Chapter Nineteen
A North Europe World of Tea: Scotland & the Tea Trade, ca. 1690- ca.1790
Andrew Mackillop
At first glance,Scotland may not seem an obvious context for exploring the trends and tensions which characterized theimportation, distribution and consumption of tea in eighteenth-century Europe. As a small, relatively underdevelopedkingdom on the outer edge of the North Sea world, Scotland had little direct experience of Asia andindeed had liquidatedits ownshort-lived East India Company as a precondition of union with England in 1707.[1] Yet it is Scotland’s marginality to the early phase of Europe’s direct contact with Asia from circa 1500 to circa 1700, when juxtaposed with the country’s sudden inclusion thereafter within the monopoly market of the United English East India Company (EIC), which makes its interaction with Asian products so potentially illuminating. Scotland experienced the centuries of the Eurasia trades as one of extremes, moving from relative insulation from Asia commodities as late as around 1700 to a position where, by the 1770s, many commentators felt that Scottish society risked being fatally undermined by a welter of influences from the East.[2]
All European countries experienced their version of this angst over the supposedly corrupting and enervating characteristics of Asian luxury, as well as the shift toward ideas of ‘new’ luxury which imbued commodities and their consumption with a range of virtuous, civilizing, modern and beneficial attributes.[3] As is well known, tea was among the most obvious of the many exotic goods sweeping across Europe, driving innovative forms of elite and mass consumption while transforming imitative production methods, social practices and cultural expectations.[4] In most respects, Scotland followed rather than set these European trends. It experienced its own increasing levels of legal trade and consumption in tea, a parallel smuggling economy of noticeable size and efficiency, and an intense debate that sought to realign older, moralistic concepts of luxury in positive ways to better reflect social and market realities.[5] But key aspects of the country’s involvement in the tea economy and its associated patterns of consumption were played out in an unusually intense fashion and in ways that complicate ideas of a homogenous European or British reaction to the wave of consumables from Asia. Indeed, the manner in which Scottish merchants, smugglers and consumers bypassed the EIC’s official monopoly and participated disproportionately in the Swedish East India Company (SEIC) helped to ensure the creation of a highly variegated ‘British’ tea economy and culture. In this way Scotland played a significant role in ensuring that instead of than a single, EIC-framed British world of tea there emerged a metropolitan, London-based tea economy and a variety of provincial or regional based alternatives.
With the exception of some studies of smuggling and Irish society’s changing perception of EIC imports, the regionally diverse manner in which different parts of Britain and Ireland reacted to the coming of tea has not received sufficient attention.[6] The value of the Scottish example lies in the way it offers a reconfiguration of the established geography of the tea trade in Europe, by forcing attention away from defined national markets and the importation strategies of the large monopoly companies in Amsterdam and London.[7] What emerges instead is a greater appreciation of the multi-centred and sophisticated regional and pan-European connections which underpinned the emergence between around 1720 and 1790 of what can be described as a North Europe world of tea.
