the United States.
India’s planters actually had the most to fear from Ceylon’s amazing new tea
culture. After the island became part of the Empire in 1815, it became a coffee-growing
colony until disease all but destroyed the industry in the late 1860s and 70s. Some
planters were utterly ruined, but others prospered when they turned to tea. Ceylon first
exported small amounts in the seventies, but by the early nineties its tea excited a great
deal of attention. The amount of tea shipped to London in 1884 was twenty times that
sent in 1880 and new gardens kept opening.39 When tea expert Edward Money published
a fourth edition of his best-selling textbook in 1883 he felt compelled to add a new
chapter on the need to create foreign markets. He was indeed astonished by the recent
and very rapid globalization and industrialization of tea production and was especially
impressed with Ceylon. Though its teas had only just appeared in London, he regarded
10
Ceylon as already a “formidable competitor.” Money foretold inevitable recession and
bitterly asserted “there is too much tea already.”40
Similar anxieties were expressed in many trade publications around this time. In
the “Battle of the Teas!,” an article published in an 1894 issue of The Tea Trader, the
author worried about the growing competition between the two British industries in India
and Ceylon. He was fascinated by how “British enterprise” in India and Ceylon had
defeated Chinese “endurance” and ousted its tea from the British market. However, he
warned that the struggle has now entered “a new phase.” No longer was the competition
for markets a battle between East and West. It is now, the writer exclaimed, a fight
between “the British producers themselves.” Using a Darwinian framework which
seemed to threaten extinction and necessitate expansion, this journalist warned that it was
“no longer in the British market, but in the market of the world, that the struggle must be
fought out.”41 The key question, however, was whether or not Ceylon and India would
cooperate and promote the global expansion of “British” tea “on a great scale outside of
the British Empire?”42
Importers, retailers and consumers often blended India’s and Ceylon’s teas and
thought of them as possessing only subtle flavor distinctions. Ceylon’s industry started
with the same plants grown in Assam and manufactured them in much the same way as
those in India. However, Ceylon established a unique national brand known for its high
quality and superiority to that produced in either East Asia or India.43 At an official level
these colonies only rarely formed a unified front until institutions such as the Empire
Marketing Board and the International Tea Market Expansion board promoted the idea of
“Empire teas” in the 1920s and 30s. Indeed, it was the smaller and newer industry in
11
Ceylon that inspired India to publicize its teas around the globe. In a letter to the editor
of the Ceylon Observer in 1886, a correspondent captured the tenacious nature of this
late-Victorian imperial industry and attributed it to the planter’s “British” heritage. He
believed that the combined efforts of “Scotch dourness” and “English pluck” had made
Ceylon so determined “not to be beat by anybody or anything.”44
By the mid-eighties, the huge expansion of acreage and the industrialization of tea
manufacturing in South Asia and elsewhere brought prices and profits sharply
downward.45 The leading expert on the history of India’s tea industry, Sir Percival
Griffiths, described the period between 1875 and 1899 as one of “altering prosperity and
depression,” in which profits often failed to meet expectations. As in most agricultural
industries, good prices led to expanded acreage and encouraged practices, such as course
plucking that eventually reduced quality and prices. Planters sought new customers by
branding their teas with unique qualities and characterizing them as national resources.46
Imperial Rivalries and the Making of Foreign Markets in the Fin-de-Siècle
In 1879 the Home and Colonial Mail urged tea planters who wanted better prices
to no longer consider “London alone as their only market.”47 Many in the 1880s argued
that it was simply “imperative for new markets to be found for the sale of Indian tea.”48
Ceylon’s agricultural community was of the same opinion. The Ceylon Observer, a
newspaper with close ties to planting interests, urged the island’s business community to
seek “fresh fields as outlets for our produce.”49 As we have seen, planters had figured out
how to grow and manufacture an abundant supply of tea.50 They now realized that they
12
had to learn how to produce tea drinkers. During the next several decades, private
individuals, tea companies, the colonial and trade press and producer organizations
scoured the world for tea drinkers, energetically gathering knowledge about consumers
and developing schemes for creating new needs and wants. Recognizing that tastes
varied nationally and regionally, experts nonetheless felt that similar techniques could
create new markets, whether they were in Calcutta, Chicago or Liverpool. Scholars have
emphasized that pre-existing ideas and local economies and cultures often determine
whether a commodity “sells” and condition its use and its associations. However, most
growers, retailers and politicians were not so sophisticated. In an era when marketing
was in its infancy, approaches were strikingly similar.
A commercialized public sphere of committees, newspapers, lectures, exhibitions,
and shops emerged along with a new beverage. These arenas introduced people to a new
drink while also providing producers with knowledge about potential consumers and
markets. Initially, politicians and planters formed syndicates supported by voluntary and
government funds to coordinate publicity. In the 1890s and 1900s voluntarism gave way
to professionalism as both Ceylon and India’s governments levied taxes and created a
new bureaucracy to create new “foreign” markets. These bodies worked with large
private companies and local retailers, often circumventing already established supply
networks. They also hired “experts” to give lectures on tea’s history, its health benefits
and proper methods of making and enjoying the beverage and to display their colony’s
produce at countless international and local exhibitions. Producers believed that to make
people into tea drinkers they first had to see and think about the beverage and then taste
it. Men and women in Africa, Europe, North America and India thus first sipped South
13
Asian teas at exhibitions, tea shops and at public demonstrations. Though the beverage is
often considered one which is consumed in private, most people first encountered this
commodity in public.
Planters in virtually every growing region, in Ceylon, India, Java, Formosa, Japan
and China, organized themselves into trade associations during the turn-of-the century.51
Such corporate bodies were a central feature of late-Victorian and twentieth century
business. In colonial industries, however, they united merchants and politicians in
Europe and the colonies and became the backbone of a new kind of global economy.
They wielded a strong hand in politics, became involved in questions of labor recruitment
and conditions, funded scientific research, and most importantly for this study, they
organized and supported global advertising campaigns and related promotional work.
These trade associations often joined hands with chambers of commerce and similar
groups to defend colonial business interests. Like the companies and Indian agency
houses, which they represented, these were British institutions that created a transnational
economy. At times they promoted the idea of empire, but at other moments they
advocated the products of a particular colony or nation as distinct from Britain and the
Empire.52 They thus produced both imperial and national identities as they assembled a
cosmopolitan business culture.
The Indian Tea Association, the foremost of these trade organizations, grew from
the merger of two late-Victorian groups that had formed to defend Indian tea from
competition and from government policies which at times seemed less than helpful.53
The ITA began as the Indian Tea Districts Association, launched in July of 1879 in the
Guildhall Tavern, Gresham Street in London. The businessmen who attended this
14
meeting were owners and managers of Northern Indian tea estates who desired to create a
“medium of intercommunication” for those interested in the “cultivation of tea in British
India.” They hoped unity would reduce costs, improve quality, and enable them to better
increase demand for tea. They wanted to “watch the course of legislation in India and
England in so far as it affects the tea industry” and to “promote a fuller and freer stream
of immigration” to help insure cheap and obedient labor.54 The group was not favored by
all in the tea trade.55 Nevertheless, it prospered and in 1894 the Indian Tea Districts
Association joined with the Calcutta-based Indian Tea Association, a group conceived at
a meeting of tea estate agency houses held at the Bengal Chamber of Commerce in May
of 1881. Like the Indian Tea Districts Association, the ITA defended and promoted
planters’ interests.56
The men who joined and ran these associations were often born in England or
Scotland and had come to India as employees of the East India Company, private
companies, or the military. Some served as colonial administrators and were involved in
other businesses besides tea planting. For example, the career of Sir Thomas Douglas
Forsyth, the first chairman of the Indian Tea Association in London, was typical of the
group’s early leaders. Forsyth was born in 1827 in Liverpool and served first as a writer
in the EIC. He then became assistant commissioner in the Punjab in 1849, commissioner
in Lahore and then Oudh, member of the Legislative Council and Order of Knight
Commander of the Star of India in 1874. Forsyth was also appointed special envoy to
Burma, and after his retirement he directed several Indian railway companies and helped
form the Indian Tea Association, for which he served as chairman from 1879 until
1886.57 Many of the ITA’s executives had careers that, like Forsyth, spanned the Empire.
15
For example, Lord Sydenham of Combe was born in Lincolnshire in 1848, had a long
military career before becoming governor of Victoria, Australia and then Bombay. In
addition to serving as president of the ITA after World War One, Sydenham was also
chairman of the British Empire League from 1915 to 1921, an organization dedicated to
advancing imperial business interests.
In India the Tea Association tentatively supported the new Tea Syndicate’s search
for “foreign” markets. The syndicate embarked on their quest at the Melbourne
Exhibition in 1880 because Australians and New Zealanders already enjoyed their tea,
drinking substantially more tea than Britons at that time.58 Their tastes needed to be
refashioned, however, for they were only used to that grown in the Celestial Empire.
According to a notable tea expert, convincing their “cousin” to change her tastes and “cut
out the barbarian,” was akin to courtship. Australia needed to be patiently wooed, for she
“is not to be snatched at discretion from the embrace of China; she is both coy and
diffident about changing her lover.”59 The colonists’ Britishness made them an important
potential market, but merchants did not assume that imperial membership necessarily
convinced Australians to drink British-grown tea. Instead of relying on patriotism, the
Tea Syndicate scared Australians into drinking South Asian tea. Just as retailers and
importers were doing in Britain, the Syndicate taught Australians that tea from China was
adulterated and therefore dangerous to their health. They emphasized the purity of Indian
teas, which under the watchful eye of a British manager and efficient machinery had no
unsanitary elements. This approach was still employing European ideas about the
modern West and backward East, but it didn’t directly exhort Australian’s to drink tea
simply because it was a British imperial product. Rather South Asia’s ostensible
16
modernity made it the healthy choice. Though Australia’s China tea importers took issue
with such “misrepresentations,” their protests did not seem to halt the steady growth of
South Asian tea drinking.60
India’s planters were also excited about Canadians, but here too imperial
membership did not automatically guide tastes. To be sure, C.F. Amery, who had opened
a tea agency for the sale of Indian teas in Montreal, exhorted growers to think more about
this market. “The one lesson which I wish to convey to the Indian planter,” Amery wrote
in his report on Canada, “is that here is a market large enough to absorb the whole Indian
output.” The problem, he explained, was that Canadians primarily liked green teas from
both China and Japan. He urged India to learn how to manufacture these varieties and
thereby transform their product to meet pre-existing tastes.61 Planters followed this
advice, but they also labored to convert tastes.
In the 1880s, planters obsessively fantasized about turning the United States into a
vast land of tea drinkers. The Indian Tea Districts Association initiated this discussion in
1880, the same year that the Tea Syndicate sent an “expert” to America to “ascertain the
requirements and conditions of that market.”62 At about the same time, U.S. trade
journals such as the Anglo-American Grocer and some retailers started pushing India’s,
and as we will see, Ceylon’s tea.63 In their shareholder’s report published in the summer
of 1882, the directors of India’s oldest and most established tea firm, the Assam
Company, enthusiastically described the new Tea Syndicate and disclosed that in the
previous year Indian tea had begun to be exported directly to “Colonies and America with
marked success,” selling for “good prices.” Nevertheless, the directors assured
shareholders that such moves were proceeding with caution since “it is necessary to
17
guard against overstocking new markets.”64 The directors were hesitant but they still
insisted to shareholders that the prudent course for tea was to plow fields that were far
beyond the United Kingdom.
During the 1880s, then, India began to think of Australia, the US and Canada.
Some companies began to work in Europe, South America, Central and South Asia as
well. Generally, though, India’s producers were divided about whether they should
invest in foreign markets. According to one businessman, the larger Indian tea
companies had little interest in “speculative movements, such as opening new markets.”65
Their teas were selling very well in Britain and seemed to be gaining ground every year.66
India’s industry was less cohesive and had less influence on its country’s press and
politics than the smaller, more desperate producers in Ceylon. Growers were also
worried that their product, largely strongly-flavored black teas, was simply unsuitable for
many markets. As we have seen, many consumers in the U.S. and Canada enjoyed green
teas, and planters realized that it would take some time and a great deal of effort to
convert them to prefer India’s black teas.67 Some businessmen were apparently frustrated
by India’s inertia and insisted that “American and Canadian markets have to be won,” but
“at present nothing has been done for Indian teas beyond an endeavor on the part of a few
enterprising men to around a spirit of ‘go’ in members of the industry more generally.”68
Still, throughout the eighties, India’s planters debated whether or not they should
follow Ceylon’s example and spend money to open “foreign” markets, especially in the
U.S. and Canada.69 In a letter to the editor of a colonial newspaper, for example, “AN
OLD FOGEY,” wrote how he was annoyed to find that “on every public occasion,
Ceylon tea is always advertised and represented, while Indian tea interests are usually
18
nowhere.”70 Though India was clearly worried and perhaps “annoyed” by Ceylon, some
planters, steeped in liberal thought, argued that “the friendly rivalry” would “stimulate
rather than weaken the efforts of Indian tea planters.”71 Ceylon’s Planter’s Association
had been in existence since 1854 and its business community had organized themselves
on much the same lines as that in India. Ceylon’s productions had been on show at
earlier exhibitions and individual tea gardens and companies had done some work
abroad, but in the 1880s Ceylon felt that its new industry depended upon foreign
consumers and global markets.72 It pushed its teas in Britain, the rest of the Empire and
other parts of the world, but found the wealthy and novelty-seeking consumers in the
United States especially appealing.
In the autumn of 1883, the Ceylon Planters’ Association met in Kandy to discuss
how to introduce their teas into “foreign” markets. Their conversation quickly turned to
America. One of the planters present, E.R. Stimson, enthusiastically discussed the U.S.
and Canada and especially promoted several forthcoming exhibitions planned for New
York, Cincinnati and Boston. Stimpson argued that Americans were especially good at
putting on these shows because they were a people open to seeing, buying and tasting
new things. He then passed around engravings of the forthcoming Boston Exposition,
calling attention to its large attractive buildings. In urging that Ceylon should go to
Boston, Stimpson explained that “our exhibits will go there and be seen by the sort of
people interested in them and they will open the eyes of those people to what can be done
in Ceylon.”73 These planters were attracted to what they saw as American dynamism and
a seemingly innate desire to consume new things. They were motivated by a powerful
fantasy about American business and consumer cultures, and hoped to profit from the
19
spectacle of its economic growth in the late 19th century. This discussion was only one of
countless similar debates about where and how to sell Ceylon’s newest tropical product.
What is striking about it, however, is the degree to which this community of planters
already possessed a sophisticated knowledge about a commercial culture that was
literally on the other side of the world.
In the 1880s and 1890s, planters were becoming aware of the size and scope of
the U.S. market and experimenting with how to introduce themselves to its consumers.
Whereas Britain appeared sated, the United States seemed to be a “country of big things,”
including its appetites.74 In one key article written in 1886, imperialism was rewritten as
market conquest. The author, Mr. J.L. Shand, a tea planter and one of Ceylon’s leading
experts on foreign markets, fervently wrote that “the United States and Canada are two
great countries that have to be conquered for tea.” For Shand ethnicity determined tastes.
He explained that both the U.S. and Canada “are peopled mainly by Anglo-Saxon and
Celtic peoples—by the same people in the main who constitute tea-drinkers in the United
Kingdom.” America had turned away from tea not because of its last famous tea party in
Boston. Rather British emigrants came under the influence of other nationalities,
especially the Germans and the Dutch, gave up their native customs, and acquired a taste
for coffee. He was certain, however, that if North Americans were served high quality
teas, they were “quite ready to fall back on their old habit of tea drinking.”75 The editor
of the Ceylon Observer similarly urged planters to return British North Americans to
their cultural origins before their neighborhoods swelled with the increasing tide of
ethnically diverse “European” coffee drinkers.76 Those who backed the Ceylon tea
industry were thus fascinated by the ever-expanding population in the States. However,
20
they also worried that the wrong sort of people could dilute British North American’s
dormant taste for tea.
