CAT 2021 Slot 3 VARC: The History of the Tea Trade

Few commodities have rearranged the world as thoroughly as a dried leaf steeped in hot water. For most of its history tea was a Chinese affair: cultivated in the southern hills, pressed into bricks for the caravans that crossed into Tibet and Mongolia, and taxed by imperial officials who understood early that a drink everyone wanted was a revenue everyone would pay. When European traders arrived at Canton in the seventeenth century, they entered a market that China controlled on its own terms. Foreigners were confined to a strip of waterfront warehouses, forbidden to learn the language from local teachers, and required to deal only with a licensed guild of merchants.

The problem for Britain, whose appetite for tea grew from an aristocratic affectation into a working-class necessity within a century, was that China wanted almost nothing Britain made. Tea had to be paid for in silver, and by the late eighteenth century the drain of bullion to Canton had become a recurring anxiety of British finance. The East India Company's solution was as ingenious as it was corrosive. It grew opium in Bengal, sold it at auction in Calcutta to private traders, and let those traders smuggle it into China, where they exchanged it for silver that was then used to buy tea. The Company kept its own hands formally clean while the flow of silver reversed direction. When Chinese officials tried to stamp out the trade, the result was war, and the treaties that followed forced open ports and ceded Hong Kong.

Even this arrangement left Britain dependent on a rival empire for a staple of daily life. The next move was botanical rather than military. In the 1840s the Scottish plant collector Robert Fortune travelled into the Chinese interior in disguise, gathering seeds, seedlings and, crucially, knowledge of processing techniques, which he shipped to the Himalayan foothills of India. Meanwhile, planters in Assam were learning to cultivate an indigenous variety that had long been dismissed as inferior. Within a few decades Indian and later Ceylonese tea overtook Chinese exports in the British market. Plantation labour, much of it recruited under coercive indenture contracts, bore the cost of this triumph.

It is tempting to read this history as a morality tale of imperial greed, and it certainly is partly that. But it also illustrates a subtler point about commodities: that what looks like a natural preference is often the sediment of policy. The British taste for strong black tea with milk and sugar was not an inevitable development of the English palate. It was shaped by what the plantations of Assam could most cheaply produce, by the sugar of the Caribbean slave economy, and by tax changes that made tea affordable to labourers at the precise moment industrial employers wanted a stimulant that kept workers alert through long shifts. The 'national drink' was, in large part, manufactured.

Today tea is grown in dozens of countries, and China has regained its position as the world's largest producer. Yet the geography of the trade still bears the imprint of the nineteenth century: in the location of the great auction centres, in the brand names of the major blenders, and in the wages of plantation workers, which remain among the lowest in the agricultural sector.