Nowhere is the influence of tea upon Scottish society more evident than in the parish surveys of the Statistical Account of Scotland, published from 1791 to 1799.[8] Written by Kirk ministers with access to local lore, basic economic information and history, many summaries reveal how tea consumption was considered to be one of the great socio-economic changes of recent times. One or more parishes in 25 out of Scotland’s 33 counties noted the impact of tea in some manner or another (see Map 23.1). A vivid folk- memory endured in some parishes about the precise number of kettles and families that had the wherewithal to access tea before the upsurge in mass consumption began.[9] One statistical entry in particular captures the product’s impact upon a small, coastal village and the prosaic yet profound way it shaped local practices and memory. The Reverend James Scott’s 1793 summary of Benholme parish in Kincardine, which contained the village of Johnshaven(see Map 23.1), a well knowncentre of smuggling throughout much of the century, noted the aura that had once surrounded tea:
About 50 years ago, the Excise officer’s family was the only one in Johnshaven that made use of tea; when the tea kettle was carried to the well, to bring in water, numbers both of children and grown people followed it, expressing their wonder, and supposing it to be “a beast with a horn”.[10]
By the time of the Statistical Account, tea had become a central part of life and culture all over the country. Its pervasive mundanity was captured brilliantly in another memorable image by the Reverend Scott, who observed: ‘Now the tea kettle has lost of the power of astonishing.’[11] Yet how had this situation come to pass and what does it reveal about how provincial societies, far from the dominant centres of Europe’s tea economy, incorporated a ‘global’ product in local, regional and national ways? Given Scotland’s geography, it is hardly surprising that tea arrived late in comparison to other western European countries. The parish of Pettinain in Lanarkshire (see Map 23.1) proclaimed it was the first place in Scotland where tea drinking occurred. According to lore Andrew Kennedy of Clowburn, Conservator of the Scots Staple at Veere in Zeeland from 1689, returned home ‘towards the end of the [last] century’ and brought back tea given him as a present from the directors of the United Dutch East India Company (VOC).[12] This would date the arrival of tea to some point in the 1690s.
The accuracy of Pettinain’s claim to fame cannot be verified; but the product was almost certainly known earlier to Scottish aristocratic and landed families.[13] There is definitive evidence of tea consumption among aristocratic elites in Edinburgh by 1691.[14] One aspect of the tale surrounding Kennedy of Clowburn does have a convincing ring: the Netherlands connection. For all the later connotations surrounding tea as a particularly British recreational product, during the early emergence of the trade Scottish society would just as readily have associated tea with the Continent. At the end of the Seventeenth Century the Netherlands remained Scotland’s premier continental source of many luxuries from Asia.[15] Andrew Russell, a merchant-factor from Stirling based in Rotterdam who retained extensive commercial links with Scotland, certainly traded in coffee, tea, and chocolate. His accounts detail impost rates at Rotterdam for tea in 1691 and 1692, and again from 1694 to 1696.[16]
The 1700s to early 1730s marked an era of consolidation for the EIC, not least as a consequence of the growing profile of tea as a percentage of total imports.[17] In Scotland, by contrast, the quarter century or so after 1707 was marked by structural recession as consumer demand and the economy struggled to adjust to new levels of taxation and competition from high quality goods from the rest of Great Britain.[18] One result of this situation seems to have been a largely unknown phase of experimentation and a growing awareness of the wide varieties of teas, price patterns, and potential market opportunities. John Cowan, a merchant in Stirling (See Map 23.1), typified this speculative climate and the steep learning curve required by those engaging in the trade. In November 1726 Cowan purchased tea in London for sale in Rotterdam in an effort to diversify his portfolio of exports. Commissioning the London-Scots merchant, George Udny, he asked for ‘a small parcel [of] goods such as the India Company sells, to be exported to Holland’ as a trial; it was to include 200lb of Bohea tea ‘of the very cheap sort’ and 600 lb of pepper.[19] Attempting to dispose of such goods in the Netherlands might seem a particularly counter-intuitive approach and evidence of a lack of specialised commercial knowledge among merchants of a society with no direct contact with Asia. Yet Cowan’s reasoning had less to do with the intricacies of markets in the United Provinces than an up-to-date awareness of British fiscal policy, particularly the value of the drawback of 4 shillings and 6 pence allowed on re-exported tea.[20]
By 1745, the flow of tea handled by Cowan had reversed as adjustments in the British customs and excise regime now facilitated importation from the Continent.[21] What followed was a series of complaints to his associate, Alexander Livingston, in Rotterdam that the 400 lb of ‘coarse’ tea imported from the Netherlands would not sell. The inability to dispose of lower quality tea was part of an influential trend by which both merchants and consumers felt that the two big monopoly companies continually failed to read market and taste preferences effectively. Complaints over the EIC’s persistent inability to import sufficient quantity and higher quality varieties forced the introduction in 1745 of a licensing system by which British merchants could import from continental sources if the quarterly sales at East India Company House failed to adequately provide for domestic consumption. [22] Yet Cowan’s consternation at the loss he sustained on Dutch tea masks the more intriguing evidence that Scottish society had already established clear preferences and a definite awareness of varieties, price and quality. Returning some of the coarse leaf to Rotterdam, Cowan began ordering a much more diverse range of teas. In early November 1745, he instructed Livingston to consign £40 of ‘good bohea tea’, 50 lb of the higher quality leaf, Congou, and a further 50 lb of Souchong. This was followed in May 1746 by another order on Rotterdam for 300 lb, most of which was Souchong and other unnamed types on a sliding scale of cost.[23] The increasing sophistication of Cowan’s purchases shows an awareness of the various levels of demand in and around Stirling, and speaks to the existence of an increasingly discerning customer base many hundreds of miles from the main metropoles of the tea trade.