Ceylon’s planters thus assumed that Americans, living both in the U.S. and in
Canada, possessed the necessary culture and capital to absorb their surplus harvests. The
problem, they felt, was retail not consumer resistance. The American tea trade, which at
that time imported and distributed Chinese and Japanese teas, stopped other teas from
making their way to market. When South Asia’s teas first appeared, a New York “Ring”
formed, bought up all the teas and shipped them right back to London. H.K. Rutherford,
a planter who was passionate about the need to promote Ceylon’s tea in foreign markets,
urged his colleagues to organize into a Syndicate in the first place because “unity of
action” and a “defined plan” was necessary to defeat the New York Ring and introduce
“our teas into America.”77 Ceylon’s growers agreed with Rutherford and in 1886 they
formed a voluntary tea syndicate fund designed to “promote a demand for the article
where it is not present.”78 As India’s had done, Ceylon’s Syndicate distributed teas to
grocers and others in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.79 They also
hired Shand to run their global campaign. Shand in turn sought out “colonial merchants”
and planters as agents to promote Ceylon’s tea at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition held
in London that year. The agents then moved on to foreign territories on the Continent,
The United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and in “South African, West Indian,
and other Colonies.”80 In 1887, a second fund supported exhibition work in Argentina,
Southern Ireland, Russia, Vienna and Constantinople.81
In 1888 a new group, known simply as the Ceylon Association, was created to
further planters’ interests in London. Like the ITA this body immediately commenced
21
what would become an on-going discussion on the nature of consumer tastes and
desires.82 Though it had many fits and starts, at key moments the Ceylon Association
was at the forefront of global advertising and promotions, especially in North America.
Ceylon’s planters spent much of their initial energies trying to thwart New York’s Tea
Ring. One expert on the American market recommended avoiding the metropolis
altogether by directly courting “householders and housewives in the towns of New
England…and the Central and Western States.” “The grandest opening for the
introduction of the wholesome teas, of India and Ceylon that can be found anywhere on
the world’s surface” was, the Ceylon Observer believed, among the “town dwellers and
rural populous to the West and North of Washington, New York, and Boston.”83 Another
correspondent also advised directly selling to “the tea dealers in surrounding states and
their distributing towns.” The surest route to retailers and to the “heads of families,” he
wrote, was to lecture to them. “We know of no better means of reaching the American
intelligence than by lectures,” this author believed.84 This letter repeated an oft-noted
“fact” about American business and consumer culture. Americans, most Ceylon planters
imagined, were especially “fond of lectures.” This author concluded that to “strengthen
and extend the incipient business in our teas,” growers should hire planter-turnedpropagandist, J.L. Shand to conduct a “judiciously managed lecturing tour through the
States and Canada.”85 The Ceylon Planter’s Association agreed and appointed Shand as
official Tea Commissioner, charged with representing the colony’s teas in “foreign”
markets. He had already been involved in key exhibitions in Britain and, through his
various travels and lecturing, was one of a handful of individuals who had obtained a
detailed knowledge about consumer tastes.
22
When discussing these tours, Ceylon’s business community characterized
American customers as an educated and rational people whose tastes could be conquered
through factual information. Lecturing also importantly created long-distance yet
personal relationships. Shand, for example, made numerous acquaintances in the U.S.
and used this knowledge to better tailor his selling strategies.86 Lecturing conveyed
information to consumers but it also was a crude form of market research in which
planters hoped to gain information about customer’s tastes and desires. Print advertising
and promotional materials typically accompanied tea demonstrations and lecture tours.
So, for example, the Planters Association also distributed “Ceylon Tea,” a pamphlet that
denigrated the “inferior teas” of China and Japan as adulterated and potentially harmful.
Ceylon’s teas by contrast were healthy, produced by machinery under the supervision of
British eyes. Ceylon planters thereby used the same sort of marketing strategies that
Indian tea sellers had practiced in Britain for decades.87
Planters often became retailers and salesman, moving to new business
communities, where they took the lead in advertising colonial products. They stayed in
touch with their former colleagues through letters and journals, in which they wrote about
American merchants, advertising strategies and tastes. Readers of the Ceylon Observer,
for example, engaged in an exchange with R.E. Pineo and Murray, a Philadelphia-based
company that was among the first to sell Ceylon’s produce to American consumers. Mr.
J. McCombie Murray and R.E. Pineo had both been tea planters in Ceylon but when they
“retired,” they joined hands, moved to Philadelphia and began cultivating a taste for their
produce by distributing free samples to leading families of the city. They also pushed
their own brand of foreign-sounding, “Kootee” Ceylon tea.88 One of the firm’s
23
advertisements, a multi-verse poem explained how Ceylon’s phoenix-like tea industry
grew from the ashes of its now devastated coffee plantations, was republished in the
Observer.89 The ad was addressed to American ladies and suggested they had the fate of
an industry and an island in their tea cups. It also asked consumers to reflect upon, if
only for a fleeting moment, the exotic and political nature of their everyday shopping
choices.
Fair Ladies! All, of every charm possessed,
To you alone, these lines are now addressed,
On you we feel that all our hopes depend,
Through you alone, we hope to gain our end.
We’re strangers; Yes! But cannot so remain,
Unless we long do work, and work in vain,
If you, fair ladies, greet us with a smile,
We’ll pine no more for Ceylon’s Spice Isle…”90
The ad did not promote the notion of the British Empire, however. It spoke as a Ceylon
tea merchant teaching American housewives that they should avoid India’s inferior
product:
India, our northern neighbors, were zealous,
But soon of our speedy success became jealous;
For strength in the cup they were equal in favor,
But as pure drinking tea we could beat them in flavour.91
Appealing to women was much like a lecture tour, partly a means to avoid existing
supply chains. It also encouraged an imperialistic and cosmopolitan perspective among
average Americans but denied that India and Ceylon were constituent parts of a larger
formation—the British Empire. Thus, when American consumers were informed about
the pleasures of drinking South Asian tea, they associated this commodity with Asia not
Britain. These tendencies – to move outside of preexisting commercial networks and to
24
brand tea with distinctive national qualities – became fixed in the years to come as
marketing efforts reached new levels of expertise and bureaucracy.
R.E. Pineo and Murray’s history exemplifies the nature of global business in the
late 1880s. Pineo and his partner had helped found Ceylon’s tea industry but they were
equally well informed in American tastes and communicated their ideas to Ceylon’s
growers through correspondence, but also through the press, particularly through the
Ceylon Observer. In one important letter, for example, the company provided
information about American tastes and established itself as a conduit for knowledge as
well as goods. Newspapers such as the Observer, which was not exclusively a trade
paper, were one of the key sites in which businessmen in such diverse reaches of the
globe communicated with each other.92 From this letter, written by Pineo himself, we
also learn how his firm sold itself to growers by establishing its reputation as
knowledgeable about the commodity, the nature of production and of consumption. The
most important part of the letter, however, related specific proposals on how to sell to
America. As Pineo explained his company had been “energetically” occupied in selling
“a pure Ceylon tea” in both Canada and the U.S. since 1885. But, despite McCombieMurray’s “gentleman’s vigor and push” and his own steadfast efforts, they had heretofore
met with little success. Limited capital and the vast size of the American market—
estimated here at about sixty million people—had been overwhelming. Pineo set forth
six specific points that he felt would overcome such difficulties.
First—A delicate, highly-flavored pekoe tea is an absolute desideratum.
Second—A man with push, energy, an abundance of capital, and
thoroughly versed in the art (?) of American advertising.
Third—To maintain a uniform standard of tea.
25
Fourth—to refrain from sending strong, pungent, coarse teas until the
more delicate varieties are known and recognized by the American and
Canadian consumer.
Fifth—To work independently of grocers, retail tea dealers and jobbers of
tea.
Lastly—To see that only pure Ceylon tea is sold by your representatives.93
Pineo’s suggestions were nearly identical to those being debated among both Ceylon and
India’s planters at the time.94 Basically, Pineo was telling growers what they already
knew but perhaps didn’t want to hear. To conquer a territory as vast as North America,
growers would require “an abundance of capital” to hire a man with “energy” and
advertising experience. They could not rely on the American tea trade to do the pushing
for them. As McCombie-Murray wrote in another letter in the Ceylon Observer, to be
“progressive in this country one must be aggressive.”95 Thus, Ceylon’s planters were
well aware that they needed to spend more money to sell more goods in new ways.
Merchants like Pineo hoped that their global expertise would lead to an
appointment as Ceylon’s special tea agents. Another associate of Pineo’s, the New York
entrepreneur S. Elwood May also sought Ceylon’s attention by emphasizing his extensive
advertising experience with several different new commodities.96 He promised that if he
were named the “Accredited Representative Agent of the Planters’ Association of
Ceylon” he would advertise extensively, package Ceylon’s tea in an “attractive” manner,
and distribute it free of charge.97 May essentially argued that he was the vigorous but
gentlemanly sort of individual Ceylon was looking for. Some resented this boldness and
questioned May’s character and motives, but the Dimbula Planter’s Association passed a
resolution to work with him.98 The more general Planters’ Association rejected May’s
proposal because he wouldn’t agree to buy their teas unless he was named the
26
Association’s special agent.99 Perhaps taking advantage of May’s failure, Pineo
unofficially positioned himself as the planters’ representative by launching a new
company called the Ceylon Planters’ American Tea Company in 1889.100
Charles Ker Reid similarly built a career based on South Asian and American
expertise. Reid founded a coffee roasting and tea packing firm in Philadelphia in 1891
after working in both Australia and London as a specialty dealer for Assam’s teas.101
Reid sold South Asia while lecturing to Grocers’ Associations and publishing articles
such as “The Tea Leaf of Commerce” in trade journals like the Pennsylvania Grocer.102
In also taught growers about the U.S. and in numerous letters Reid urged the
development of a product that conformed to preexisting tastes. America’s palate, he
repeated, was unaccustomed to the heavier black South Asian teas. Changing tastes
wasn’t easy. Indeed it would take the efforts of a “missionary…to revolutionize the
palate of a country.” Since this task could “only be compared to establishing a new
religion,” it would in fact be easier to employ “machinery and superior science” to
develop a more delicate Ceylon Oolong.103 In years to come, planters tried to do this but
they also continued to work on the North American palate.
Before Lipton began building his empire, planter’s syndicates and associations
had worked with importers and retailers to bring their teas to the attention of consumers
in numerous places around the world. By the late 1880s there were already several dozen
firms in Britain, the US, Australia, New Zealand, Tasmania and Canada dealing in pure
Ceylon tea.104 There were just as many vending India’s teas. Long forgotten businesses
such as the Hop Tea Foreign and Colonial Syndicate even claimed to be selling their
27
mixture of hops and tea throughout Europe, India, and other parts of the Empire.105 The
tea share brokers Gow, Wilson and Stanton proudly celebrated British Grown teas’
successes. In a circular they issued in 1890 they commented on advances made in North
and South America, including Argentina, Chile, Brazil and Uruguay. They also claimed
that South Africa had proved its “appreciation of British Grown Tea,” as had Australia
and Russia. These teas had made inroads in smaller markets as well, including
Constantinople, Belgium, Holland and Germany106 Companies such as Gow, Wilson and
Stanton pronounced South Asian teas as an example of collective British enterprise, but
Ceylon and India were in fact intensely competitive with each other, especially in the
potentially lucrative North American market. Though it appeared that the world was
taking to South Asian teas in the 1880s, growers felt that they did not have enough capital
to truly develop markets outside of Britain.107 Problems became especially clear as
international exhibitions grew into especially extravagant and expensive spectacles.108
Since the 1870s, planters had peddled their wares at countless local, national and
international exhibitions across Europe, North America and in the colonies. Fairgoers
sipped cups of tea in Ceylon and Indian Courts and tea kiosks at large and small
exhibitions all over Europe, North America and in many British colonies. As noted
above, Ceylon and India had been in Melbourne in 1880. Their teas were also displayed
in Calcutta and London in the 1870s and 1880s.109 They were in Amsterdam in 1883,
Liverpool in 1887, Glasgow, Brussels and Melbourne again in 1888, France and New
Zealand in 1889, Chicago in 1893, and Russia in 1894.110 J.L. Shand, who had displayed
Ceylon’s produce at many of these shows, wrote in the summer of 1888 that he was
“personally…sick of them.” However, he advised that he could “think if no better way of
28
pushing our teas than an Exhibition,” and urged Ceylon, not “to lose the chance of an
Exhibition anywhere.”111
As numerous scholars have shown, these public gatherings have served many
purposes and conveyed multiple meanings about race and nation, economy and
modernity. 112 They were also a very important feature of Victorian and early 20th
century commercial culture. Fairs were marketplaces in which new products competed
for prizes and potential buyers. They served as arenas in which buyers and sellers formed
relationships around particular goods and were often at the center of widespread
advertising campaigns. The logistics involved in staging these shows had consequences
in places, such as India and Ceylon, which we have not yet understood. Exhibitions
stimulated the development of marketing experts, international relationships, and a
system of advertising and financing that had a lasting legacy.
In 1893 growers around the empire read with anticipation about the giant show
about to be put on in America’s great Midwestern metropolis. The Planters’ Gazette, a
journal which claimed to speak for planters in India, Ceylon, the West Indies, Straits
Settlements, Mauritius, South America, China and Java, celebrated the “excellent
market” now being opened for British grown teas in the United States and surmised that
“Chicago should do much to place [that market] on a sound and permanent basis.”113
Largely because of Chicago in 1893 and the Louisiana Purchase Exhibition held in St.
Louis a decade later, planters organized their conquest of American tastes in its
Midwestern states. Both of these international shows had a widespread impact on the tea
industry in South Asia and elsewhere. The history of these two gigantic fairs highlights
the role of the exhibition in the growth of global commerce, the way that South Asia
29
appeared in the U.S. and how the U.S. appeared to British businessmen and statesmen.
Ceylon and India were intensely competitive with one another and their marketing efforts
in the U.S. and elsewhere helped create, at least in American eyes, a sense of two distinct
South Asian nations, disaggregated from the larger British imperial polity.114
Though both Ceylon and India had already been in the U.S. for more than a
decade, the Chicago spectacle launched the official beginning of their American
campaigns.115 Although Ceylon’s government and most in the planting industry were
dedicated to supporting the Tea Fund in principle, its directors complained frequently that
dues went unpaid and the government hadn’t stepped in to help.116 Voluntarism seemed
especially inadequate for Chicago. In January of 1893, just months before the World’s
Fair opened, Ceylon’s government levied a tax or cess on all exported teas. In 1894 it
also created an official body, known as the Committee of Thirty, to administer the funds,
whose purpose “was to increase the consumption of tea in foreign lands.”117 Ceylon’s
Planter’s Association, Chamber of Commerce and government contributed approximately
₤21,000, which was three times as much as India, to create a particularly lavish spectacle
and to establish a “central permanent depot” for Ceylon teas in Chicago after it closed.
