by Sarah Rose
Nana Sahib, the Butcher of Cawnpore, was said “to read Balzac, play Chopin on the piano and, lolling on a divan and fanned by gorgeous Kashmiri girls, to have a roasted English child brought in occasionally on a pike for him to examine with his pince-nez,” a newspaper would later report.
When the British arrived, they ordered every mutineer to clean up the blood by hand, or lick it up, under threat of the lash. If touching a holy or forbidden animal was degrading to the men of India, touching the blood of humans was the ultimate defilement.
“I wish to show the Natives of India that the punishment inflicted by us for such deeds will be the heaviest, the most revolting to their feelings . . . ,” wrote the officer in charge. After each “culprit” had cleaned up his share of the bodies and carnage, he was immediately hanged.
The British could be just as cold-blooded as the mutineers. In September company forces attacked Delhi and massacred every man on sight—not just the combatants fighting British rule. The British slaughtered defenseless citizens in cold blood, striking down some fourteen hundred men in one neighborhood alone.
“It was literally murder,” wrote one officer witnessing the killing of Indians in Delhi. “I have seen many bloody and awful sights lately, but such as I witnessed yesterday I pray I never see again. The women were spared, but their screams, on seeing their husbands and sons butchered, were most painful.”
The civil war brought to an end the reign of the Mughal emperors who had colluded with the company as proxy rulers. The last emperor, Bahadur Shah, wrote from exile:My life now gives no ray of light,
I bring no solace to heart or eye;
Out of dust to dust again,
Of no use to anyone am I.
Delhi was once a paradise,
Where Love held sway and reigned;
But its charm lies ravished now
And only ruins remain.
When the uprising was finally put down, Parliament rescinded the privileges of the East India Company in India and revoked its charter. With the stroke of a pen the company ceased to exist. Henceforth, the British Crown would be the government of the subcontinent; Victoria would become empress of India.
In a quarter of a millennium of existence the company had amassed possessions to rival Charlemagne’s and created an empire on which the sun never set; it was the first global multinational and the largest corporation history has ever known. Yet it failed spectacularly at one significant task: to govern India in peace. However ingenious the idea and potentially profitable the industry, growing tea in India could not save the Honourable Company from extinction.
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Tea for the Victorians
By the time the Chinese realized that Fortune had stolen an inestimable treasure from them, it was many years too late to remediate their loss. His theft helped spread tea to a wider world at lower prices. He democratized a luxury, and the world has been enjoying it ever since.
Like sugar, coffee, tobacco, and opium, tea was among the first mass-produced, mass-marketed global commodities. Though tea would not cause the Industrial Revolution, its popularity in Britain and the increasingly easy access to it brought about by the advent of Indian tea spurred British industrialization along.
These global commodities could almost be considered a form of kinetic economic energy—picked for a penny, sold for a pound, and transported around the world. They rearranged the axes of power all along their supply chain, each step of the way from mountain farms to British homesteads. Through a simple drug, tea, Chinese coolies were connected to American traders and Parsee bankers in Canton, to financiers in London, to mothers and children in Manchester enjoying their breakfast.
Tea likewise revolutionized Britain’s capital and banking systems and influenced the rapid growth of trade networks in the Far East. It was instrumental in extending the reach of British colonialism as the empire expanded to include countries such as Burma, Ceylon, East Africa, and others where tea could be grown, establishing economies in places that were previously considered little more than blighted jungles. Tea also influenced efforts to colonize areas such as the Caribbean and the South Pacific, which could help meet Britain’s demand for sugar. The Oriental trade catapulted Britain and the pound sterling to nearly two centuries of global prominence, a feat that no sparsely populated agrarian island nation could otherwise have achieved.
Tea changed the role of China on the world stage. The tea trade gave birth to the colonial territory of Hong Kong, a thriving city—now once again a Chinese city—and the capital of the Orient. Some have argued that Hong Kong demonstrates the role China might have taken on the world stage had a series of tea-trade-inspired revolutions not halted progress on the mainland for much of a century. The foreign presence in China and the havoc wrought by the tea/opium exchange jointly undermined the imperial leadership of the Qing Dynasty. The fall of the Qings, in turn, led to the rise of the Nationalist Kuomintang and eventually of the Chinese Communist Party, a turn of events that would later result in the modern-day division between Taiwan and China. No one can reasonably lay the responsibility for these historical developments on tea alone, but neither can one ignore the role that foreign desire for this quintessentially Chinese commodity played in opening up China to the West and in the country’s subsequent fall from imperial self-sufficiency.
Apart from its geopolitical ramifications, the tea trade affected nearly every aspect of the economy.
Transportation
By the 1850s the passage to London from China took one month less than it had even ten years previously, spurred on by the race to bring tea to market. Tea gave rise to the fastest ships under sail; their speeds have never been matched.
