The Impact of the trade of Tea.

Background:

  • Growth of tea trade in C18th.
  • Beginning as a luxury for the wealthy, extended consumer market to include all classes. Due to nutritional value and both warming and stimulating properties, tea soon drunk by miners and textile workers in the factories of the north of England.
  • ‘The ‘Ladies’ tea party at home soon became so common as to elicit satirical comment’[1], and encouraged the production of various qualities and types of teas for the consumption of such diverse social groups.
  • Tea rose from being unheard of in Western Europe in 1500, to being the institution and tradition synonymous with “Britishness” that it is today.
  • Drinking and dining rituals created. Elaborate tea rituals developed using porcelain of various patterns, and it was at this time that we saw the birth of the dinner set & rules of social etiquette explaining how to set and eat at a table adorned with such exotic goods. Created a ‘revolution of sociability’.[2]
  • ‘By 1750 the poorest English farm labourer’s wife took sugar in her tea’.[3]
  • ‘Tea eventually supplanted home-brewed small beer almost entirely’.[4]
  • G.B. importing 5m pounds of tea in 1760, 20m by 1800.[5]


Impact on London:

  • Growth of teahouses, afternoon tea culture, ladies’ tea party, widespread drinking by miners and workers. Became part of daily routine of life.
  • Some merchants became very wealthy through the trade.
  • Tea drinking rituals spurred on the desire for porcelain.

Impact on India:

  • Need for tea in Europe, and lack of Chinese interest in British goods, led to the cheap production of Opium in Bengal (by the British). This Opium then traded with China in return for tea.
  • This, in part, led to the de-industrialisation of India, as labour and land were turned towards agricultural production.

Impact on China:

  • Led to the commercialisation of agric. by peasant farmers wishing for increased profits from tea cultivation over rice production. But, made China more susceptible to price fluctuations and harvest failures, and the dilapidation of irrigation systems required for rice production but not tea cultivation.
  • Indirectly, tea had a devastating impact on China, as it led to the huge trade of Opium. As many as 100 000 became addicted in Suzhou alone, altogether as much as 10% of the Chinese population (40m) were regular users. China consumed 95% of the world’s Opium supply.[6] This had a devastating social impact.
  • Economically, such huge amounts of Opium were imported into China illegally that China could not export enough goods to equalize, resulting in the outflow of silver from China to Europe.
  • Politically, government attempts to stop the illegal trade of Opium (due to its social impact) resulted in the confiscation of European Opium stores in Chinese cities and the blockading of European trading areas there. Britain retaliated, causing the Opium wars, through which, because of the British victory, Britain gained far greater access to the Chinese market and increased trading privileges. The British presence became firmly established in China, and this in part led to the overthrow of the Qing Dynasty in the 1911 revolution.

Nigel Ellams.

[1] John E. Wills, Jr., ‘European Consumption and Asian Production in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’, in John Brewer and Roy Porter (ed.) Consumption and the World of Goods (London, 1994), p. 142.

[2] Maxine Berg, ‘In Pursuit of Luxury: Global History and British Consumer Goods in the eighteenth century’ in Past And Present, No. 182 (2004), p. 98.

[3] Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (London, 1986), p. 45.

[4] Ibid., p. 110.

[5] Robert B. Marks, The Origins of the Modern World: A Global and Ecological Narrative (Oxford, 2002), p. 113.

[6] Ibid., p. 128.