Mr. J.J. Grinlinton, a member of Ceylon’s legislative council, was appointed the
colony’s Special Commissioner for the World’s Columbian Exhibition. Grinlinton
arrived in Chicago a full year before the show was to open in order to establish a good
working relationship with the Exhibition officials and negotiate the best sites for
Ceylon’s main court and tea kiosks. Ceylon’s court was built entirely out of native wood
which was carved in a style demonstrating the island’s ancient architecture. Both its
structure and decorative motifs replicated Ceylon’s religious and artistic history. So, for
30
example, the steps leading to the main court were guarded by cobra-shrouded figures
which adapted the designs present at the ruined temples at Anurádhapura and
Polonnáruwa, two ancient capitals of the island nation [fig. 1]. These same figures could
also be found guarding shrines throughout Ceylon as they were thought to ward off
evil.118 Pillars, windows, and ceilings were all similarly decorated with elephants, lions,
dancers and other well-known symbols of Sinhalese culture [fig. 2]. Native artists
depicted the island’s religions with painted scenes from the life of Buddha and other
traditional practices. Colossal statues of Buddha and Vishnu also flanked the central hall
[fig. 3].119 Ceylon’s planters were certainly excited by this display but were worried that
Grinlinton had been influenced by the “land of big things” and that his request for twenty
thousand pounds was far beyond what they had expected.120 He responded to such
charges by arguing that this lavish display of art, industry and culture would do one thing,
“place our Ceylon teas in the American market.”121
The Chicago organizers evidently were evidently impressed for they provided
Ceylon with special space for both the Main Court and for three mini Ceylon courts, each
containing “Ceylon servants dressed in native costume” ready to serve visitors refreshing
cups of hot tea. Ceylon main court was situated between that of France and Austria and
across from Norway. It was a short distance from Ecuador, Guatemala and Costa Rica.
Ceylon wasn’t too far from Great Britain, but it was not all that close either. It thus stood
as its own nation rich in history and tasty produce. Grinlinton also recognized that
women were the primary tea drinkers and buyers in the U.S. and he especially wanted to
reach female fairgoers. He therefore negotiated with Mrs. Potter Palmer for space in the
Woman’s Building for one of his mini kiosks.122 This court was then organized by a
31
committee of ladies, headed by Lady Havelock, the wife of Ceylon’s governor and it was
designed to exemplify art and industry that had all been the “work of women’s hands.”123
In keeping with the general vision of the Women’s Building, Ceylon’s court appealed to
modern women’s tastes for public recognition of female industry. It represented tea as
essentially a modern beverage produced in a beautiful yet timeless place. Ceylon’s
colonial history was indicated by the island’s productions, specifically through its tea and
other agricultural products and its machinery and farm tools.
Ceylon’s exhibit thus juxtaposed the ancient and modern, art and industry.124
This story reinforced and undercut the Exhibition’s official theme. Marking Columbus’s
arrival in the Americas, Chicago celebrated the industrial and imperial progress of the
New World. Ceylon’s tea industry illustrated the continued viability of Old World
imperialism.125 Both narratives used race to sell goods. Indeed, the advertising icon
“Aunt Jemima” first appeared at Chicago in the person of Nancy Green, a former slave
from Kentucky, who served pancakes to fairgoers from inside a booth designed to look
like a giant flour barrel.126 Such displays literally allowed Americans to savor their
whiteness. Yet, Ceylon’s spectacle hoped to develop a sophisticated palate which would
enable visitors to distinguish among similar Eastern tastes. In practice, the exhibit and
official handbooks that accompanied it actually paved the way for American enterprise in
Ceylon by providing visitors with digestible knowledge about the colony. Indeed,
Ceylon’s exposition handbook went further than the exhibit by supplying businessmen,
tourists and others with a history and ethnography of the island. Advertisements too
provided readers with the names of agents and others who would help them do business
32
in this far-off British colony.127 Such exhibits sold colonial products to American
consumers in ways which made colonial spaces familiar and desirable.
Yet, colonial exhibits might very well have left fairgoers very confused since
there were quite a number of exhibits and buildings that presented a staged version of the
“East.” For example, India also attempted to court customers by producing a lavish
oriental show centered upon tea production and consumption. The East Indian pavilion,
which adjoined that of Sweden, Haiti and New South Wales, was designed by the famous
Chicago architect, Henry Ives Cobb. Cobb’s structure was described as “Oriental in its
minutest detail,” including Indian carpets, utensils, vessels and mosaic work inlaid with
filigree and precious metals.128 Its chief exhibit was Indian tea, which was served in
hand-painted crockery in which turbaned Indian servants “distributed little pots of tea to
all comers free of charge.”129 Mr. Richard Blechynden, the Indian Tea Association’s Tea
Commissioner at Chicago stated in an interview that he would not let India be “outdone
by their Ceylon rivals.” He pronounced that he served nearly 6,000 cups of the “fragrantsmelling liquid” daily at the Fair. Almost as soon as it touched their lips, customers were
convinced that black Indian tea was better than the “faintly-coloured beverage” to which
they were accustomed.130 Of course, such hyperbolic statements were part of
Blechynden’s salesmanship and helped him capture the attention of the news media,
which led stories on India’s exhibit with headlines such as “From Old Bombay,”
“Looking for New Markets,” “They Wish to Establish Trade with America.”131
Retailers evidently liked what they saw and tasted since over 1,500 American tea
firms signed agreements in Chicago to stock Indian tea.132 After the Fair closed
Blechynden launched a coordinated newspaper campaign and hired “Indian servants” in
33
“picturesque costumes” to move from store to store and city to city to serve tea at
“leading American tea firms” and at various “food shows” throughout the Midwest.133
The Midwest remained the core territory for planters’ marketing efforts, which for
decades sold South Asian tea by popularizing South Asia. At times this included
cooperative work between India and Ceylon but more often than not India and Ceylon
were characterized as distinct brands from two different nations.
Individual companies and Blechynden’s counterpart representing Ceylon’s
growers also toured the U.S. during these years and created similar tea displays to court
American retailers and consumers.134 One trade observer maintained in 1897 that
everywhere he went he encountered “photographs and scenes in the tea gardens of
Ceylon.” Many of these emphasized the beauty of the gardens, but they were intended to
present the island as the home of “machine-made tea.”135 Both American and British
retailers were branding their teas by associating them with the “East,” and as one
journalist commented, they often employed images of “attractive young women…to set
forth the merits of the brand.”136 Many companies promoted both India and Ceylon as
the “teas of the future,” but this invariably implied an image of nature tamed. For
example, at a large food show hosted by Philadelphia’s Retail Grocer’s Association,
Ceylon and Indian were represented by several displays of tea gardens “wherein maidens
passably fair invite you to tarry and sup.” Tetley’s had a second exhibit at the show, in
which fairgoers could also “obtain a cup of the delicious beverage, and go away provided
with a beautiful lithographed brochure…” 137
Large retailers like Lyon’s and Lipton’s repeatedly used images of tea gardens
and “comely” women in their ads and exhibits in Britain to develop a distinct sense of
34
South Asian teas as “imperial” to compete with their East Asian rivals.138 However these
global images were also produced by Americans working in conjunction with British
planters, and their significance outside of Britain was somewhat different. In the U.S.,
for example, consumers would have understood South Asia as an enticing, alluring place
safely tamed by modern enterprise. At these exhibits and in these ads the world appeared
as an enjoyable place, eagerly ready to entice them with a free sample.139 Thus,
Americans were constituted both as consumers and imperialists, even though they did not
in fact possess the lands, peoples or the commodities on display.
Certainly South Asia was quite visible in the United States in the 1890s, as
competition between tea companies and growing nations became quite fierce. During
that time, American retailers accepted that South Asia had “come to stay.” However,
East Asia had not yet given up the fight.140 In fact, after Chicago other growing nations
stepped up their efforts to pursue North American consumers. Japanese tea merchants
even asked for government subsidies to promote their teas in the US. Ceylon similarly
raised a very large amount to advertise teas in America.141 Though China had fallen far
behind India, it appeared on the verge of industrializing and thus might re-emerge as a
stalwart competitor. “An enterprising Chinese ‘Creeper,” traveling in Ceylon “yearning
for information” in 1897 caused some concern, for example. Commenting on this
incidence of industrial spying, one writer asserted that “Supremacy in the tea market was
fought for keenly, and won by pluck and perseverance. It must be held tightly.”142 Such
anxieties encouraged a new, though temporary, cooperation between India and Ceylon to
promote South Asian teas. This alliance provided Richard Blechynden with sufficient
funds to advertise both India and Ceylon teas in leading journals circulating throughout
35
the East Coast and Midwest in the late 1890s.143 Both India’s and Ceylon’s teas were
gaining a larger market share, with Ceylon gaining an even greater hold in American
households, and this was interpreted as evidence that propaganda paid.144
The Tea Cess and the Creation of Global Markets in the New Century
In the early years of the new century, India’s planters anxiously followed the path
Ceylon had laid out. In 1903 its government levied its own cess to support global
advertising and created a Tea Cess Committee, which like the Committee of Thirty in
Ceylon, was supposed to direct the creation of “foreign markets” 145 In Edwardian
Britain, cess funds helped support the planter’s political battle against new tea import
taxes levied by the Liberal government. These colonists charged the Liberals with
hurting poor consumers and producers alike and therefore working against the cause of
empire.146 However, this money was targeted for work outside of the U.K. because
growers felt that other agencies, such as large importers, retailers and packet tea
companies had already converted the British into South Asian tea drinkers and that
Edwardian Britons were essentially sated. The Committee therefore devoted money
elsewhere, especially in the US and later in India.
The Tea Cess Committee was then a body devoted to publicity. It first
energetically sought knowledge about the world via trade reports from individuals such
as Richard Blechynden and businesses such as Lipton’s working in India, South Africa,
Australia, Continental Europe, Central Asia and the Middle East.147 It’s twenty or so
members, representing local planter’s associations and chambers of commerce, debated
36
the value of many countries as potential markets. So, for example, the TCC discussed
South Africa a good deal but initially avoided it because its economy still appeared
unstable after the Boer War. The Committee also assumed that South Africans would
primarily be drawn to the teas starting to be produced on a large scale in Natal.148
Nevertheless, they clearly anticipated doing work in South Africa in the near future.149
The TCC considered the world their territory but limited resources meant that they
looked first to places with large populations of “British” people. They also favored
countries whose government’s supported low import duties. By the turn-of-the-century
the Committee thought more about local markets. It also encouraged growers to
transform their teas to meet the specific needs of native economies and tastes. So, for
example, it awarded bonuses to cultivators who could develop a good quality and
affordable green tea and to those who could develop machinery to produce a cheap
product of compressed tea. Like the Tea Syndicate had in the 1880s, however, the Tea
Cess Committee was especially interested in the United States and India, large markets
that together could create a huge demand and thereby secure high prices and steady
profits.150
The Committee thus spent much of its initial budget supporting Blechynden’s
work at the Louisiana Purchase Exhibition held in St. Louis, Missouri in 1904. The
characterization of the world as marketplace was even stronger at the Louisiana Purchase
Exhibition than it had been in Chicago. India and Ceylon’s rivalry instigated dramatic
imperial spectacles in Missouri and launched intensive campaigns throughout the
Midwest. At the Fair native Sinhalese dressed in traditional costumes served Americans
their first cup of ice tea. This British-Sinhalese invention quickly became reinterpreted
37
and sold as a distinctly “American” way of taking tea. The beverage was thus both a
clever marketing strategy and an example of how commodities and their meanings were
transformed as they cross national and cultural boundaries.151 Not to be outdone as they
had been in Chicago, the Indian Tea Cess Committee allotted a great deal of its own
money and raised funds from the London and Calcutta branches of the ITA, and various
local governments for St. Louis. It also funded a “systematic” advertising campaign to
overlap with the Fair.152
Once again hired as tea Commissioner, Richard Blechynden’s taught the
Committee about American geography and tastes in tea and advertising. He launched a
large but geographically-limited campaign emanating from St. Louis and consisting of
advertising in what were known as “patent insides,” that is the inside sheets of country
newspapers which included news and advertising. He also used large colored
supplements in Sunday papers that circulated in the Midwest. For the whole second half
of 1904, for example, he advertised India’s tea in two and a half inch, double columns in
669 weekly papers and 11 Sunday supplements, covering the States of Missouri, and
parts of Illinois, Indiana and Kansas, amounting to a population of 11, 250,000.153
Though this region of the country was also devoted to Japan green teas, Blechynden
wished to avoid the black tea trade in the East Coast. He argued that exhibitions and
advertising reached consumers but more importantly they helped constitute alternative
supply chains. For example, he explained to India’s planters that advertising created
friends among certain facets of the distributing trade, especially the “packet people.”
These were the renegades who sold branded teas outside of the usual lines of distribution.
Some, such as Pineo’s unsuccessful Ceylon Tea Planters’ Company failed, but others
38
such as Lipton’s, Lyon’s, Tetley’s and Mazawattee prospered from working with Cess
funds.154
Blechynden initially warned against advertising randomly throughout the US. He
had his eyes set on a limited and defined, albeit large territory.155 In some sense, his
letters and reports reflect a businessman’s anxieties about dealing with a potential market
the size of the US. He was clearly excited about his prospects, but worried about regional
trade and taste differences. He was also concerned that Ceylon’s more aggressive and
earlier efforts had created a unique problem for India. In a memo to the Cess Committee
in 1904, Blechynden claimed that Ceylon was the only word American consumers and
retailers knew for British-grown teas. Even when retailers blended Ceylon’s leaf with
that from India or elsewhere they still sold it as Ceylon tea. Blechynden felt it would
almost be impossible to reeducate consumers and instead advocated publicizing both
“Ceylon and India” collectively as South Asian teas. As Blechynden explained it, the
two needed to decide whether to be “allies or enemies.”156
Cooperation between these two imperial industries was thus not motivated by a
higher imperial ideal. India’s businessmen recognized that their larger and older industry
had fallen behind their younger relative. Ceylon did not want to lose their brand identity,
but agreed to cooperate because they felt that they could not afford to advertise as
extensively as they wanted to in a nation as large as the U.S. In the late nineties the
Committee of Thirty provided nearly half of the money Blechynden used to advertise
South Asian teas throughout the U.S. but especially in the Midwest.157 As we will see in
later chapters, time after time India and Ceylon would break and then renew this alliance.
Indeed, while government-backed trade associations might advocate nation-based
39
publicity, retailers, blenders or grocers often introduced Imperial or South Asian blends.
Much of this advertising emphasized the South Asian origins of the tea plant, yet these
various approaches might have confused consumers as to the origins of their tea and the
relationship between places such as Ceylon and India.
Cess funds brought tea into America’s heartland and thereby aided the
development of mass marketing and retailing. They certainly improved planters’
relationship with American merchants, in essence subsidizing mass retailers. Richard
Blechynden especially made arrangements with some of the country’s most aggressive
chain stores and packet tea firms, such as James Butler in New York and the Great
Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company. In 1905 the Atlantic and Pacific had over 200 stores
in the East Coast and in some Western states.158 Blechynden also worked closely with
groups such as the Retail Grocers’ Association in Philadelphia, which at that time
controlled around 700 stores. These retailers agreed to stock Indian tea and participate in
schemes such as giving tea as free gifts to shoppers who purchased coffee. Newspaper
advertisements selling both the name of the stores and the taste for Indian tea typically
accompanied such schemes in places like New York, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire,
Vermont, Alabama, Tennessee, Louisiana, New Jersey, Delaware and Maryland.159
In the summer of 1905 Richard Blechynden sent a circular to Chicago Tea Houses
describing his typical methods to sell tea and thereby ally himself with local distributors.