For the first two hundred years of the tea trade the only ships making the trip to China out of Britain belonged to the East India Company, the sole business chartered to trade in the Far East. These boats, known as East Indiamen, were slow floating warehouses. The “tea wagons” sailed from the Thames to Canton and back; tea’s journey to the Mincing Lane auction in London took as long as nine months after picking and sometimes an entire year. This meant that even the finest grades of tea, the flowery pekoes and souchongs, lost their edge. No “new season” tea was ever available, although travelers’ and merchants’ reports suggested that the “first cut” off the first blush was the choicest brew. While only a few of London’s tea drinkers were ever likely to notice a degradation in quality, those in the tea trade knew there was vast room for improvement, that a premium might well be paid for higher-quality, fresher teas. But without competition, with no challenger attempting to bring tea from hillside to table in the same season, there was little impetus for innovation and no improvement for many years.
The nineteenth century saw tremendous technological advances in shipbuilding. After Britain defeated Napoléon in 1815, there was no longer a pressing need for the old British warships, heavily gunned and self-sustaining enough to remain at sea for long stretches, avoiding land. In the period of peace that followed, ships became longer, sleeker, and faster.
When the East India Company monopoly over China ended in 1834, new trading companies sprang up to claim a portion of the China trade—names still revered in the Orient: Swire, Jar-dine, and Matheson. These firms fought for a cut of the lucrative tea profits, challenging the East India Company, which like its ships, was bloated and inefficient. As increased competition created new incentives for faster boats, the tall-masted sailing ships became even more refined.
When the 1849 repeal of the British Navigation Laws allowed American-built ships to sail to and from China, the Americans could finally offload Chinese tea right onto British docks—and did so weeks ahead of British-built ships. The American vessels, modeled after the finer hull lines of the swift privateers from the War of 1812, could make the run between New York and Canton in under a hundred days. With speed at a premium, British ship-builders went back to their drawing boards; they shaved the bows, narrowed the hulls, and raked the masts to compete w
ith the best of Boston’s designers.
In a matter of twenty years, these three factors—the end of Napoléon, the end of the East India Company’s monopoly in China, and the entrance of the Americans into China shipping—accelerated the delivery of tea and revolutionized navigation under sail. The new ships, called tea clippers, were immediately recognizable by their long, low hulls that had a “fish head” stern hanging sharply over the water. They were square-rigged and triple-masted, “a perfect beauty to every nautical man,” as one captain remarked.
With the advent of the clippers, the tea trade also became a hugely popular spectator sport. Once the first raking masts of the Oriental fleet were sighted in the English Channel, the City of London turned out on the banks of the Thames to watch the annual Tea Race, when the China clippers delivered the new season’s picking. Tugs were engaged, signals were flashed from every headland all the way up to London, wagering began, and fortunes were made or lost on which ship would be the first to throw a box of tea over its gunwales and onto the wharf. There was as much interest in this race as there was in the results of the derby.
The tea clippers remain the fastest sailing ships in the world, in part because they were marvels of engineering and enterprise, and in part because there was never again a need for a big, fast sailing boat. Trade with the Far East became so valuable that the French undertook the building of the Suez Canal. Although clippers couldn’t sail in the waterway—the Red Sea’s winds were too challenging—a steamship could reach China in half the time of a clipper. With well-placed fueling stations, the journey to China and India grew ever easier. By 1869, when the Suez Canal was complete, all the improvements in navigation brought on by tea would become a thing of the past. The ambitions of the British merchant fleet could be fueled by reliable and steady coal, not fickle wind.
Manufacturing
Tea’s light weight meant that a merchant ship transporting it needed ballast to stay trim, and for most of the early years of the tea trade, that ballast consisted of blue and white Chinese porcelain. Although this merchandise tended to be undervalued by traders, who could make larger profits on more desirable commodities such as silk, it was considered useful as “kentledge,” the ballast padding between layers of tea crates, and it had the added benefit of ensuring against leaks when it lined the hull and keel. Luxury items such as tea were high risk: They were vulnerable to water damage, and a ship was always in jeopardy of being lost at sea, so porcelain helped spread the risk around. Porcelain also protected the more valuable cargo from dirty bilgewater.
Tea’s growing consumer base encouraged the development of the porcelain industry in Britain—among the very first industries to take advantage of the nineteenth century’s mechanical innovations. Prior to the eighteenth century, no European factories could make a ceramic teacup capable of holding boiling water.
European clay could not meet the service demands of tea the way Chinese clay could, for in Europe clay lacked the essential ingredient of kaolin. Chinese porcelain was fired at a high temperature, so it was cheap and sturdy, with a strong transparent glaze. Because European clays were fired at a lower temperature, they had porous glazes and were more likely to break.
The need for more durable pottery stimulated an industrial race in England. Could British manufacturers make tableware harder and more inexpensively? English factories had been working with stoneware, which was heavy, coarse, and fragile, but by virtue of its lower transportation costs it could compete with Chinese porcelain on price. Ultimately, by about 1750, European factories discovered the secret of porcelain production, and a new industry was born that took advantage of the mechanization that was then transforming British industry. (Ironically, one of the earliest potters to make use of these technological advances was Josiah Wedgwood, who could count among his grandchildren Charles Darwin, the naturalist and contemporary of Robert Fortune.)