The two generations between circa 1730 and 1790 were marked in Scotland by interactions and reactions with the importing strategies of the EIC and VOC, the changing fiscal regime of the British state and the creation of the Swedish East India Company.[24] The result was a flourishing of provincial smuggling economies and the deepening of Scottish preferences for, and even reliance on, continental imports of tea. The age of the illicit tea economy in the British-Irish Isles is conventionally divided into distinct stages. The pre-1745 decades were marked by pervasive but small-scale smuggling. Thereafter competition between legal and smuggled tea stabilised before a ‘new mode’ of ‘associations’ emerged in the decade or so after the end of the Seven Years War (1756-1763). These organisations, such as the Clovan, Mull and Carrick ‘companies’ focused on large-scale importation of teas such as Congou which the EIC failed to provide in sufficient quantity or quality.[25] They consolidated supplies of Swedish East India Company tea and linked with wholesale and retail networks across Northern Britain and Ireland.This era marked in effect the apogee of a distinctive northern subset of the wider European tea economy.
The prominence of Scotland within some of these trends is striking. The country’s geographical situation, its small consumer base and relatively underdeveloped retail provision might point to a peripheral role in the evolution of Europe’s tea cultures.[26] Yet as early as February 1761, the EIC directors had become sufficiently concerned at the scale of ‘a clandestine trade in tea’ to order an intelligence-gathering exercise in Edinburgh.[27] In fact the country lay at the cutting edge of alternative modes of supply, consumption culture and taste preferences that ultimately helped to force adjustments upon the EIC and the elite London tea dealers. As the ‘the most revealing example’ of the new connections created between European suppliers and the domestic British market, ‘Scotland was the only region [in Britain and Ireland] that threatened the dominating position of London’. [28] In this sense Scotland lay not at the periphery of a British tea economy, but constituted a key market in the North Europe world of tea.
What is far less appreciated is the period of the 1730s-70s, which set the stage for the later, better documented large-scale illicit tea economy. The high profile smuggling networks of the 1760s-80s did not emerge in a vacuum, but evolved from a less dramatic but still significant era of growing Scottish engagement with tea. If the Netherlands had been the first supplier of non-EIC tea to Scotland, Sweden emerged rapidly as the dominant new source with the foundation in 1731 of the Swedish East India Company. A number of Scots entrepreneurial networks have been identified as operating within the organisation from the moment of its inception. This was the case both at the level of the directorate and among the supercargoes who acted as the chief mercantile operatives in Asia.[29] Colin Campbell from Moy in Moray and the Aberdeenshire merchants Charles Irvine and James Moir were only the most prominent foreign nationals who formed a substantial percentage of the SEIC’s elite merchants in the early years of its existence. Scots constituted a majority or substantial minority of supercargoes on 35 per cent of all SEIC voyages to Asia between 1732 and 1750, and held 18 per cent of all such posts in the same period. [30]
While Scotland, in common with other British regions, could not access the tea trade directly as a consequence of the EIC’s monopoly, Scottish mercantile networks could and did move easily across and between the formal regulatory frameworks. The effects of this mobility are apparent in the ways in which tea was traded in Scotland throughout the middle decades of the century until the 1790s. A unique record of the volume, variety, prices, customer base and distribution scope of a north European tea dealer can be found in the ‘Tea Sales Books’ of James Corbet, merchant and ship-owner in Dumfries during the 1750s-60s.[31] (See Map 23.1) Like most other purveyors of tea beyond the specialised circle of dealers in London and Amsterdam, Corbet was a general merchant, with the product forming only one part of a much wider range of commodities.
