Globalisation storm in a teacup

What is nonetheless universally accepted is that over a thousand years ago it was first in China that tea was seen as an “agent of civilisation,” of temperate pleasure and with health properties. It took the Europeans some centuries to “appropriate and adapt” the Chinese ideas about tea to make these a “core part” of the culture of their continent. The Europeans gave identical treatment to many other commodities produced in other parts of the world but whose trade and, in many cases, ownership of their production mostly stayed with them.

So well recorded is the history of tea that another book on the commodity will find justification if it throws light on the largely unexplored “underlying ideologies and cultural norms and political and economic thinking that shaped the behaviours of a transnational business.” Erika Rappaport’s A Thirst for Empire is mounted on a large canvas that packs in it an early colonial industry whose ascendance and profits supported the expansion of British Empire and funded its wars.

China ruled world production and exports of tea for centuries. Taking advantage of its dominance of the commodity which was increasingly gaining in popularity in Britain and among British settlers in colonies, the Celestial Empire would from time to time put “humiliating” conditions and logistical disadvantages for English merchants. Hostilities between the two powers in the early 19th century reached a point when the British and the Chinese started viewing each other as Barbarians. In Assam, Britain saw an enticing prospect of growing tea on a large commercial scale that could become over time an important source of imperial revenue. This would also give Britain a handle to “chastise” China. Incidentally, Assam had grown tea, albeit in an unorganised way, and consumed the beverage.

Ms Rappaport has done an excellent job in describing the compulsions centred on growing tensions with China, the lifeline of beverage supply that led Britain to grow its own tea in Assam. This would allow Britain to keep control of the trade in the course of time. Besides the lingering China threat to stop supplies, Britain had to take note of the emergence of the Americans as a “notable force in the tea trade” and the Dutch “starting to grow tea in Java.”

Ms Rappaport writes “in the 1820s and early 1830s, Indian tea came to be regarded as a solution to a series of interconnected global problems. Assam could satisfy the world’s thirst for an inexpensive and healthful beverage, could provide the British government with steady revenue.” Equally importantly, growing tea in abundance in Assam would give Britain a chance to tell China that of the two empires, it was the more powerful. But before tea growing could start in any meaningful manner in Assam, Britain had to fight a “costly and difficult war” to rid the place of Burmese occupation and then win over the local people who in the beginning were not well disposed to the British with “opium” and “soft words.” Smoking the peace pipe yielded results because the inhabitants were aware of gunboats lurking behind. The colonial rulers adept in playing one local group against another adopted the tactic in Assam too with one clear goal of making the place a tea producer of size.

Ms Rappaport rightly points out that the “local elite and foreign nationals had worked with the British to bring capitalism to Assam” to turn what were wild plants grown in wasteland into highly rewarding tea plantations. For example, as the author points out, Assam Company, the first corporate engaged in tea growing was initially a “racially hybrid business.” Prince Dwarkanath Tagore was a member of the board and one Maniram Dewan was appointed chief executive of the company in 1839. This puts to rest the common perception that the adventurist English and Scotsmen alone brought thousands of acres under tea cultivation.

The challenge for Assam planters for many years was to recruit people on a large scale from “impoverished villages in Bengal, Orissa, the Northwest Provinces and Oudh” mostly by unfair means such as “tempting workers with loans, liquor and women.” Describing the wretched working condition in plantations even after The Crown had assumed direct authority over its biggest colony, Ms Rappaport writes the “workers were essentially enslaved and high death rates, low birth rates, diseases and countless abuses continued.” Labour reforms in spite of government claims to the contrary were painfully slow.

The book is a lot more than the growth of tea industry in British colonies and how it helped the Empire through good and bad times. The long discourse on how government funding on generic promotion helped the beverage to become popular in British colonies and outside and fend off competition from coffee, which incidentally arrived in Europe earlier than tea, and subsequently other soft drinks makes interesting reading. A Thirst for Empire, which has a brilliant narrative style, shows how trade in commodities, including tea, helped the cause of globalisation. How Tea Shaped the Modern World Erika Rappaport Princeton University Press 549 pages; £32.95