The tea trade, through the porcelain trade, also stimulated the notion of China and the East as “exotic” places. The iconic images of chinoiserie—weeping willows and towering pagodas, and demure women clothed in flowing robes—became familiar as a result of being stamped or painted on the sides of imported tea-cups. This romanticization of the Orient was highly useful for advancing the imperial project; it made a pretty thing of an unknown place and lent an air of enchantment to what might otherwise have been considered a fearsome, treacherous journey abroad. Great poverty was devastating England, along with disease and dislocation. Cities encroached on the countryside, and its former inhabitants were now working in factories, breathing smog, and living in crowded tenements, but the images visible everywhere on porcelain represented a link to a wider, bigger, and better world. It was a world of trade and possibility, a world that England could conquer.
Life in England
As had been predicted by the Honourable East India Company, Indian-grown tea, aided by the repeal of tea taxes and advances in shipping—and increased competition with the end of the company’s own monopoly—led to an overall decrease in tea prices. Cheaper tea also meant that unscrupulous dealers felt less need to pad their product with other plants and dangerous chemicals, so the tea’s quality improved. Although England had been a nation of tea drinkers for over a century, cheaper tea became a boon to the rapidly urbanizing country.
Demographers and doctors had long noticed a drop in the mortality rate as the taste for tea became increasingly popular. With the growth of cities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries came a rise in levels of pollution and disease. Cholera, which had long plagued the Indian subcontinent, made its first appearance in England in the 1830s when infected sailors, drinking water from ships’ barrels filled in India, returned to their home port and spread the deadly bacteria through local sewers. By midcentury, cholera epidemics were repeatedly wiping out Londoners by the tens of thousands; the outbreak of 1848-49 alone claimed fifty thousand lives—all from drinking water.
Countries such as England, where tea was preferred to coffee that was steeped in hot but not boiling water, reaped immediate health benefits from their drinking habits because boiling water killed the microorganisms that spread contagion at close quarters. Even under normal circumstances London’s drinking water was far from sanitary, owing to the density of the city’s population and lack of proper waste removal. A nation of tea drinkers was more likely than one of coffee drinkers to survive the repeated infestations that were a product of the global economy of the Victorian era.
Tea was a boon to the imperial project as well. It became a standard part of rations for the British army, as well as for native troops in the colonies. As Englishmen were slogging through the jungles of the tropics, tracking the boundaries of empire, they comforted themselves with a cup of tea and simultaneously kept water-borne illnesses at bay.
As previously noted, sugar was another key commodity in the intricate economy of the British Empire, a product of the queen’s remaining colonies in the New World: Barbados, Jamaica, and the Virgin Islands. Britain had a glut of sugar, and tea gave Britain somewhere to dump it.
Tea with sugar provided Britons with a convenient source of calories. The urbanization of Britain meant that the poor no longer had easy access to farm products, and while tea was not inherently nutritious, it could be drunk with milk, a protein, and sugar, a cheap and dense source of energy.
Prior to widespread tea drinking, factory workers obtained much of their calorie intake from beer and ale, which made for a less than ideal workforce. Beer drinking could be tolerated in workers doing primarily manual labor, as was the case in preindustrialized economies, but it posed a serious problem in the industrialized sectors of Britain’s economy, where fine motor skills were required. A drunk worker was a danger around the fast-moving looms and needles of Manchester’s textile industry. But by drinking sugared tea and eating bread, plus meat on Sunday, Britons could get all the calories they needed without the risk of intoxication. Indeed, tea had a stimulant effect; it focused the minds of the wor
kforce, helping them to concentrate better on their demanding jobs.
Fermented drinks such as alcohol also have the benefits of killing parasites and bringing liquid calories to the diet, but by the start of the eighteenth century beer production was eating up nearly half of the wheat harvest in Britain. There was no possible way for Britain’s domestic agriculture to feed the rapidly expanding population and keep them in beer, too. There just wasn’t enough farmland for every new mouth in the industrial era. Calories had to come from an outside source, one beyond the boundaries of the British Isles, from the wider shores of the empire. The pursuit of food has always shaped the development of society, and in the days of the Victorian empire, the very start of our modern industrialized global food chain, tea with milk and sugar became the answer to Britain’s growing need for cheap nutrition.
European countries such as France and Germany that continued to choose alcohol as the staple drink lagged fifty years behind Britain in the process of industrialization.
Other benefits accrued from the choice of tea over beer, particularly for the young. Pregnant women drinking tea rather than beer significantly improved the health of the infant population. Tea also contains antibacterial phenols, plant-based chemicals that act as natural disinfectants. Since it was typical in Britain to breast-feed babies for the first year, mothers opting for tea rather than beer meant British babies were no longer exposed to as much alcohol. Tea reduced infant mortality and gave an immunizing boost to the population when industrialization was demanding an ever larger workforce.
