Empire of Tea

Title: The Empire of Tea – The Asian Leaf That Conquered the World

Author: Markman Ellis, Richard Coulton, Matthew Mauger

Publisher: Speaking Tiger, 2016 (First published 2015)

ISBN: 9789385755699

Pages: 326

Camellia sinensis is the scientific name of a shrub the modern world is intimately associated with – tea. The ubiquitous drink has permeated polite company so well that modern society, particularly in Britain and its former colonies, can think of no other drink to pour to a friend or guest. Our conversation around the tea table is often so pleasant as to engender a modern maxim that gossip is the best sweetener of tea. The story of tea begins well in the ancient past in China, but it was introduced to the entire world with British colonial expansion. The East India Company’s trading campaigns to Asia brought in its ships’ holds copious amounts of tea as well as spices and textiles. Tea was an object of luxury at first, but soon the common people took a fancy to it. Tea became a defining symbol of British identity in a period when it all came from China and Japan. Zealous taxonomists and botanists of the Enlightenment could successfully transplant this elixir of life into India, which readily became available for colonization by the middle of the eighteenth century. It was in 1839 that the first ‘Empire Tea’ came from Assam. Thereafter, the Chinese trade dwindled and the capital of tea trade was shifted to London. This book tells the story of the introduction of tea in England, how it went on to make England a ‘tea-drinking nation’, the story of English conquest of the tea trade and the confused present of the tea industry in the modern world. Markman Ellis is the Professor of Eighteenth century Studies, Richard Coulton is a lecturer of English and Matthew Mauger is a lecturer at Queen Mary, University of London.

For all its universal acceptance, the most surprising fact is that tea has no nutritional value at all. The so called energy its drinkers get is the handiwork of caffeine, the powerful alkaloid in coffee as well, which constitutes nearly three per cent by weight of the tea leaves. Even though tea has been consumed in China from very ancient times, Europeans came to know about it only by the sixteenth century. It is intriguing to note that the earliest reference to tea as a processed foodstuff with a marketable value and as an everyday drink is itself more than 2000 years old. Tea became popular in Britain in mid-seventeenth century along with coffee from Arabia and chocolate from Mexico. These three modern staple drinks shared surprising similarities. They were served hot, had a bitter flavour that was ameliorated with sugar, were made with rare and expensive botanical ingredients and had intriguing psychoactive properties. These three newcomers presented a stiff competition to Britain’s traditional alcoholic drinks such as beer and wine. The new drinks were stimulants, but their consumption did not lead to inebriation or other forms of rowdiness as did alcohol. So, although the psychoactive effect of tea and coffee on drinkers was conspicuous, the forms of behaviour associated with them were broadly congruent with the programmes of moral reform and regulation promoted by Protestant sects in the period.

Tea was a costly fad of the rich for a long time after its introduction. Gradually, the peasants and workers also took to it when cheap tea began to find a place in the market. Proponents and detractors of tea argued with each other. This book presents a very good narrative of the debating points used by both sides. The urge to understand tea in eighteenth century Britain was an intermingling of intellectual and cultural currents. Tea became a habit and the tea table turned into a place of gossip and slander. Numerous poems and treatises appeared in print in praise of tea. A sprinkling of the best among them is listed in the book. Information on the growth of tea plants and processing of the plucked leaves was borrowed from China. Botanists in Britain could inspect twigs, flowers and seeds, accidentally found in crates of leaves. It was at first believed that bohea and green tea – two most popular varieties of it – were believed to have come from separate species. It was conclusively proved after two centuries of research that the both are indeed one in terms of species variability. Some critics could not assimilate the fact that the lower classes also drank tea like their masters. They came out with a novel argument that it turns robust masculinity into enfeebled femininity while exposing feminine delicacy to masculine immoderation.

Consumption of tea was elevated to a sophisticated ritual in China and Japan with elaborate crockery and spoons attending to it. When tea and coffee were introduced in England, they were the first hot drinks in use. The porcelain used by the Chinese to handle tea came to be associated with British practices as well. At the inception of these drinks, there was no domestically manufactured pottery that could stand the thermal shock of hot beverages. With the liberal use of porcelain, two Chinese products became locked in a commercial embrace.

Many Indian intellectuals are justifiably worried at the prospect of multinational companies sourcing valuable plants and animals from India and then copying the genetic material for commercial use. Most of them are ignorant of the immense gain the country has made when tea itself was transplanted in India, though not in the literal sense. Wild tea trees were found in Assam around the beginning of the nineteenth century. This prospect attracted a horde of planters and labourers to Assam, aided by considerable tax breaks to any enterprise that transformed the hilly wildernesses into agricultural land. The first chest of Assam tea was auctioned in London in 1839. In a fit of condescension, the intellectuals of the period saw in this attempt an effort to civilize the Indian natives by offering them an opportunity to participate in polite British practices of tea drinking. The post-world war era saw British companies falling by the wayside and getting amalgamated into foreign entities. It is a strange coincidence that two of the most famous tea houses (Typhoo and Tetley) are now owned by Indian tea companies.

The book also presents a case in tea’s history that casts dirt on its spotless career of satisfying humans. For a brief period, the East India Company had used opium to finance its trade on tea with China. The company was concerned with the one-way trade it plied with China, who was not enamoured by European produce in return for tea. This required silver to be paid in hard cash. The frantic efforts to find some product which would find acceptance in China finally identified opium which was traded under cover by the company’s agents. They repaid tea with the silver they got in response to the sale of opium. Nearly two-thirds of the annual cost of civil administration in the 1830s was met from tea taxes.

Though the book is composed by three authors, the content is pleasantly readable. A lot of illustrations and diagrams are included in the main text. The careful effort to include paintings and etchings which illumine the growth of the tea habit in Britain is commendable. Seldom do we find real art-aficionados among researchers.  A comprehensive index and a perfect bibliography leave out nothing as far as tea is concerned. The description is purely historical and social. The scientific and business aspects of tea – such as the mechanism with which tea’s ingredients influence our neural systems and some of the anecdotes related to marketing and trading tea – are completely ignored.

Rating: 3 Star