He started with newspaper advertising that promoted Ceylon and India tea in a general
way. He then introduced ads that gave consumers the specific names of shops where the
tea could be procured. Retailers received free advertising but only after furnishing
Blechynden with customer mailing lists. Blechynden then distributed thousands of
40
postcards that again publicized the shop and the commodity, the local and the global at
one and the same time. In 1905, for example, Blechynden had produced a “very
attractive” colour post card with views of both the India and the Ceylon Buildings from
the World’s Fair held the previous year at St. Louis. It also had the requisite display of “a
native man and a woman.” This form of advertising replicated the visual pleasures to be
had at the Fair and in the newspaper. Grocers likewise displayed ‘hangers’ with similar
images of “oriental” commodities produced by Blechynden and the Tea Committee. In
1905, then, thousands of households in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas and Missouri were
told that when they shopped at their local grocer and drank India and Ceylon teas they
encountered the world.160 Men and women from Muncie, Indiana, Joplin, Missouri and
Sioux City, Iowa encountered South Asia every day as they read their morning paper,
opened their mailbox and shopped for groceries. This is not to say that they necessarily
drank more tea nor did it automatically make them imperialists, but it demonstrates how
the partnership between British and American business brought imperial culture within
view of tens of thousands of average men and women.
By forming agreements with local grocers and large firms like the A&P
Blechynden effectively curtailed American business’s resistance. By 1905 he reported to
the Cess Committee that nearly all of the major American companies now distributed
South Asian teas and further argued that “It was only after active advertising was done by
the two Funds that the packet tea firms made any headway. Since then some of them
have expanded into very considerable factors.”161 In 1906 the chairman of the joint
American Advertising fund for India and Ceylon teas surmised that the “direct opposition
and obstruction from those with vested interests in China and Japan teas appears now to
41
have been forgotten, or never realized.”162 Thus in the decade before the war, Cess funds
which were paid by planters on exported tea were not only advertising colonial produce
around the world, this advertising was also benefiting new forms of mass retailing. This
basic arrangement worked similarly in places like Canada. It was also instituted in
Europe and South Asia, but the types of markets which planters imagined in those arenas
were slightly different than those they perceived in North America.
Though North America was receiving the lion’s share of attention during the early
20th century, private individuals, companies and organizations like the London Indian Tea
Association and the Committee of Thirty also gathered facts about European proclivities.
Ceylon and India had made an appearance in Europe before the new century, especially
making a show of their wares at key exhibitions. However, after the turn-of-the-century
the Ceylon Association and London Tea Association fostered an elite tea culture centered
upon serving fine blends in luxurious surroundings to wealthy female customers.
Europe became especially attractive after the German and Italian governments
reduced their duties on imported tea and Belgium eliminated them altogether.163
Producers were surprisingly shy of doing business in Russia, a major market, because it
had a relatively significant tea tariff and an emergent industry in the Caucuses. Ceylon
cultivated these consumers but in general planters assumed it needed less publicity work
than other European markets. In the first years of the new century both Ceylon and India
sent representatives on European sojourns to learn about its consumers and retailers and
teach them about South Asia. In 1901, the Ceylon Association’s Mr. J.H. Renton visited
Germany, Austria, Bohemia, Hungary, Northern Italy and France. Numerous shops and
depots, hotels and restaurants then contracted to sell pure Ceylon tea and to help Renton
42
distribute pamphlets laying out the benefits of Ceylon’s leaf and reviling that produced in
China. For example, Renton distributed one brochure to hundreds of wholesale tea and
colonial produce dealers, three thousand newspapers and a thousand hotels in
Germany.164 As they did elsewhere, these tea commissioners invited local hosts to sell
Asia as divided between a good area controlled by Europe and a bad Asia resistant to
European or American hegemony. China was corrupt and decrepit and a purveyor of
dangerous pleasures, while Ceylon and India vended a wholesome yet refined luxury.
Imperialism was on the shelf as well, since by buying either Ceylon or India’s story a
European retailer or shopper was in a sense buying the idea that empire made oriental
luxuries safe. This narrative presented a modernized and sanitized Orient for European
consumption.
On the Continent, as in the U.S., local merchants helped sell the planters’ story
even as they built their own commercial institutions and catered to local tastes. In
Europe, even more than turn-of-the-century America, tea was understood as an elite good
enjoyed in refined and sociable settings. Renton thereby especially targeted prominent
vendors with established reputations. He was for example happy to report to his
employers that he had convinced one of the oldest tea retailers in Paris, the Liverpool,
London and China Tea Company, to agree to serve only pure Ceylon tea at their five
o’clock teas at their prominent shop in the Rue de Rivoli. If many of these venues
reached elite female consumers, Renton didn’t neglect men. He reported to be working
with the French War Office to induce them to “raise the standard of tea for the Army,”
which presumably would mean important contracts for Ceylon’s producers.165
43
The Indian Tea Association adopted the same basic procedures as Ceylon used to
open European markets. It distributed free samples and booklets and hired agents who
canvassed grocers and other retailers.166 It constructed “Indian Pavilions” at exhibitions
and opened Indian tea rooms and shops in many areas of urban Europe. J.E.M.
Harington, an “excellent linguist” fluent in Dutch, German and French and Italian,
became the Tea Association’s European representative. Like Renton, he toured the
Continent, forged relationships with its retailers, and educated planters about European
tastes. Harington believed, as others had found initially in the U.S. that to reach
consumers India needed to convince indifferent local retailers to stock their tea and in
essence to sell their story. He maintained that to make progress in Europe India would
therefore have to employ “other agencies,” that is individuals “of the right class, outside
of the grocer clique” to act as tea agents.167 Harington often looked for independent
small-scale female-owned businesses that he could support and cultivate. He thus
reported working with two privileged ladies who had opened a small but fashionable tea
shop in Rome. Harington claimed he had helped these businesses grow into significant
ventures, reporting for example that this Roman tea shop grew from selling 50 to 2,000
pounds of tea in its first year alone. As they were in Britain, tea shops were often first
started by female entrepreneurs and catered particularly to urban women enjoying the
public pleasures of the metropolis. Ironically, Harington and the planters he represented
supported these quasi-modern feminine enterprises because they were a means to avoid
local retailers and the established tea trade.168 Tea shops importantly served a different
clientele than did grocers, who typically dealt with servants rather than the bourgeois
44
housewife herself. Thus, the tea shop was in essence a new institution designed to cater
and speak directly to middle and upper-class female Europe.
The ITA and other tea firms in Europe especially emphasized tea drinking as a
fashionable alternative to the café. Tea houses were opened in the most stylish areas of
large metropolitan centers. Firms such as the London-based, Messrs Whiteaway,
Laidlaw invested heavily in Europe when they opened twenty “good class depots,” in
major cities to sell brewed, packet and bulk Indian tea.169 In Paris, the British Dairy
Company also set up tea rooms on the Esplanade des Invalides and Rue Caumartin in
1900. Another company selling Ceylon’s blends opened in Trocadero the same year.
According to trade experts, these tea rooms encouraged “the fashion of tea drinking.”
“Tea Tatler,” a columnist for the new journal Tea, remarked that in France tea and coffee
were considered luxuries never given to servants, who drank vegetable soup first thing in
the morning.170 By contrast, the French version of the British social ritual of afternoon
tea was a “meal for the gods,” in which ‘the French cook sends up the most sugary, the
most delicately flavoured cakes…Then there are sandwiches of every possible
description, from the masculine anchovy to the feminine peach.”171 Well-appointed tea
shops reinforced the perception of tea drinking as a special social event enjoyed by
wealthy and stylish men and especially women.
Though making headway among wealthy French coffee consumers, the Tea
Association was especially interested in prewar Germany.172 So, for example, in 1908
Harington helped launch a “handsomely furnished, well fitted and suitably decorated” tea
shop in 1908 in Leipzigerstrasse in Berlin. Its atmosphere of luxurious Orientalism was
augmented by the presence of Indian waiters quietly serving “good quality Indian tea.”173
45
A second branch was soon opened in Charlottenberg, Berlin and another in Hamburg and
Brussels. The Committee also supported the opening “Indian style” boutiques for the
sale of dry tea.”174 Such institutions did not just serve Germany’s elites, for they
frequently also housed demonstrations directed at grocers and other tea traders. In
general, however, they emphasized expensive tastes and high fashions.
The Tea Association created a public culture that displayed how to make and
enjoy its tea. In Germany alone during 1908-09, the Tea Committee allotted ₤7,000 to
fund forty-one tea demonstrations, distributed thousands of cups of tea and tea samples,
as well as other related advertising ephemera.175 Consumers and vendors also learned
how to make tea at numerous “local exhibitions” in for example Hamburg, Antwerp,
Dresden, Turin, and Charleroi.176 Just before the War, Harington eagerly reported to the
Cess Committee that his methods were working. In particular, he emphasized that
consumption of Indian tea in Germany had increased by 100 per cent since work began
there in 1900. Until the outbreak of hostilities, the Tea Association remained interested
in developing this small but fashionable European market which complemented the new
mass markets in the U.S. and India.
After the War, the Tea Association resumed its work, although relations remained
awkward. In the early 1920s, German retailers tried to force the Indian Tea Cess
Committee to pay outstanding debts incurred before the War. The Committee
complained that the amounts owed were far less than the German companies implied and
that in fact doing business with German firms had been and would continue to be a
frustrating affair. In the months just before the War broke out, Harington wrote that he
had encountered problems while dealing with “Messrs. Seelig and Hille [who] are very
46
active and have a large connection throughout Germany.” However, recalled that they
“are troublesome to guide into the right direction, having strong pre-conceptions of their
own.”177 National politics had disrupted what had seemed like an inevitable process in
which British planters were gaining a hold in countless local economies. As we will see
in the next section and chapters, the war was not a major break in how the planters sought
to make and control markets but it did shift their attention away from Europe to the
Empire. Interwar planters’ associations developed a partial program of imperial autarky.
Much like Mussolini’s fantasies of Italian self-sufficiency, global politics and economics
led British business to the colonial consumer. This dream of native subjects consuming
British-made goods was not new, nor was it perceived as an unproblematic benefit. In
fact, it was at the same meeting in which the Executive Committee of the Indian Tea
Association considered how to avoid paying their German debts that they learned that
Gandhi’s non-cooperation movement was limiting their ability to sell their story and their
tea in India. Nationalism and labor struggles had begun to shape how Indians perceived
and consumed tea. One Indian canvasser working in the United Provinces complained
that when he asked the public if they drank tea, many replied, “no, I will never drink tea
as it would be drinking the blood of my brothers.”178
Civilizing Natives: The Creation of a Mass Market for Tea in India
The British market had been glutted with tea in the second half of the nineties, so
many incorrectly assumed that the “British people are surfeited with tea, and no material
increase of consumption can be expected within the limits of the United Kingdom.”179
47
As we have seen, this thinking led both Ceylon and India to the US, the Empire and in
Europe, but it also led planters to create a local or native mass market. In 1900-01 tea
prices were reported to be at the “lowest level ever known.” To compensate for their
losses planters produced more poor quality teas by plucking as much leaf as possible.
These teas flooded markets and further depressed prices. Industry experts urged the
cessation of such unsavory practices but also argued that increasing demand in places
such as Tibet, Persia and “especially India itself” was the only long-lasting and truly
workable solution.
From as early as the 1830s, the Indian tea industry believed that “native” markets
could provide an outlet for lower grade teas and help “civilize” and improve local
populations. Mid-century advocates enjoyed arguing that Hindus, whose “only drink is
water,” would especially find a moderately-priced tea “a most refreshing addition to their
domestic economy, as well as a salutary beverage in those fatal febrile affections to
which the oppressive heat of the climate predisposes them.”180 However, it wasn’t until
the 20th century that the ITA and private companies systematically tried to convert “the
native populations into an empire of tea drinkers.” 181 Recently, a few scholars have
examined this process, but surprisingly they have yet to consider the politics surrounding
this imperial beverage.182 As Timothy Breen has suggested in his study of consumer
politics and the American Revolution, goods were almost necessarily politicized in
colonial markets.183 Gandhi, of course, saw this point and his politics highlighted the
significance of Indian markets.184 Though hunger strikes created a politics around food,
Gandhi did not explicitly focus on tea because it was yet to become a major part of most
Indians’s diet. Gandhi evidently dismissed “the drinking of tea and coffee by the so-
48
called educated Indians,” as “chiefly due to British rule,” and something that “may be
passed over with the briefest of notice.”185 Gandhi was both right and wrong. Tea
drinking was something chiefly due to British rule. Unlike cotton there had been very
little tea consumption before the British occupation. Although Indian capital was
invested in this industry and there were some Indian planters, tea was viewed as a
European commodity. Gandhi was perhaps, however, too quick to dismiss tea’s
symbolic power. As we have seen, some of his followers did challenge the Tea
Association’s desire to convert “the native populations into an empire of tea drinkers.”
Eventually publicity won out over politics as planters and their local agents used many of
the same methods they had employed in Great Britain, North America and elsewhere to
introduce Indians to the tea habit. The remainder of this chapter will focus on how
planters’ imagined the “native” market as a solution to their global economic and
political problems. The following chapter will then examine how Indians, Americans and
other colonial subjects understood and altered the meanings associated with the beverage.
In the twentieth century, the tea trade surmised that if India’s vast population
drank even a small amount of tea, they could solve the problems created by
overproduction and maintain prices and profits. This home or native market also
promised to absorb the cheapest of teas which did not sell in wealthier markets, thereby
reducing waste and production costs. Though there is some evidence that a few tea firms
were also taking their teas into the “interior of Africa,” at this time most planters
fantasized about India’s huge population.186 “The seventy millions of Bengal alone ought
to be able to consume the output of the adjacent tea plantations of Assam,” surmised the
journal, Tea, in 1901.187 If both North America and South Asia were excitingly large,
49
planters saw them differently. Wealthy North Americans and Europeans could afford
expensive high quality teas, while Indians had to learn to appreciate their dregs.
Planters and retailers understood that most Indians were extremely poor and that
the subcontinent’s population was especially diverse. They also realized that its religious
diversity conditioned tastes and rituals surrounding food and drink. They nevertheless
believed that Indians could be made into tea drinkers in much the same way that
consumers were fashioned elsewhere, through the creation of a public culture of
exhibitions, tea shops, lecture tours, tea demonstrations, newspaper advertisements and
other forms of publicity. As they did in Europe, the United States and other parts of the
Empire, groups such as the ITA, also relied on local vendors and experts to learn about
and cultivate local tastes.
In the late 19th century, Indian tea consumption was still quite small but was rising
and was starting to attract the attention of tea producers.188 In the 1880s, the growing
presence of imported Chinese tea especially prompted planters to think about the potency
of non-white consumption.189 An Indian trade report published in 1880 stated that over a
million and a half pounds of Chinese tea were being imported into India each year and
that most of it was consumed by “natives, who have not yet taken to Indian tea.”190 This
ironic situation was duly noted by growers who were looking for outlets for their lower
grade teas. Indeed, the London-based Kaiser-I-Hind Tea Press Company advertised its
machines by urging growers to transform their fannings and tea dust into compressed
cakes. In this form waste product could be cheaply transported and “Indian tea” could be
brought “within reach of the poorest” native consumers.191 As they did elsewhere, new
companies and syndicates began to form in the 1880s to figure out how to sell cheap tea
50
to poor consumers. For example, in 1887 some “gentlemen” in the tea industry held a
meeting in Calcutta to launch a company that would purchase low quality teas, package
them in very small quantities, and distribute them among native village shopkeepers.