Table 23.1 James Corbet Tea Sales Book, Dumfries, 1758Tea / Price (per lb) / Localities/County / Customer Base
Heyson Green
Singlo Green
Best Congou
Congou
Best Heyson
2nd Congou
Best ZZiong
Best Breakfast
Breakfast Bohea
Coarse Breakfast / 13 shillings
9 shillings
8 shillings
7 shillings, 6 pence
6 shillings, 6 pence
5 shillings
4 shillings, 6 pence
4 shillings, 3 pence
4 shillings
3 shillings, 10 pence / Dumfries (burgh) = 16
Dumfries (county) = 20
Hawick (Roxburgh)
Carrachan (Kirkcubright)
Kirkbean (Kirkcubright)
Glasgow (Lanark)
Edinburgh (Lothian)
Whitehaven (Cumberland) / Women = 35
Gentry = 10
Aristocracy = 7
Clergy = 5
Burgh officeholders = 4
Artisan = 4
Merchant = 3
Lawyers = 3
Shopkeeper = 2
Customs & Excise = 2
Military = 1
Vinter = 1
Schoolmaster = 1
Source: National Records of Scotland, CS 96/2153-2155: Tea Books of James Corbet, merchant and shipowner, Dumfries, 1754-1762.
Table 23.1 provides an overview of Corbet’s 363 tea sales in 1758. The tea books show Corbet’s activities expanding considerably, with 474 lb of ‘breakfast tea’ sold at four shillings per lb in 310 separate transactions between August 1755 and the end of 1756. Congou formed a prominent element in his sales strategy and demand remained buoyant, with 175 Ilb sold in 104 separate sales at 7 shillings per lb between August 1755 and February 1756.[32] The central role of women in the culture of tea consumption is confirmed unequivocally in Corbet’s ledgers. Women formed 54 per cent of his customers for breakfast tea and 38.4 per cent for the more expensive Congou over the latter months of 1755. They retained this high profile throughout 1758, constituting 39 per cent of his entire customer base in that year. Contemporary representations of tea as a particularly feminine, domestic and polite pursuit was clearly reflected in market practice; but acquiring tea also ensured women operated at the sharp end of pricing trends and demands for certain varieties. If this was the case in fashionable salons in Paris and London it was no less true in predominately rural regions like the Scottish borders.
One salient feature of Corbet’s distribution network was its regional scope; his horizons were essentially those of the south west Scottish borders. The known social background of his customers is also telling; the preponderance of landed elites and the professional orders is only to be expected. But shoemakers, wrights and masons also purchased the cheaper varieties, while merchants and shopkeepers such as John Little in Langholm and William Main in Dumfries almost certainly retailed the product further down the social hierarchy. (See Map 23.1) The most striking aspect of Table 23.1 is the diversity of teas and the mixed pricing structure. It is testimony to the sophistication of tea distribution networks and customer tastes across north Europe that a non-specialist merchant in a provincial Scottish burgh was able to offer ten different tea varieties. It is also a telling indication of how Corbet sourced the better quality leaf that his ledger was arranged by 1757 under the distinct headings ‘Congo tea from Gothenburg’ and ‘Gothenburg Congo’.[33]