From Aeon:
The China tea trade was a paradox: a global, intensified industry without the usual spectacle of factories and technology
Dutch merchants were the first to import tea leaves into Europe in 1609, but by the late 1700s it was the English East India Company, backed by state monopoly, that came to dominate what became known as the ‘Canton Trade’. During its 18th-century golden age, tea symbolised Chinese civilisation’s preeminent standing in the world. The European aristocracy and bourgeoisie fetishised it as a distinctively Asian commodity, the latest in a broader fashion for exotic art, porcelains and silk from the Orient known as ‘chinoiserie’. Tea symbolised the material grandeur of the venerable celestial empire, which the younger European powers admired and sought to emulate.....MUCH MORE
Over the course of the 18th century, the average English family quintupled its consumption of tea, mixed with sugar and milk, and profits skyrocketed. Demand for tea was so powerful that it fuelled the creation of a British-centred world market, and its taxation accounted for one-tenth of the Crown’s revenue, underwriting the British expansion into South Asia. As the East India Company’s auditor-general declared in 1830: ‘India does entirely depend upon the profits of the China trade.’
The British could offer little in return that Chinese merchants wanted to buy. So, by the late 18th century, British colonial officials began to smuggle Indian opium into the port city of Canton (now known as Guangzhou). When the Daoguang Emperor, who ruled from 1820 to 1850, attempted to enforce a longstanding prohibition on the narcotic, British officials and traders declared war under the banner of defending liberty of trade. The lopsided British victory in the first Opium War (1839-42) inaugurated what is known today in China as the ‘century of humiliation’. Put simply, tea helped launch the British empire while also setting into motion the long decline of China and the Qing dynasty. Only with the rise and victory of the Communist Party in 1949, the nationalist lore goes, could the original shame of military defeat and colonialism be redeemed.
China had been cultivating the tea plant for more than 1,000 years – a wondrous product of nature painstakingly perfected by artisanal masters. England, however, came to the contest with iron ships, powerful artillery and the backing of the world’s first industrial revolution. For scholars of European empire and modern Asia alike, it’s typically at this point in the story – with the rise of the West now firmly established – that the Chinese tea trade recedes from view.
But, in fact, the post-Opium War tea trade has some important things to tell us about the history of capitalism. Looking beyond the North Atlantic world, in the tea districts of 19th-century China in particular, modern capitalism continued to develop, flexible and globally oriented in character. Even in the Chinese hinterlands, we find the accumulation of capital dependent neither upon spectacular technological innovation nor particular class relations, but instead manifest in a new social logic of global competition. After all, the Chinese treaty port system implemented after the First Opium War didn’t spell the demise of the tea industry but its expansion.
During the rest of 19th century, tea exports climbed even faster, as buyers from continental Europe and the United States joined the British. By the early 20th century (the time of the first systematic surveys), the tea trade continued to employ more people – peasant families, women, children, seasonal workers and porters, spanning rural villages and treaty ports – than any of China’s early urban industries. In response, rival industries emerged in colonial India, Ceylon, Japan, Taiwan and the Dutch East Indies. Just when most histories turn their attention elsewhere, the Chinese tea trade was growing larger than ever, with ever-deeper overseas entanglements.
The Chinese tea trade actually represented China’s entry point into global capitalism. Tea was traded, directly and indirectly, for Patna opium, Peruvian silver, Caribbean sugar, English textiles and Burmese rice. Such activity constituted the first truly global division of labour, powered by the regional specialisation of colonial-world cash crops – or, as W E B Du Bois put it in his book Black Reconstruction (1935): a ‘dark and vast sea of human labour in China and India, the South Seas and all Africa; in the West Indies and Central America and in the United States … spawning the world’s raw material and luxury – cotton, wool, coffee, tea …’ This global division of labour also reshaped the Chinese countryside in dynamic and novel ways.
For much of the 20th century, Western experts viewed China as a precapitalist society. They typically equated ‘capitalism’ with industrialisation and innovation, spectacular benchmarks such as coal-powered engines, steel factories and advances in chemical and mechanical engineering. These technological breakthroughs distinguished the ‘West’ from the ‘rest’, and it was their absence in China – and much of Asia – that marked it as ‘precapitalist’.....
Previously:
The Great British Tea Heist: Or How England Stole the Secret, Discovered a Fraud and Created the Modern World
Why the World Only Has Two Words For Tea
"Christopher Hitchens And George Orwell’s Ironclad Rules for Making a Good Cup of Tea"
Watch Out Mary Poppins: The World's First Tea Brewing System Utilizing Machine-Learning Algorithms Has Received Pre-Launch Seed Funding (plus a Princess Rap Battle)
"'Tea cartel' formed to boost profits"
Mary Poppins Triumphs: Thousand-Dollar IoT, Bluetooth and WiFi Enabled Tea Kettle Company Folds
"East India Company: The Original Too-Big-to-Fail Firm"
Shipping: It Wasn't Just the British: Americans Making Money Off the Opium Trade
Invitation to Tea at the Financial Times