These men assumed that Indians were natural tea drinkers and asserted incorrectly, “It is
well known that natives of all classes have a great liking for tea.”192 There was a good
deal of enthusiasm for this new company and it quickly raised the capital for its scheme
to “promote the sale of Indian Tea amongst natives.”193
Throughout this period, there were some in the trade who questioned whether
money and expertise were being wasted in the U.S. Rather than seeing the U.S. and India
as complementary, they advocated the promise of local markets. The author of the 1901
article “How to Reach the Native Consumer” complained: “It is somewhat strange that
Indian planters, while waiting for the opening up of foreign markets, should apparently
overlook the vast market in India itself, which might swallow up immense quantities of
the surplus production.” Another avid supporter writing in the Calcutta journal, Capital,
commented “it is all very well to spend money in America,” but “it would be nothing for
India to consume at least four ounces per head per annum, and a new customer taking 50
or 60 million lbs. per year would put tea on its legs at once.” The journalist surmised that
“tea drinking is an easily acquired habit.” All that was needed in India, he believed, was
for producers to create a two ounce packet of tea that could sell for one anna. This would
enable local retailers and boxwallahs or hawkers to sell tea to the masses. The author
thus fantasized about the prospect of “every coolie and tiller of the soil” drinking tea,
believing this would bring about “a commercial revolution.” He even went on to suggest
51
that a company that could create this affordable tea might thereby become the ‘centre for
the distribution of Indian tea throughout the world.”194
Though they wished to cater to Indians, planters did not speak of them in the same
way they discussed wealthier white customers. Tea experts described India’s consumers
as ignorant souls who needed to be forced to have new wants. In 1901 one journalist
admitted plainly that in India “supply creates demand.” He further suggested that “the
coolie is, for the most part, utterly ignorant of the incalculable benefits to be derived from
drinking… [tea, but] steps are being taken to awaken him to a sense of his needs.” He
credited the Indian Tea Association for beginning to convince the coolie that he does
indeed need tea: “By the time that coolie has disposed of all those free samples it is
hoped that the tea habit will have taken possession of him, and that his annas will
contribute to the material salvation of the industry.”195 The passive voice is important
here. For the when discussing India, this journalist felt compelled to describe consumers
as passive and ignorant beings in need of a stern education. This writer betrayed some
distaste, then, that a great British industry now needed to depend on its colonial subjects
for survival.
Derogatory descriptions of native consumers can be found when discussing other
colonial subjects, as well. For example, when he commented on Mr. Henry Bois’ trip to
Egypt, the “Tea Tatler,” wrote, “I trust he may be able to convince the Fellaheen that they
only want British-grown tea to complete the benefits that are supposed to have showered
upon them through British occupation of their country.”196 This wry comment on
Britain’s mandate essentially positioned tea as equivalent to Christianity. The native,
52
whether in Egypt or India, needed to be taught that British culture had brought them
many blessings.
Cheap tea sold in small amounts to the masses was thought to be the key to
transforming India tastes. Yet experts believed they first needed to influence elite tastes.
Such thinking seemed steeped in Veblenesque ideas about social climbing and
conspicuous consumption. Though it is unlikely that India’s planters actually read
Veblen, they certainly shared his assumptions about how fashions spread. They
maintained that tastes trickled down the social scale from “ruling chiefs,” especially those
who had visited Europe, to government servants and village landlords.197 Some worried
that certain groups, such as orthodox Hindus, were prejudiced “against tea,” but they still
argued that animosity would end when the masses saw their social betters had taken to
tea. Most experts insisted that there were no true dietary restrictions on tea as such and in
fact these laws may actually work to the benefit of tea:
Tea ought to prove a veritable godsend to the coolie, whose religious and
cast prejudices oblige him to be very fastidious in the choice of his liquid
refreshments. Alcohol is tabooed by the Mohammedan, but neither his
creed, nor that of the Hindu, so far as I am aware, contains any
condemnation against tea.198
Race thus shaped how markets were imagined as “experts” lumped cultural ethnic
diversity into a few simple categories, most notably putting all of India’s populace into
two simple groups, either Muslim or Hindu. In a similar way that the tea trade believed
that Americans’ British heritage shaped their tastes, they also held that Indians’
“Oriental” nature made them natural tea drinkers. When discussing potential consumers,
for example, Indians were often compared to other Asian people who already had a
confirmed taste for tea. One author of an article on native tea drinking was convinced
53
that Mohammedans in the Punjab, Sind and Baluchistan “will readily take to tea-drinking
for it is the universal beverage in the big towns of Afghanistan and Central Asia, and at
every important halting-place of caravans.”199 Marketing experts placed people into
simple, definable categories. They sought out new customers whose bodies and lifestyles
approximated those who already possessed a liking for the beverage. In this case, they
hoped that India’s Muslim population would share the predilections of those who because
they lived near the Silk Road enjoyed one of its treasures.
Despite a clear sense of racial difference then between India’s and Europe’s
population, the ITA still thought that the best way to make tea drinkers was to seek out
large public gatherings at which they could offer free samples and show people how to
make and drink tea. Indian consumers were introduced to tea at railway stations and post
offices, in their workplaces, at leisure events, and religious and other festivals. The ITA
also encouraged the growth of tea shops and built tea pavilions at exhibitions.200 In doing
so, however, the Tea Association targeted a very different populace than in Europe or
North America. Generally, these public institutions were patronized by male workers
rather than bourgeois ladies. The ITA, for example, encouraged the growth of the tea
shops that Parsees from Persia were opening in Bombay, Delhi and other regions of
urban India. Typically near large labor yards, these shops catered to workers of diverse
religious and caste backgrounds aerated water, tea and coffee. The tea, known as Iranee
tea, was initially from China.201 The Tea Association recognized that men, not women
patronized these shops. However, as they would also later do in Africa, targeting men
became an important strategy in colonial settings. To get tea into “native” homes, The
Association believed Indian men first needed to acquire a taste for the beverage.
54
The ITA also worked with both native and European middlemen to distribute free
samples and thereby inspire tastes.202 It supported numerous agencies and individuals
such as a German naval officer who freely distributed tea on the frontier with Persia, in
Western Persia and in Turkestan.203 This agent also catered to the Indian army because
he felt that soldiers did not possess the native’s “inherent suspicion of European articles
of consumption.”204 According to one report, such efforts had made headway “amongst
the men of the native army, on the railways, at the exhibitions, in the theaters,” and
among miners and mica and jute workers.205 The trade tried to solve the riddle of
“native” tastes by launching an Indian-only essay contest entitled “How to bring Indian
tea to Indian Homes.”206 This effort to get accurate information and be culturally
sensitive led to the use of local middlemen. In one instance a “smart Dacca-born Indian
assistant” was hired to visit homes, distribute free samples and give lectures on the
“benefits of tea drinking.” He told Hindus “that tea is a vegetarian’s drink,” and Indians
in general that tea was a “product of their Mother Country.” Basically, the Indian Tea
Association tried to get Indians to assure his compatriots that tea was not a foreign
“European” commodity but was an indigenous good. As we will see, not everyone
accepted this story.
By hiring local intermediaries and launching essay contests planters believed they
could gain a better understanding of local tastes and desires and thereby avoid cultural
errors. Of course the main problem for most Indians was that they could barely feed
themselves, let alone spend money on tea. The Indian Tea Association attempted in
various ways to compensate for this problem, working on producing a very cheap tea or
one that could travel easily and be kept for long periods of time without becoming stale.
55
So, for example, they produced a variant of Chinese brick tea. Planters also tried to
create a beverage that would be appealing in India’s hot climate so several years before
iced tea was served to Americans in St. Louis, a tea agency in India sold this “refreshing
draught” at railway stations, markets, jetties and football matches in Lahore and
Calcutta.207 Planters introduced compressed and iced tea in India but it appears that the
highly spiced and sweetened tea known as chai was a relatively recent Indian invention
which first appeared in the 1930s.208
Wherever they went the Tea Association and related agencies sought out
middlemen to help them alter their methods and their tea to meet local needs and desires.
In a sense then similar techniques were used to discover cultural “differences.” Tastes
were essentially understood in cultural not biological terms. Consumer desires appeared
to be universal merely filtered by culture. Nevertheless, planters did not see consumers
as equals. Not only did they imagine that Indians would be drinking the industry’s
refuse, but they also betrayed a derogatory perception of their native customers. When
thinking about the U.S., for example, the Tea Committee saw itself as forming alliances
with American merchants to reach intelligent audiences. In Europe they believed they
were again forming business partnerships which would cater to a refined female clientele.
In India local contacts helped planters force ignorant consumers to acquire a taste for a
cheap good and to learn that this new desire was good for them. In essence, planters
sought to conquer Indian consumers not work with them.
India’s ruling class provided the political justification necessary for this conquest.
In fact, in the early years of the new century the Viceroy himself endowed tea with a new
political significance when he recommended in a speech on the “Assam labour question”
56
that many of India’s problems would be solved if Indians drank tea. In a Daily Telegraph
article reacting to Curzon’s speech, Sir Edwin Arnold concurred and posited that tea was
a healthy drink that would materially benefit India. Its preparation involved boiling
water and therefore would save many lives. He argued in the face of much counter
evidence that tea was “nourishing,” and as in Britain this “social cup” was conducive to
“conversation and family peace.” Tea would thereby be a boon to “the patient, gentle
womenfolk, who have few such pleasures.” Arnold admitted, however, that tea would be
drunk differently in India than it was in Europe. He surmised that “If Lord Curzon’s idea
to “make the “Hindoo housewife” a tea drinker worked, she would drink it “as the
Japanese take it, pure and simple, without cumbrous paraphernalia,” such as milk and
sugar and the “spoons, plates, and cream jugs.” 209 Arnold’s derogatory comments, like
those uttered by Curzon himself, lent a great deal of political support to the creation of
“native markets.” In so doing, these men linked these efforts to Britain’s broader
civilizing mission and addressed wider questions about the significance of Britain’s rule
in India. When confronting challenges to their rule, these men argued that tea was among
the many blessings that the British had brought to India.
Curzon’s speech was in fact a response to a charge made by Sir Henry Cotton, the
Chief Commissioner for Assam, that its planters had introduced a new slave system on
their plantations. Planters’ journals, such as The Home and Colonial Mail, admitted that
isolated abuses had occurred but they steadfastly denied Cotton’s charge that Assam’s tea
planters were the “twentieth century representatives of the slave holders of the Southern
States.”210 They also countered such charges by focusing on the civilizing benefits of
consumption rather than production. A journalist in the planters’ paper Tea opined that
57
“planters and merchants of India” were succeeding “in their philanthropic efforts to
spread the blessings of tea among the heathen who sit in darkness and smoke opium. Tea
is what the benighted Indians require for their social elevation, and tea they must take.”211
Like the temperance advocates who promoted tea among the British working class,
planters were advocating the “civilizing” influence of a cup of tea and suppressing the
exploitative nature of labor in South Asia. Indeed, planters in India became an informal
“temperance party” which agitated against alcohol and for tea, especially in the vicinity
of their plantations. These advocates repeatedly espoused tea as “the cause of health and
temperance.” Tea would end fever, dysentery, and other diseases, wrote many who
supported the cause. 212
In India, then, politics inspired commerce. After Curzon’s speech, Messrs. Yule
and Co. agreed to work for three years to distribute tea to the “native population” without
remuneration. The Tea Association and most of the large agency houses contributed
three quarters of million pounds to support their work to expand the home market and
thereby civilize the natives.213 The business they started came to be known as the Indian
Tea Markets Expansion Commission, a term later adopted by the Tea Association itself in
the 1930s. Large companies such as Messrs. Parry and Co. and Brooke Bond who were
also fostering India’s tea drinking habit furnished the Tea Association with information.
In order “to prevent any clashing or overlapping” Brooke Bond even suggested that they
divide India into four territories and to aide in their efforts, Brooke Bond even asked for a
subsidy of at least £500 per annum.214 Local planters associations also appealed to the
Cess Committee to support their efforts. In one petition from the Kangra Planters Tea
Association, which surprisingly included two female growers, the group claimed to be
58
“pioneers of the introduction of the custom of tea drinking among the native population
in India.” Long before the Tea Association had begun this project they asserted that they
had sold nearly sixteen per cent of their production direct to the consumer from the local
factories.215
As much as it wished to see Indians drinking Indian tea, until the 1920s the Tea
Cess Committee was somewhat hesitant about spending enough to insure this would
occur. Some years they did little more than give small subsidies and bonuses to other
agencies at work in the subcontinent. Every year before the war tea propaganda experts
complained that India was an especially difficult market to work in because accurate
statistics were difficult to come by and because extreme poverty meant that even the
cheapest of teas were beyond the means of millions of Indians.216 The TCC worried that
they had made “unsatisfactory progress,” yet they dreamed that one day Indians would
learn to consume their nation’s produce.
Just before the war the Committee stepped up its Indian publicity. So, for
example, in 1910 it made an alliance with Lipton’s to display Indian tea at the United
Provinces Exhibition As they did elsewhere, visitors drank free cups of tea, read
pamphlets and saw pictures extolling the modernity of India’s tea gardens.217 In 1911 it
hired Radhanath Dey, a Bengali Agent with considerable experience in the tea trade, to
put together a tea display in conjunction with the Durbar that year, but “unfortunate
difficulties” meant that “no satisfactory display was possible.”218 In 1913 the problems in
India encouraged the Committee to seek more information about local cultures so they
launched a new contest for the “best proposal for a scheme to push Indian tea in India.”219
A Mr. R.J. Oats of Rawalpindi won the prize but his scheme was ignored. Instead the
59
Committee began work with the Governments of Bengal and Calcutta to limit teas
typically sold in bazaars that were “unfit for human consumption.” They also hired
Messrs. Pathé Frères to make a film to teach the natives how tea was manufactured and
thereby presumably encourage them to identify the drink as a native production.220
With the beginning of hostilities, transport costs increased, cess collections
diminished and rationing led to the temporary end of work in Europe and America and
greater attention to India. Though the TCC would eventually reactivate its European and
American campaigns, they increasingly imagined India and the Empire as the center of
their propaganda work. New media such as film and radio became increasingly
important and in 1923 the first Indian, A.C. Sen, joined the Tea Cess Committee.
Nationalist agitation branded tea as an especially unsavory British commodity but it was
also between the 20s and 40s that Indians began truly drinking tea.221
As we have seen, rivalries between India and Ceylon and between these imperial
industries and China and Japan encouraged numerous agencies to seek markets in many
regions of the globe. Though it is debatable whether these campaigns worked, their
methods became industry standards for tea and other similar commodities. Certainly, the
Ceylon and Indian Tea Associations believed their efforts were paying off. North
Americans switched from drinking East Asian green to South Asian black teas and after
the Chicago World’s fair overall tea consumption peaked in the U.S.222 The onslaught of
the advertising of other beverages, however, meant that Americans actually drank less tea
in the 1920s than they had in the 1890s. India, by contrast, steadily increased its taste for
tea until the 1970s when gross tea imports, though not per capita consumption, outpaced
60
Britain. Nevertheless, the relentless desire to recapture America for tea meant an even
greater presence of South Asia in American commercial culture in years to come.
Despite the very different politics involved in the formation of mass markets in
South Asia and North America, planters, politicians and journalists imagined both places
as vast markets of many millions and year after year they spent thousands to create those
markets. One key question which will be pursed in the next chapters is to what degree
the domestic economies, local tastes, and political contexts shaped the reception of India
and its tea in places as diverse as Missouri and the United Provinces. Here I’ve
emphasized how imperial culture was a global export that was produced both by British
and local entrepreneurs, journalists and politicians. This cosmopolitan business
community was forged in newspapers and trade journals, at exhibitions, and in meetings.
It recognized differences in consumers’ ability and desire to consume but believed that
tastes could be cultivated the same way across the world.
This chapter has followed planters as they turned into retailers and publicity
experts who traveled the world during the fin-de-siècle. Of course, it was also true that
grocers could become planters. The most famous of these was the globe-trotting-grocerturned-sportsman-sahib, Sir Thomas Lipton. Lipton’s story has been told many times
and indeed his newspaper advertisements illustrating Ceylon’s tea plantations have been
much reproduced and studied. Lipton represented himself as the classic self-made man.
