The British Tea Industry and the Empire

The British tea trade was one of the great commodity stories of the nineteenth century. In 1700, tea was a luxury consumed only by the wealthiest Britons; by 1900, it was the universal beverage of the British working class. Britons consumed 1.9 kg per head per year in 1900, a figure exceeded only by the populations of Turkey and Ireland. Tirthankar Roy, in The Economic History of India, 1857–1947 (2000), has calculated that by 1900 perhaps 250 million Indians, 4 million Ceylonese, and smaller numbers in Natal and the Straits Settlements depended on the tea industry for their livelihood.

The British tea industry was, in Prasannan Parthasarathi’s framing in Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not (2011), an instance of the larger process by which European commercial and industrial power displaced the older centres of Asian manufacture. The Chinese tea industry, which had supplied the British market from the seventeenth century through the early nineteenth, was displaced by the 1880s. The displacement was the result of a sustained programme of botanical transfer, capital investment, and tariff policy — a programme that would have been impossible without the political control that the British exercised over India and Ceylon.

The China Trade and the Opium Wars

The earliest British tea trade was conducted through the East India Company. The Company had, by the late eighteenth century, a substantial monopoly on the British trade in Chinese tea; the British demand for Chinese tea was growing rapidly. The 1834 abolition of the East India Company’s monopoly on the British trade with China opened the China trade to private British merchants, and the subsequent trade in opium — the principal British export to China — was the cause of the First Opium War (1839–42). The Treaty of Nanking, signed on 29 August 1842, opened five Chinese treaty ports to British trade, ceded Hong Kong to Britain in perpetuity, and abolished the Canton system of licensed monopoly trade. The subsequent Treaty of Tientsin (1858) and the Convention of Peking (1860) opened further ports and legalised the opium trade.

As William Gervase Clarence-Smith has argued in The Global History of Tea (2015), the Opium Wars were the moment when the British tea trade stopped being a Chinese export business and became an Indian colonial enterprise. The shift had already begun before 1842, with the 1834 establishment of a Tea Committee by the Governor-General of India, Lord William Bentinck, charged with investigating the possibility of growing tea in India. By 1840 the Committee had identified the indigenous tea plant of Assam, and by 1841 the first commercial shipment of Assam tea was sold at the London auctions.

The Assam Tea Industry

The Assam tea industry was a creation of British colonial capital. The first commercial gardens were planted by the Assam Company, founded in 1839, with capital from London and Calcutta. By 1870 there were perhaps 1,000 tea gardens in Assam, employing some 100,000 workers, and producing 17 million pounds of tea a year. The labour force was recruited from the Santal, Munda, and Oraon peoples of the Chotanagpur plateau and from the tribal peoples of the central Indian hills, transported under a system of indentured labour that was continuous with the slavery-era coolie trade. The mortality rates on the early tea gardens — a death rate of 30 per cent within five years of arrival, in some districts — were among the worst recorded in the British Empire, comparable to those of the rubber plantations of early Malaya.

The Indian tea industry overtook the Chinese in the British market in the 1880s. The 1880s dominance of Indian tea was the result of three factors: the lower price of Indian tea, made possible by the wage costs and the absence of Chinese-style tea taxes; the political control of the Indian government over the industry, which made tariff and infrastructure policy instruments of trade competition; and the failure of the Chinese government to defend the industry through investment, tariffs, or quality controls. Prasannan Parthasarathi, in Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not (2011), has placed the story of Indian tea at the heart of his argument that European economic ascendancy was the contingent product of particular political choices, not of any inherent technological or biological advantage.

The Ceylon Tea Industry

The Ceylon tea industry was an indirect product of the destruction of the Ceylon coffee industry by the coffee-leaf rust (Hemileia vastatrix) in the 1860s and 1870s. The British planters of Ceylon, faced with the loss of their principal crop, turned to tea in the 1880s. By 1890 tea had overtaken coffee as the principal Ceylonese export, and by 1900 the island was producing 100 million pounds of tea a year. The London auctions at Mincing Lane — held three times a week from the 1830s to the 1960s — were the price-setting institution of the world tea trade.

The Ceylon tea industry was, in its labour regime, similar to the Assam industry. The labour force was recruited from South India, transported under the kangani and maistry recruitment systems, and worked under a debt-peonage regime that survived nominally into the 1940s. As John Tully has argued in The Devil’s Milk (2011), the tea plantation system was, in its labour relations, an extension of the slavery-era plantation system. The difference was the existence of a colour bar: the Tamil labour force was, formally, free but unfree in practice; the slave-owners’ compensation payments of the 1830s had not provided any compensation to the enslaved, and the post-1834 plantation regimes reproduced, under different legal forms, the unfreedom of the slavery era.

The Decolonisation of the British Tea Industry

The 1947 independence of India and the 1948 independence of Ceylon (Sri Lanka from 1972) were the political markers. The economic markers came more slowly. The 1972 nationalisation of the British-owned tea plantations in Sri Lanka, the 1980s restructuring of the Indian tea industry, and the 1990s consolidation of the London tea auction system (the Mincing Lane auctions were closed in 1998) were the structural changes. The British-owned plantation companies — the Ceylon Tea Plantations Company, the Madulsima Plantations, the Consolidated Tea and Lands Company, and dozens of others — were sold off to Indian, Sri Lankan, and Malaysian capital over the 1960s and 1970s. The British consumer of tea drank, by the 1980s, a product that had been almost entirely decolonised.

A Primary Source: The Treaty of Nanking, 1842

The Treaty of Nanking opened the Chinese tea trade to British merchants. Article II declared: “The Island of Hong Kong, to be possessed in perpetuity by Her Britannic Majesty, her Heirs and Successors, and to be governed by such Laws and Regulations as Her Majesty the Queen of Great Britain and Ireland shall see fit to direct.” Article V opened the treaty ports, and Article VI provided for “a fair and reasonable Tariff” of export and import duties. The treaty did not mention opium, although the war had been fought over the opium trade; the omission was the price of Chinese agreement to the peace.

Historiographical Note

The historiography of the British tea industry has been transformed since the 1970s. The older celebratory accounts of the Assam and Ceylon plantation industries have been displaced by the critical literature: Tirthankar Roy’s The Economic History of India (2000), Parthasarathi’s Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not (2011), Clarence-Smith’s The Global History of Tea (2015), and the essays in the Oxford History of the British Empire. The unresolved question is how far the British tea industry was the consequence of British technological and commercial advantage, or of the political-military power that the British exercised over India and China. The consensus, as Sven Beckert has argued in Empire of Cotton (2014), is that the answer depends on how one defines “advantage.”

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