Born of modest Irish background in Glasgow, he sailed for New York, and then returned
to Glasgow to build a fortune as a grocer. Lipton acquired tea plantations in Ceylon
while also creating a multi-national corporation, with its U.S. base in Hoboken, New
Jersey. Lipton was certainly at the forefront of mass retailing and he definitely helped
61
secure a taste for Ceylon’s produce and “modern” imperialism around the globe. Anandi
Ramamurthy has shown, for example, how Lipton’s British advertisements in the 1890s
and 1900s represented Ceylon as an ordered paradise, both serene and modern. His ads
were directed at consumers rather than retailers and used images of contented laborers to
suppress an emerging public debate going on in Britain about the conditions of tea
plantation labor.223 This merchant king was then crucial to the history of mass retailing
and the construction of empire at home. However, there has been perhaps too much
attention placed on extraordinary individuals such as Thomas Lipton and surprisingly
little given to the planters who first sold their produce and colony to retailers like
Lipton.224 Lipton profited from a global network, established primarily by planters
supported with funds from colonial governments and trade associations. From a global
perspective we can rethink the significance of men like Lipton. Indeed, he was in some
ways quite similar to J.L. Shand, Richard Blechynden or the unnamed, but “smart Daccaborn Indian assistant” who sought to teach the “blessings” of tea to indigenous
populations.
1
Assam Company, Report of the Directors and Auditors made to the Shareholders at the General Meeting,
19 December 1882. Assam Company Archives, Ms 27, 052/4. Guildhall Library, London. Also see H.A.
Antrobus, A History of the Assam Company, 1839-1953 (Edinburgh: T. and A. Constable, 1957). For
general histories of the Indian tea industry, see Sir Percival Griffiths, The History of the Indian Tea
Industry (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1967) and Arup Kumar Dutta, Cha Garam! The Tea Story.
(Guwahati, Assam: Paloma Publications, 1992). For a Victorian overview see J. Berry White, “The Indian
Tea Industry: Its Rise, Progress During Fifty Years, and Prospects Considered from a Commercial Point of
View,” Journal of the Royal Society of Arts (June 10, 1887): 734-51.
2
For specific company information, see the tea and tea share brokers’, Gow, Wilson and Stanton’s
publication, Tea Producing Companies of India and Ceylon (London: A. Southey and Co., 1897).
3
Other inexpensive “drugs” went through a similar process around the same time. See, for example,
Howard Cox, The Global Cigarette: Origins and Evolution of British American Tobacco 1880-1945
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) and Mark Pendergrass, Uncommon Grounds: The History of
Coffee and How it Transformed our World (New York: Basic Books, 1999). Illicit drugs were of course
also central to globalization. See, for example, Carl A. Trocki, Opium, Empire and the Global Political
Economy: A Study of the South Asian Opium Trade (London and New York: Routledge, 1999) and Opium
62
Regimes: China, Britain, and Japan, 1839-1952, eds. Timothy Brook and Bob Tadashi Wakabayaski
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
4
The Kolkata-based organization is still very active and is currently trying to increase the domestic market
in India. See the brief description of the ITA’s history and its current campaigns on its webpage,
http://www.indiatea.org/. A couple of recent studies have mentioned the Indian Tea Association’s
promotional efforts, but have not explored how this organization was at the forefront of globalization. See,
for example, E.M. Collingham’s chapter on tea consumption in India in her recent, Curry: A Tale of Cooks
and Conquerors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Piya Chatterjee, A Time for Tea: Women, Labor,
and Post/Colonial Politics on an Indian Plantation (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2001)
and Anandi Ramamurthy, Imperial Persuaders: Images of Africa and Asia in British Advertising
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003).
5
Scholarly studies of tea drinking in Great Britain have emphasized the domestic and the feminine. See,
for example, Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace, Consuming Subjects: Women, Shopping and Business in the
Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 19-36. Nearly all general histories
mention tea shops and tea gardens and other public spaces, but few have explored how these spaces
introduced people to new tastes. See, for example, Jane Pettigrew, A Social History of Tea (London: The
National Trust, 2001). For a general overview, see John Burnett, Liquid Pleasures: A Social History of
Drinks in Modern Britain (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), chapter three.
6
This literature is very large. See, for example, David Howes, ed. Cross-Cultural Consumption: Global
Markets, Local Realties (London: Routledge, 1996). An excellent and nuanced study of this sort is Daniel
Miller’s, “Coca-Cola: A Black Sweet Drink from Trinidad,” in Material Cultures: Why Some Things
Matter, edited by Daniel Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 169-87.
7
Horniman’s packet tea firm was already selling their wares on a global scale in the mid-century. “The
Packet Tea Trade,” Home and Colonial Mail (13 March 1891), iv. There is a long history of long-distance
trade. For a particularly well-documented example of 18th century global retailing, see, Neil McKendrick,
“Josiah Wedgwood and the Commercialization of the Potteries,” The Birth of a Consumer Society: The
Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England, eds. Neil McKendrick, John Brewer and J.H. Plumb
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 127-140.
8
For an important analysis of the invention of colonial consumers, see Timothy Burke, Lifebuoy Men, Lux
Women: Commodification, Consumption, and Cleanliness in Modern Zimbabwe (Durham and London:
Duke University Press, 1996). At least since the 18 th century, missionaries and businessmen saw the
consumption of certain, but not all western goods as part of the civilizing process. See John L. and Jean
Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution: The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier, Vol. 2
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). In a sense the idea was embedded in 18 th century notions of
the divinity of commerce and can be seen to structure understandings of China to this day. See, David
Porter, “A Peculiar but Uninteresting Nation: China and the Discourse of Commerce in 18 th Century
England,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 33.2 (2000): 181-99. Steven Kemper suggests some of the parallels
between religion and marketing in Buying and Believing: Sri Lankan Advertising in a Transnational World
(Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2001).
9
In Edwardian Britain there was a very vocal debate about the ethics of plantation-based labor. See, for
example, Lowell J. Satre, Chocolate on Trial: Slavery, Politics and the Ethics of Business (Athens: Ohio
University Press, 2005).
10
For a parallel argument, see Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption
in Postwar America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003). Also see, Charles McGovern, “Consumption and
Citizenship in the United States, 1900-1940,” in Getting and Spending: European and American Societies
in the Twentieth Century, ed. Susan Strasser, Charles McGovern, and Matthias Judt (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998), 37-58.
11
See, for example, Ramamurthy, Imperial Persuaders; Thomas Richards, Commodity Culture in Victorian
England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851-1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991); Ann
McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York and
London: Routledge, 1995), 207-31; John MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of
British Public Opinion, 1880-1960 (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1984), and John
MacKenzie, ed. Imperialism and Popular Culture (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1987).
12
General historical work on globalization has tended to neglect consumer culture. In his overview of the
historiography of globalization, for example, A.G. Hopkins covers a good deal of ground, but he doesn’t
63
address the globalization of consumption except in passing. See, A.G. Hopkins, “The History of
Globalization—and the Globalization of History?” in Globalization in World History edited by A.G.
Hopkins (New York: W.W. Norton, 2002). For two important collections which do historicize consumer
culture, see Consuming Cultures, Global Perspectives: Historical Trajectories, Transnational Exchanges,
ed. John Brewer and Frank Trentmann (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2006) and Consuming Modernity:
Public Culture in a South Asian World, ed. Carol A. Breckenridge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1995). This lack of attention is surprising given that there is excellent social theory on globalization
of media and culture. See, for example, Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of
Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996) and Arjun Appadurai, ed. Globalization,
special issue of Public Culture: Society for Transnational Cultural Studies, vol. 12, no. 1 (Winter 2000);
John Tomlinson, Globalization and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Fredric Jameson
and Masao Miyoshi, eds. The Cultures of Globalization (Durham and London: Duke University Press,
1998).
13
Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through Twentieth-Century Europe
(Cambridge, Mass: The Belknap Press, 2005), 6. Also see, Robert Rydell and Bob Kroes, Buffalo Bill in
Bologna: The Americanization of the World, 1869-1922 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago
Press, 2005).
14
For the consumer as a historical construct, see Frank Trentmann, ed. The Making of the Consumer:
Knowledge, Power and Identity in the Modern World, ed. Frank Trentmann (Oxford and New York: Berg,
2006), especially the introduction.
15
Thomas Metcalf, Imperial Connections: India in the Indian Ocean Arena, 1860-1920 (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2007) and Sugata Bose, A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age
of Global Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006).
16
One of the best studies looking at the history of globalization through a particular commodity is Sven
Beckert, “Emancipation and Empire: Reconstructing the Worldwide Web of Cotton Production in the Age
of the American Civil War,” American Historical Review Vol. 109, no. 5 (2004). An important study
which also emphasizes networks is Robert Batchelor’s “On the Movement of Porcelain’s: Rethinking the
Birth of Consumer Society s Interactions of Exchange Networks, 1600-1750,” in Consuming Cultures,
Global Perspectives, 95-122.
17
Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (University of California Press,
2005), 10, 91.
18
Antoinette Burton warned against seeing Britain and its Empire as a fixed or closed system.
“Introduction: On the Inadequacy and the Indispensability of the Nation,” in After the Imperial Turn:
Thinking with and through the Nation, ed. Antoinette Burton (Durham and London: Duke University Press,
2003), 1-23. For examples of scholarship that has placed the Empire in a global framework, see the other
essays in Ibid; Durba Ghosh and Dane Kennedy, eds., Decentering Empire: Britain, India and the
Transcolonial World (Hyderabad: Longman Orient, 2006) and Kevin Grant, Philippa Levine and Frank
Trentmann, eds., Beyond Sovereignty: Britain, Empire and Transnationalism, c. 1880-1950, edited by
(Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
19
Chatterjee, A Time for Tea, 49. Also see, Catherine Hall, Civilizing Subjects: Metropole and Colony in
the English Imagination, 1830-1867 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2002), 284. For a recent
overview of this question, see Joanna de Groot, “Metropolitan Desires and Colonial Connections:
Reflections on Consumption and Empire,” in At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the
Imperial World, ed. Catherine Hall and Sonya O. Rose (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006),
166-90. For an earlier period, see James Walvin, Fruits of Empire: Exotic Produce and British Taste,
1660-1800 (New York: New York University Press, 1997); Woodruff D. Smith, “Complications of the
Commonplace: Tea, Sugar, and Imperialism,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 23:2 (Autumn 1992):
259-78; Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants and
Intoxicants, trans. by David Jacobson (New York: Pantheon, 1992). For general arguments about
imperialism and twentieth century popular culture, see Stuart Ward, ed. British Culture and the End of
Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001) and Wendy Webster, Englishness and Empire,
1939-1965 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
20
Bernard Porter, The Absent-Minded Imperialists: What the British Really Thought about Empire (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2004), 34-5. Porter treats the subject in a very superficial way, referring to a
survey of Scottish school children conducted in 2002 for his evidence to support this point about
64
consumers’ ignorance. David Cannadine briefly explores the contradictory meanings of “imperial
provisioning” in his childhood memories from the 1950s and 60s in Orientalism: How the British Saw their
Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 186.
21
Recent food scares and worries about lead-painted children’s toys imported from China reflect worries
about this gap between production and consumption and are simply the most recent contribution to a very
old discussion in the “West” about the consequences of doing business with the “East.” Erika Rappaport,
“Packaging China: Foreign Articles and Dangerous Tastes in the Mid-Victorian Tea Party.” In The Making
of the Consumer: Knowledge, Power and Identity in the Modern World, ed. Frank Trentmann (Oxford and
New York: Berg, 2006), 125-46. For recent scholarship on the globalization of food in particular see, Fast
Food/Slow Food: The Cultural Economy of the Global Food System, ed. Richard Wilk (New York:
Altamira Press, 2006); Food in Global History (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1999). Many studies
of a single commodity have been “global” in their approach, tending to follow the commodity from sites of
production to those of consumption. See, for example, the classic, Sidney Mintz’s Sweetness and Power:
The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York and London: Penguin, 1985). Another approach to the
anthropology and history of food has been to focus on how foods have become part of nation-making. See,
for example, the essays in Food Nations: Selling Taste in Consumer Societies, ed. Warren Belasco and
Philip Scranton (New York and London: Routledge, 2002). Scholars need to start thinking more about the
relationship between the nationalization and globalization of food.
22
The Grocer (15 November 1862): 380.
23
Samuel Baildon, “The Origin and Future Prospects of Tea in India,” in Tea Cyclopedia (Calcutta: Indian
Tea Gazette, 1881), 15.
24
Edward Money, The Cultivation and Manufacture of Tea, 4th edition (London: W.B. Whittingham,
1883), 184-93. Planters followed these “experiments” closely in their papers. On Natal, the Caucuses and
Jahore, for example, see The Home and Colonial Mail (30 May 1879): i. On the Azores, see Ibid, 13 June
1879, i. On the development in the Caucuses, see ibid. (6 March 1889): iii. Older industries such as that in
Japan and Java began to appear a threat though the former’s teas primarily went to the United States and
the latter to Holland and Northern Germany.
25
The Grocer (25 August 1866), 132.
26
In the 1850s and 1860s, South Carolina seemed to possess the most likely climate for tea and as early as
1850 a businessman who had made his fortune in ocean steamers, Junius Smith had some success growing
tea near Greenville. “Tea: Its Consumption and Culture,” The Merchant’s Magazine and Commercial
Review (February 1863): 117.
27
Quoted in The Home and Colonial Mail (27 May 1881): iii.
28
Grocer (23 July 1864): 69.
29
Pittsburg Commercial cited in the Grocer (15 April 1871): 335. On Hollister, see The Grocer (3
February 1872), 121.
30
“Tea: Its Consumption and Culture,” The Merchant’s Magazine and Commercial Review (February
1863): 117. Victorians consumers tasted these at their exhibitions. For example, in addition to the teas
from India and Ceylon, those from Fiji, Natal and the Straits Settlements were on also on display at the
Colonial Exhibition held in London in 1886. See details from J.L. Shand’s speech “British Grown Teas,”
which he delivered in the Ceylon Court on 9 June 1886. “British Grown Teas,” The Home and Colonial
Mail (18 June 1886): iii.
31
Tea and the Tea Trade: Parts First and Second (New York: Geo. W. Wood, 1850), 10-11.
32
Colonial Empire and Star of India (7 June 1878): 10. The first projects in South Carolina were evidently
abandoned, but State Department again encouraged its tea culture in the 1890s. Home and Colonial Mail
(11 August 1893): iii.
33
Colonial Empire and Star of India (20 August 1880): 324.
34
Money, Cultivation and Manufacture of Tea, 184.
35
Money, Cultivation and Manufacture of Tea, 190.
36
In 1880 the country imported between fifty and sixty million pounds of tea. The Colonial Empire and
Star of India (16 July 1880): 3.
37
Tea and the Tea Trade, 11. Also see, “Tea Consumption in the United States,” The Merchant’s
Magazine and Commercial Review (December 1859): 734. Some worried that these methods led to a great
many health problems. See “Tea Drinking in the United States,” The Home and Colonial Mail (4 January
1895): v.
65
“Tea: Its Consumption and Culture,” The Merchant’s Magazine and Commercial Review (February
1863): 113. For Americans, tea, of course, became identified with England’s illiberal authoritarian
economic practices in the late 18th century. T.H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer
Politics Shaped American Independence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Further research is
needed, however, on whether or not the politics surrounding tea in the revolutionary era continued to
influence America’s taste in decades to come.
39
Tea consumption in Britain had grown as well, but some experts anticipated that soon supply would
outstrip demand. “Ceylon Tea,” Home and Colonial Mail (19 June 1885): iii.
40
Money, Cultivation and Manufacture of Tea, 184.
41
“The Battle of the Teas!” The Tea Trader and Grocers’ Review II, no. 5 (September 1894): 74. Some
experts did feel that China and Japan could reassert themselves if they reformed their manufacturing
methods. See, for example, “Tea Companies’ Shares,” The Home and Colonial Mail (19 April 1895): iii.
42
“The Battle of the Teas!” 74.
43
Though still discussed in the “new products” section of the Planters’ Association annual report for 188384, the author noted that their teas had achieved a very high reputation for quality. “Thirteenth Annual
Report,” Proceedings of the Planters’ Association of Ceylon for the Year Ending 1884 (Colombo: Times of
Ceylon Press, 1884), xxiii. For the history of Ceylon’s tea industry, see D.M. Forrest, A Hundred Years of
Ceylon Tea, 1867-1967 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1967). Forrest’s book was commissioned by the
Ceylon Tea Propaganda Board and he had worked for the board. Also see, Maxwell Fernando, The Story of
Ceylon Tea (Colombo: Mlesna, 2000) and Planters’ Association of Ceylon, 1854-1954 Centenary
Celebration Volume (Colombo: Times of Ceylon, 1954).
44
Overland Ceylon Observer (24 February 1886): 191.
45
Griffiths, Indian Tea Industry, 119.
46
Planters debated limiting supplies throughout this period, but wasn’t until the early 1930s that this
became an official policy. For an example of their debates, however, see “Notes on Produce and Finance,”
Home and Colonial Mail (22 November 1889): iii. All growing nations embarked on advertising their
nation’s teas at this time. See, for example, “Japan and the Tea Trade,” Planters’ Supplement to the Home
and Colonial Mail, 35 (1 January 1897): iii. Formosa Oolong Tea (Taihoku: Bureau of Productive
Industries, Government of Formosa, 1913) and Tamotsu Morooka, Tea Drinking Proved Effective in
Health Improvement: Medicinal Properties of Tea Scientifically Ascertained (Tokyo: Nakaya Mitsuma,
1928).
47
Home and Colonial Mail (12 September 1879): iii.
48
The Grocer (28 February 1880): 488.
49
Ceylon Observer (18 May 1886): 455.
50
Rappaport, Tea Parties, chapter one.
51
The Dutch, for example, formed the Javanese Tea Association in 1881 and Tea Export Bureau in 1905.
William H. Ukers, All About Tea (New York: Tea and Coffee Trade Journal) vol. 1, 125. For a brief
history of Japanese tea associations, see Ukers, All About Tea, vol. 1, 324-6. These trade associations were
not, however, merely attempts to defend a nation’s industry. Many were backed by merchants in Europe
and Asia to defend a trade that was international in scope. For example, The China Tea Association was
formed in 1907 by British importers and Chinese merchants, Ukers, vol. 2, 133. The North Formosa
Foreign Board of Trade was established by British and American businessmen in 1900 in the Tamsui
Chamber of Commerce. Ibid, 232.
52
The Agency houses were private companies that were crucial to the development of South Asia’s
economy between the late 18th and early 19th centuries. They not only linked the metropolitan and South
Asian economies, but were global businesses with interests that stretched from Europe to India and the Far
East. See, Tony Webster, “An Early Global Business in a Colonial Context: The Strategies, Management,
and Failure of John Palmer and Company of Calcutta, 1780-1830,” Enterprise and Society, Vol. 6, no. 1
(March 2005), 98-133; Michael Greenberg, British Trade and the Opening of China, 1800-1842
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951); S. B. Singh, European Agency Houses in Bengal, 17831833 (Calcutta: Firma K.L. Mukhopadhyay, 1966), Amales Tripathi, Trade and Finance in the Bengal
Presidency, 1793-1833 (Calcutta: Oxford University Press, 1979). The agency houses were not directly
involved in tea management until after the end of the EIC’s monopoly, but they helped finance the
Company by investing in the Canton trade in these early years.
38
66
53
The Indian Tea Association also represented regional branches. See, for example, Assam Branch: Indian
Tea Association, 1889-1989 Centenary Souvenir (Guwahati, Assam: Indian Tea Association, 1989).
54
Quoted in William H. Ukers, All About Tea, Vol. II (New York: The Tea and Coffee Trade Journal,
1935), 198. For a copy of the group’s prospectus and a list of men who joined the provisional committee,
see Planter’s Supplement to the Home and Colonial Mail (18 July 1879), iii and for further discussion, see
(25 July 1879), iii.
55
The Indian Tea Gazette called the new organization a clique and suggested that it wouldn’t be able to
meet its stated goals. I’m not sure why the journal did support the ITDA since I have not yet been able to
find a copy of it. However, I suspect that it represented planters in Southern India and eventually formed
their own organization. I suspect these organizations also protected the racial privileges of white planters,
especially since there were no non-white planters in elite positions of the ITA until well after independence.
56
Ukers, All About Tea, Vol.II, 199.
57
Ukers, All About Tea, Vol. II, 199.
58
According to J.L. Shand, per capita consumption rates in 1885 were as follows: Australia 7.66 lbs; New
Zealand, 7.23 lbs; Great Britain, 4.9 lbs, Newfoundland, Canada, and Tasmania were nearly the same,
followed by the U.S. at 1.3 lbs, Holland at 1.05. “British Grown Teas,” The Home and Colonial Mail (18
June 1886): iii.
59
“The Tea Market in Australia,” The Tea Cyclopedia (Calcutta: Indian Tea Gazette, 1881), 276.
60
“The Combination against Indian Tea in Australia,” The Home and Colonial Mail (16 December 1881):
iii. For a later assessment of the Tea Syndicates successes in Australia in the 1880s, see Sir Edward Buck’s
remarks made at a meeting of Calcutta Tea Agency Houses held on 30 January 1903. F174/922, Indian
Tea Association Archive, India Office Collection at the British Library, London.
61
“Report on the Canadian Market—A New Market for Indian Tea,” The Tea Cyclopedia (Calcutta: Indian
Tea Gazette, 1881), 289.
62
The Colonial Empire and Star of India (26 November 1880): 3; “The American Market,” The Tea
Cyclopedia (Calcutta: Indian Tea Gazette, 1881), 286. On these early attempts to oust the China trade from
Australia, see The Tea Cyclopedia, 276-85.
63
See the mention of this article in The Colonial Empire and Star of India (14 January 1881): iii.
64
Report of the Directors and Auditors made to the Shareholders at a General Meeting (19 June 1882) Ms.
27,052/4, Assam Company Archives, Guildhall Library, London.
65
The Colonial Empire and Star of India (26 October 1888): iii.
66
See previous chapter which explores how British taste changed from Chinese to Indian teas in the 1870s
and 1880s.
67
The Colonial Empire and Star of India (23 September 1887): iii.
68
The Colonial Empire and Star of India (28 September 1888): iii.
69
“Pushing Ceylon in America,” Planters’ Supplement to Home and Colonial Mail, 19 (28 September
1888): iii.
70
“Pushing Ceylon in America,” Home and Colonial Mail, 19 (5 October 1888): iii-iv. Also see the other
responses on 26 October, 8 and 16 November 1888.
71
“The Rise of the Tea Industry in Ceylon,” Home and Colonial Mail, 12 (16 April 1886), iv.
72
As in India, The Planter’s Association launched their global tea campaign when they hired Mr. A.M.
Ferguson, the editor of the Ceylon Observer, to represent Ceylon at the forthcoming Melbourne Exhibition.
In 1883, the editor of the Ceylon Times, held a similar job at the Calcutta Exhibition. The Planters’
Association of Ceylon, 117.
73
E.R. Stimpson, Minutes of the Proceedings of a General Meeting of the Planters’ Association in Ceylon
(21 September 1883) in Proceedings of the Planters’ Association of Ceylon for the Year Ending 1884
(Colombo: Times of Ceylon Press, 1884), 66-7.
74
Home and Colonial Mail 35 (15 January 1897), v.
75
Ceylon Observer (17 May 1886): 454. For a similar argument, see “Tea versus Coffee,” Tea, vol. II, no.
16 (July 1902): 473.
76
Ceylon Observer (2 November 1886): 484.
77
Ceylon Observer (26 May 1886): 485.
78
Ceylon Observer (20 August 1886): 769.
67
79
Forrest, A Hundred Years of Ceylon Tea, 197. For the debates on the establishment of the tea syndicate
and how they could open the American market, see H.K. Rutherford’s proposal and its discussion in The
Ceylon Observer (22 June 1886): 565 and discussions during the next months.
80
Tea Syndicate Circular, published in Ceylon Observer (20 August 1886): 769.
81
By the early 1890s, it also began tea publicity in Tasmania, Sweden, and Germany, and in a limited way
in Ceylon itself. The Planters’ Association of Ceylon, 118.
82
The Planters’ Association of Ceylon, 1854-1954 (Colombo: Times of Ceylon, 1954) and Forrest, A
Hundred Years of Ceylon Tea, 186-7 and 193-212.
83
Ceylon Observer (2 November 1886): 483-84. On the American Trade’s resistance, also see, Ceylon
Observer (17 June 1887), 555.
84
Ceylon Observer (25 May 1886): 483.
85
Ceylon Observer (17 May 1886): 454.
86
Ceylon Observer (25 May 1886): 483.
87
“Ceylon Tea,” quoted in the Ceylon Observer (4 September 1886): 820.
88
Ukers, All About Tea, vol. II, 281.
89
“Ceylon Tea in America,” Ceylon Observer (17 June 1887): 555.
90
“Ceylon Tea in America,” Ceylon Observer (17 June 1887): 555.
91
“Ceylon Tea in America,” Ceylon Observer (17 June 1887): 555. Pineo and Murry also stimulated
demand and avoided their competition by going to the very summit of the U.S. social system—the
president. Just as the East India Company had done fifty years earlier when they had sent Queen Victoria
Assam tea, this Philadelphia firm claimed that it sent a similar present to Grover Cleveland. The President
evidently wrote them a nice note saying that he thought their tea tasted “good.” Whether or not this is a
true story, it certainly made good advertising copy and was thought to stimulate social climbing.
92
For a similar argument see, John J. McCusker, “The Demise of Distance: The Business Press and the
Origins of the Information Revolution in the Early Modern Atlantic World,” American Historical Review
Vol. 110, no. 2 (April 2005): 295-321.
93
R.E. Pineo, “Tea for America,” Ceylon Observer (23 April 1888): 382.
94
See, for example, Ceylon Observer (24 April 1888): 390; See the discussion over the next few days and
month as well.
95
Ceylon Observer (20 July 1888): 687.
96
Ceylon Observer (25 April 1888): 392. Pineo claimed to growers that he had extensively checked out
May’s personal and professional background with an American branch of a Liverpool banking firm, with
the Dun Agency, the Bradstreet Agency, the State Examiner of Banks of the State of New York and all had
spoken very highly of his private and business character. Ceylon Observer (21 July 1888): 701. For the
role of these agencies in establishing a man’s character, see Scott Sandage, Born Losers: A History of
Failure in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995).
97
Ceylon Observer (5 May 1888): 433.
98
See, R.E. Pineo’s discussion of growers’ reactions, Ceylon Observer (13 August 1888):749.
99
Report of the General Meeting of the Planters’ Association of Ceylon, held at Nuwara Eliya, published in
the Ceylon Observer (11 December 1888): 1187.
100
Ceylon Observer (6 July 1889): 694. Also see, Ceylon Observer (8 July 1889): 695.
101
Ukers, All About Tea, vol. II, 281.
102
C.K. Reid to the Editor, Ceylon Observer (20 July 1888): 688.
103
See, his letter quoted by Murray, in the Ceylon Observer, (20 July, 1888): 687 and his own letter to the
paper, (20 July 1888): 688. This is an example of consumer preference influencing production. However,
it is better to see this relationship as retailers attempting to alter producers. On the way in which
consumers’ tastes can influence production in the global context, see Jeremy Prestholdt, “On the Global
Repercussions of East African Consumerism,” American Historical Review 109, no. 3 (June 2004): 755-80.
104
Ceylon Observer (4 April 1889: 333); See a further list published on (6 April 1889): 340.
105
“Hop Tea,” Home and Colonial Mail (23 October 1891): iii.
106
Gow. Wilson and Stanton, Tea Circular, 1890. Assam Co. archives, ms 27, 051. Guildhall Library,
London.
107
See J.L. Shand’s discussion of this need published in the Ceylon Observer (8 August 1888): 735. For an
assessment of the problems and constraints faced by growers, see H.K. Rutherford’s opinion in the Ceylon
68
Observer (10 August 1888): 740. For another “plan” to introduce tea, see the discussion of a Dr. Duke’s
plan, Ceylon Observer (26 September 1888):898.
108
De Grazia argues for the reemergence of the fair as a key facet of interwar market culture in her section
on the Leipzig Fair, Irresistible Empire, 187-205.
109
A.G. Stanton, A Report on British-Grown Tea (London: William Clowes, 1887), 6-7. This report was
ordered by Commissioners for the Colonial and Indian Exhibition, held in London in 1886. For a fuller
discussion of the representation of Ceylon and its teas in Britain, see chapter three of Tea Parties.
110
Forrest, A Hundred Years of Ceylon Tea, 199. For Amsterdam, see The Home and Colonial Mail (2
May 1884): iv.
111
Letter from J.L. Shand to H.K. Rutherford, published in the Ceylon Observer (11 June 1888): 545.
112
Some key works on exhibitions and imperial culture include, Peter Hoffenberg’s An Empire on Display:
English, Indian and Australian Exhibitions from the Crystal Palace to the First World War (Berkeley and
London: University of California Press, 2001); Louise Purbeck, ed. The Great Exhibition of 1851: New
Interdisciplinary Essays (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 200), especially Lara Kriegel’s essay
in the volume, “Narrating the Subcontinent in 1851: India at the Crystal Palace,” 146-78. Also see her
forthcoming book, Grand Designs: Labor, Empire, and the Museum in Victorian Culture (Durham and
London: Duke University Press, 2007); Tim Barringer and Tom Flynn, eds. Colonialism and the Object:
Empire, Material Culture and the Museum (London and New York: Routledge, 1998); Jeffrey A.
Auerbach, The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Nation on Display (New Haven and London: Yale University
Press, 1999); Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Berkeley and London: University of California Press,
1991); Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum : History, Theory, Politics (London and New York:
Routledge, 1995); Becky E. Conekin, “The Autobiography of a Nation”: The 1951 Festival of Britain
(Manchester: Manchester, 2003).
113
The Planters’ Gazette (1 May 1893): 192.
114
I plan to work further on American perceptions of the British Empire since Orientalism was a dominant
theme at Chicago and was particularly associated with the Ottoman Empire. For the complex ways in
which Arab culture was staged in Chicago, see Zeynep Çelik, “Speaking Back to the Orientalist Discourse
at the World’s Columbian Exposition,” in Noble Dreams, Wicked Pleasures: Orientalism in America,
1870-1930 (Princeton: Princeton University Press in Association with the Sterling and Francine Clark Art
Institute, 2000), 77-97.
115
As the Chairman of the joint Indian and Ceylon American Advertising Fund explained it in 1906, “The
very machinery for the active pushing of India and Ceylon Teas did not exist” prior to Chicago. See W.
Brown, letter to the Indian Tea Cess Committee, 22 September 1906. F174/926, Indian Tea Association
Archives, India Office Collection, British Library, London.
116
“The Ceylon Tea Fund, Ceylon Observer (22 February 1888): 182. On a criticism of the island’s
government, see David Reid’s letter in the Ceylon Observer (11 June 1888):545.
117
Forrest, A Hundred Years of Ceylon Tea, 198.
118
World’s Columbian Exposition Hand Book and Catalogue: Ceylon Courts (London: Castell Brothers,
1893), 2.
119
Exposition Hand Book, 2-6.
120
See the editorial on the subject from the Ceylon Observer (2 August 1892): 818.
121
J.J. Grinlinton, Report to the Government, published in the Ceylon Observer (16 July 1892):763.
122
J.J. Grinlinton, Report to the Government, published in the Ceylon Observer (16 July 1892):763.
123
Exposition Hand Book, viii.
124
See, for example, the editorial on Chicago, entitled “Ancient Ceylon Art and Modern Ceylon Tea,”
published in the Ceylon Observer (18 November 1892): 1242. This theme was also well developed in
related promotions such as World’s Columbian Exposition Hand Book and Catalogue: Ceylon Courts
(London: Cassell Brothers, 1893).
125
There is a vast literature on exhibitions in general and the Chicago World’s Fair in particular, but the
work that explores the subtle differences in America’s world’s fairs and the way they represented empire to
Americans during these years remains, Robert Rydell’s All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at
American International Expositions, 1876-1916 (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press,
1984). See, especially chapter two on Chicago and chapter six on St. Louis.
126
M.M. Manring, Slave in a Box: The Strange Career of Aunt Jemima (Charlottesville and London:
University Press of Virginia, 1998), 75-78.
69
127
See, for example, the advertisement for the commission agent and general merchant, E.B. Cressy of
Colombo. Exposition Handbook, inside cover.
128
“Indian Tea at Chicago,” The Home and Colonial Mail (7 April 1893), iii.
129
“The Battle of the Teas!”, 74.
130
“Indian Teas at the World’s Fair,” The Home and Colonial Mail (11 August 1893), iii.
131
“Indian Tea at Chicago,” The Home and Colonial Mail (14 April 1893), iii.
132
“The Battle of the Teas!”, 74.
133
“The Battle of the Teas!”, 74.
134
“Indian Tea in America,” The Home and Colonial Mail (19 April 1895): iii
135
“What The Americans Drink,” The Home and Colonial Mail (8 January 1897), iii.
136
“Indian Tea in America,” The Home and Colonial Mail (19 April 1895): iii
137
“Tea in the United States,” The Home and Colonial Mail (8 January 1897): iii.
138
Ramamurthy, Imperial Persuaders, 98. See, especially chapter four, “Tea Advertising and its
Ideological Support for Vertical Control over Production.” Such images were extremely persistent and can
be found in tea advertising today. See, Chatterjee’s discussion in A Time for Tea, 94-5.
139
It was extremely common for advertisers to promote the modernity of a particular business in a variety
of ways during these years. See, for example, Pamela Walker Laird, Advertising Progress: American
Business and the Rise of Consumer Marketing (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1998).
140
“Indian and Ceylon Tea in the United States,” The Home and Colonial Mail (5 February 1897): iii.
141
The Home and Colonial Mail (1 January 1897), iii and (15 January 1897), iii.
142
The Home and Colonial Mail (22 January 1897), iii.
143
“The Indian Tea Association,” The Home and Colonial Mail (5 March 1897), iii.
144
In 1893 the US had imported 1,870,590 lbs from Ceylon and 2,111, 247 from India. In 1896 it imported
9, 474,019 from Ceylon and 5,205, 405 from India. Statistics from a circular from Gow, Wilson and
Stanton reprinted in The Home and Colonial Mail (5 March 1897), iv.
145
See, for example, the annual reports of the Indian Tea Cess Committee, from 1903-1936. The
Committee changed its name in 1936 to the Indian Tea Market Expansion Board. The reports for 1903-13
are held as F174/922, Indian Tea Associate Collection, India Office Collection, British Library.
146
For this debate about tea and taxes, see Rappaport, Tea Parties, chapter three. Ironically, the Tea Cess
Committee was not charged with nor did it feel it was necessary to spend much time or money developing
what they believed was an already large and stable taste for Indian teas.
147 nd
2 Annual Report of the Tea Cess Committee, for the year ending 31st March 1905. F174/922, ITAA,
IOC. The Committee also backed limited efforts, such as introducing Indian Brick Tea in Tibet. 3rd
Annual Report of the Tea Cess Committee, for the year ending 31 March 1906. F174/922, ITAA, IOC.
148
Tea had been introduced in Natal in 1850 and by the 1890s Natal’s tea industry had become firmly
established. See, for example, J. Forsyth Ingram, The Colony of Natal: An Official Handbook and Railway
Guide (London: Sir Joseph Causton and Sons, 1895), 75, 140-46. In 1903, Europeans farmed about 4,000
acres and Indians about 80 in this colony. C.W.F. Harrison, ed. Natal: An Illustrated Official Railway
Guide and Handbook of General Information (London: Payne Jennings, 1903), 269. Also see, A.H.
Tatlow, ed. Natal Province: Descriptive Guide and Official Handbook (Durban: South African Railways
Printing Works, 1911), 274-77 and 379-82. Indian laborers were restricted from immigrating to Natal in
1911 and this seems to have caused problems for the industry. See an assessment of this problem in G.
Gordon and G. Noel Brown, The Settler’s Guide to Greater Britain in 1914 (London: Simpkin, Marshall,
Hamilton, and Kent, 1914), 261 and A.S. Brown and G.G. Brown, eds. The Guide to South and East Africa
for the use of Tourists, Sportsmen, Invalids and Settlers (London: Maitsong, 1916), 207. Thanks to Jean
Smith for giving me these references to Natal’s industry.
149
Indian Tea in South Africa, Preliminary Report of the Executive Committee (1 June to 31 December
1903), 17-19. F174/922, ITAA, IOC.
150
Letter from Cess Committee to Sir Edward Buck, K.C.S.I., 8 July 1903. Preliminary Report of the
Executive Committee (1 June to 31 December 1903), 32. F174/922, ITAA, IOC
151
The Indian Tea Association also served to Indians earlier than this episode. I am interested in learning
more about its use in India and want to research the cultural meanings attached to ice tea in both the US and
India.
70
152
Indian Tea Cess Committee. Preliminary Report of the Executive Committee (1 June to 31 December
1903), 8. F174/922, ITAA, IOC.
153
R. Blechynden letter to the Cess Committee, 24 November 1903, 12. Preliminary Report of the
Executive Committee (1 June to 31 December 1903), F174/922, ITAA, IOC, 10-11.
154
W. Parsons, Secretary to the India and Ceylon American Advertising Fund, to the ITCC, 22 September
1906, F175/926, ITAA, IOC.
155
R. Blechynden letters to the Cess Committee, 20 and 24 November 1903, Preliminary Report of the
Executive Committee (1 June to 31 December 1903), F174/922, ITAA, IOC, 10.
156
R. Blechynden, Memorandum Regarding Future Work in America for the Tea Cess Committee,
Preliminary Report of the Executive Committee (1 June to 31 December 1903), 12. F174/922, ITAA, IOC.
157
Indian Tea Cess Committee, 2nd Annual Report for the year ending 31st March 1905, 5-7. F174/922,
ITAA, IOC
158
For the history of the A&P, see William I. Walsh, The Rise and Decline of the Great Atlantic and
Pacific Tea Company (Secaucus, New Jersey: Lyle Stuart, 1986).
159
Letter from R. Blechynden to ITCC, 27 September 1905. F174/926, ITAA, IOC.
160
Circular from R. Blechynden to Chicago Tea Houses, 14 August 1905. F174/926, ITAA, IOC.
161
Letter from R. Blechynden to ITCC, 27 September 1905. F174/926, ITAA, IOC.
162
W. Brown, chairman of the Joint American Advertising Fund, India and Ceylon Teas to the Tea Cess
Committee, 22 September 1906. F174/926, ITAA, IOC.
163
Letter from J.E.M. Harrington, Esq. to Indian Tea Association, 27 July 1903, Preliminary Report of the
Executive Committee (1 June to 31 December 1903), 32. F174/922, ITAA, IOC. Also see, “Tea in Italy,”
Tea, vol. 1, no. 6 (September 1901): 162.
164
“Talks with Tea Men—Mr. J.H. Renton,” Tea, vol. 1, no 9 (December 1901): 264.
165
“Tea on the Continent,” Tea, vol. 1, no. 1 (April 1901): 9.
166
Indian Tea Cess Committee, 4th Annual Report of the Executive Committee (1 June to 31 December
1907, 3-5. F174/922, ITAA, IOC.
167
Indian Tea in Continental Europe, Preliminary Report of the Executive Committee (1 June to 31
December 1903), 29-30. F174/922, ITAA, IOC
168
See previous chapter. On tea shops and female space, see Erika Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure:
Women in the Making of London’s West End (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 102-4.
169
Indian Tea in Continental Europe, Preliminary Report of the Executive Committee (1 June to 31
December 1903), 27. F174/922, ITAA, IOC.
170
Tea, vol. vol. 1, no. 4 (July 1901): 103.
171
“Five O’Clock Tea,” Tea, vol. II, no. 14 (May 1902): 418.
172
Indian Tea Cess Committee, 3rd Annual Report of the Executive Committee (1 June to 31 December
1906. F174/922, ITAA, IOC. The trade press worried that the French habit didn’t necessarily benefit the
British Empire since there were reports that the French actually were “misguided enough to prefer Frenchgrown tea.” Tea, vol. I, no. 8 (November 1901): 227.
173
Indian Tea Cess Committee, 5th Annual Report of the Executive Committee (1 June to 31 December
1908, 4-7. F174/922, ITAA, IOC. Similar Indian tea houses in Stockholm, France, Holland and Poland.
174
Indian Tea Cess Committee, 6th Annual Report of the Executive Committee (1 June to 31 December
1909, 4. F174/922, ITAA, IOC.
175
Indian Tea Cess Committee, 7th Annual Report of the Executive Committee (1 June to 31 December
1910, 3-4. F174/922, ITAA, IOC.
176
Indian Tea Cess Committee, 9th Annual Report of the Executive Committee (1 June to 31 December
1912, 5-7. F174/922, ITAA, IOC.
177
J.E.M. Harington to the Tea Cess Committee, 3 July 1914, read at a meeting of the Executive
Committee of the Indian Tea Cess Committee, 12 August 1921. F174/926, ITAA, IOC.
178
Cited by Mr. John Harpur in his report to the Indian Tea Cess Committee, July 1921, read at the meeting
of the Executive Committee of the Indian Tea Cess Committee, 12 August 1921. F174/926, ITAA, IOC.
179
“The Tea Surplus and How to Diminish It,” Tea, vol. 1, no. 6 (September 1901): 161.
180
Walker, “Proposition to Cultivate Tea upon the Nepaul Hills,” 11. Also see, Samuel Ball’s discussion
of the possibility of an Indian market for Indian tea in An Account of the Cultivation and Manufacture of
Tea in China (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longman’s, 1848), 333-35.
181
Tea, vol. 1, no. 2 (May 1901): 34.
71
See, for example, the brief narrative of tea’s introduction in India in Lizzie Collingham, Curry: A Tale
of Cooks and Conquerors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 187-214. Collingham correctly notes
that the ITA was behind the creation of the Indian market, but she fails to see this as part of the process of
colonialism.
183
T.H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
184
C.A. Bayly, “The Origins of Swadeshi (home industry) Cloth and Indian Society,” in The Social Life of
Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, edited by Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1986), 285-321.
185
Quoted in Collingham, Curry, 194. Food was central to Gandhi’s politics, however.
186
Report from the Belgium Consul at Tripoli cited in Tea, vol. 1, no. 1 (April 1901): 9.
187
Tea, vol. 1, no. 4 (July 1901): 98.
188
The Grocer (24 April, 1880): 488. Ironically much of this increase was in teas from China.
189
The Grocer (11 June 1887): 1089.
190
The Grocer (24 April 1880): 488.
191
The Home and Colonial Mail (6 May 1887): vii.
192
The Grocer (11 June 1887): 1089.
193
The Colonial Empire and Star of India (16 December 1887): iii.
194
Quoted in Tea, vol. 1, no. 1 (April 1901): 46.
195
“Creating a Demand,” Tea, vol. 1, no. 4 (July 1901): 98.
196
Tea, 324
197
See, discussion of this trickle-down theory, in the Home and Colonial Mail (4 October 1901), iii and (20
July 1906): 9. Also see, a similar discussion in Tea, 227.
198
Tea vol. 1, no. 3 (August 1901): 131.
199
The Home and Colonial Mail (4 October 1901): iii.
200
Tea, vol. 1, no. 3 (June 1901): 74 and vol. 1, no. 4 (July 1901): 98.
201
In Delhi tea depots were also opening and planters were especially enthusiastic because they reached
“the frontier tribesmen” who were already tea drinkers. Tea, vol. 1, no. 3 (August 1901): 131.
202
This was part of a general tendency of European colonialism’s use “middle figures” to help construct
new colonial categories. See, for example, Nancy Rose Hunt’s use of this concept in A Colonial Lexicon of
Birth Ritual, Medicalization, and Mobility in the Congo (Durham and London: Duke University Press,
1990). Hunt derives this concept from Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture
and Colonialism in the Pacific (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991).
203
Tea, vol. 1, no. 6 (September 1901): 163.
204
Tea, vol. 1, no. 7 (October 1901): 202.
205
Tea, 360.
206
Tea, vol. 1, no. 7 (October 1901): 201.
207
This same enterprising firm distributed small packets of tea to villagers in the North-West Provinces.
These packets were printed both in Hindi and Urdu and contained “circulars extolling the merits of Indian
tea as a beverage.” Tea, vol. 1, no. 6 (September 1901):163.
208
Collingham, Curry, 200.
209
Republished in Tea, vol. 1, no. 7 (October 1901): 200.
210
The Home and Colonial Mail (4 October 1901), iii.
211
Tea, 324.
212
J. D. Rees, Tea and Taxation, reprinted from the Imperial and Asiatic Quarterly (Woking: Oriental
Institute, 1904): 5.
213
“Produce, Planting, and Commercial Notes,” The Home and Colonial Mail (26 July 1901), iii.
214
Letter from Brook, Bond, and Co. to TCC, 6 November 1903, F174/922, ITAA, IOC.
215
Petition from the Tea Planters of the Kangra Valley to the Hon. E. Cable, President of the Indian Tea
Cess Committee. 1903. F174/922, ITAA, IOC.
216 th
8 Annual Report of ITCC (31 March 1911), 6. F174/922, ITAA, IOC.
217 th
8 Annual Report of ITCC (31 March 1911), 6. F174/922, ITAA, IOC.
218 th
9 Annual Report of ITCC (March 1912), 15. F174/922, ITAA, IOC.
219
10th Annual Report of ITCC (March 1913), 4. F174/922, ITAA, IOC.
220
11th Annual Report of ITCC (March 1914), 7-9. F174/923, ITAA, IOC.
182
72
221
I will be exploring this problem further and it will become the basis of the next chapter.
The ITCC reported that US imports of Indian tea had increased by 97% in 1907. 7 th Annual Report of
ITCC (31 March 1910), 5. F174/922, ITAA, IOC.
223
Ramamurthy, Imperial Persuaders, 106-13,
224
There are numerous studies of Lipton, his sporting career and his global business strategies. See, for
example, James Mackay, The Man who Invented Himself: A Life of Sir Thomas Lipton (Edinburgh and
London: Mainstream Publishing, 1998); Bob Crampsey, The King’s Grocer: the Life of Thomas Lipton
(Glasgow, 1995) and Captain John J. Hickey, The Life and Times of the Late Sir Thomas J. Lipton:
International Sportsman and Dean of the Yachting World (New York: The Hickey Publishing Company,
1932).
222