products and the experiences of Britain’s global commerce and imperial expansion. The original front cover illustration of Tea and Tea Drinking exemplifies this focus (see fig. 1.3). Framed by Asian lettering and cherry blossoms, a recognizably English teacup occupies the center of the page and the reader’s gaze. The Oriental ornamentation on the cup suggests its status as a Chinese import, just like the tea it contains, but the cup itself emphasizes the power of English consumption to transform the products imported to England and consumed by English men and women. Chinese porcelain teacups in the nineteenth century—and today—have a much simpler shape and design; like the teacups found in Chinese restaurants, they are usually small, simple, convex cups with no handle and no saucer. The teacup handle and saucer were added purely for European export, marking the power of English tastes to exert changes on global commodities.31 The teaspoon provides further evidence of the Englishness of this image at the beginning of Reade’s tea history. Unlike Chinese tea drinkers, who consumed their tea as a straight infusion of tea leaves and boiling water, the English sweetened their tea with milk and sugar. Chinese tea drinkers had no need for teaspoons; the presence of a spoon resting on the saucer in this illustration highlights the national flavor of this cup of tea. Reade’s teacup—with handle, saucer, and teaspoon—serves as a microcosm of England’s conglomerative approach to commodity culture. The English taste for drinking tea with milk and sugar united products from around the empire and its commercial sphere of influence: Chinese porcelain, Chinese or Indian tea, English milk, and sugar from colonies in the West Indies.32 Combining the products of the empire and England within everyday rituals of consumption became common practice.33 As tea drinking exemplifies, there were no boundaries to English consumption; the world became the marketplace for English consumers, and to be truly English was to consume the world.34
Figure 1.3. The hybrid English teacup, cover illustration from Arthur Reade’s Tea and Tea Drinking (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, and Rivington, 1884).
“Indebted to the Tea-Plant”: The Discovery of Tea in India
Despite the bravado of writers such as De Quincey and Arthur Reade, the stance of hybrid global consumerism remained a relatively tenuous position, leaving the British at the mercy of foreign powers—culturally, financially, and politically. Almost fifty years before the publication of Reade’s text, at the outbreak of the First Opium War, G. G. Sigmond explains in Tea: Its Effects, Medicinal and Moral, “The necessity of avoiding an entire dependence upon China for tea, has long struck some of our most intelligent statesmen” (63). Citing politicians’ concerns regarding the source of tea imports, Sigmond signals that the tea trade affected national interests, creating a situation in which individual tea drinkers and the financial health of the nation depended on a commodity produced by a foreign power. In his tea treatise, Sigmond suggests an alternative to dependence on Chinese tea merchants for supplies of the national beverage: he offers tea drinkers the possibility of consuming tea cultivated and produced within British-controlled regions of India and thus symbolically within the conceptual boundaries of Great Britain. Tea: Its Effects, Medicinal and Moral was published at a pivotal period of the global tea trade; Sigmond’s treatise marks the beginning of a gradual transition of tea from a commodity imported to Britain from a foreign nation to a colonial resource cultivated and consumed within its imperial territories. Sigmond’s emphasis on the revelation that tea grew indigenously on the Indian subcontinent simultaneously justifies British imperial expansion and reaffirms the place of tea in English everyday life.
British explorers first reported the existence of wild tracts of tea plants in Assam, in northeastern India, in 1823, but cultivation and production of tea in India did not begin until the late 1830s. According to historian Denys Forrest, author of Tea for the British, the delay in tea cultivation can be attributed to the East India Company, which at that time held a government-sanctioned monopoly on all tea imported to Britain from China, effectively making the East India Company the sole source of tea for European consumption (Forrest, 107). Rather than encouraging internal competition among its branches, the company, according to Forrest, temporarily ignored the potential for Indian-grown sources of tea, relying instead on its network of trade relations with Chinese tea merchants. Parliament dissolved the East India Company’s China monopoly in 1833, opening up the China tea trade to independent British interests. A decade after the discovery of tea in Assam, the East India Company turned its attention to the possibility of producing Indian tea.35 The first shipment of Indian-grown tea was auctioned on the London tea market in 1839.36
In September 1839, Charles Bruce, credited with first discovering tea growing in India, issued a report detailing his experiences and encouraging the cultivation and production of tea by British planters in India.37 Bruce, whose byline includes his title as “Superintendent of Tea-Culture,” ends his report with a resounding paragraph emphasizing his role in the discovery of tea in India and intimating the great possibilities stemming from it:
In looking forward to the unbounded benefit the discovery of this plant will produce to England, to India,—to millions, I cannot but thank God for so great a blessing to our country. When I first discovered it, some 14 years ago, I little thought that I should have been spared long enough to see it become likely eventually to rival that of China, and that I should have to take a prominent part in bringing it to so successful an issue. Should what I have written on this new and interesting subject be of any benefit to the country and the community at large, and help a little to impel the tea forward to enrich our own dominions, and pull down the haughty pride of China, I shall feel myself richly repaid for all the perils, and dangers, and fatigues, that I have undergone in the cause of British-Indian tea. (160–61)
Bruce conveys his thanks to God for conferring such a blessing upon England, and he also suggests that his countrymen owe him a debt of gratitude as well. Part of the “successful . . . issue” brought about by the discovery of tea in India comes from its effect on England’s trade with China; Bruce is proud that Indian tea will one day “rival that of China,” and his goal, he admits, is to “pull down the haughty pride of China.” Published in 1839, the year the First Opium War broke out, Bruce’s piece echoes the jingoism of, for example, Thomas de Quincey’s essays on China.38
G. G. Sigmond’s Tea: Its Effects, Medicinal and Moral was published in London that same year, and he celebrates Bruce’s discovery of the tea plant growing wild in the jungles of Assam.39 Connecting botany and medicine with commerce and politics, along with a generous interest in the social habits of England, Sigmond’s text appeals to a broader audience than Bruce’s details regarding the exact expenditures needed to establish a successful tea plantation in Assam. Sigmond describes the momentous discovery of the Indian tea plant: “At the present moment every circumstance which relates to the tea-plant carries with it a deeper interest. A discovery has been made of no less importance than that the hand of Nature has planted the shrub within the bounds of the wide dominion of Great Britain: a discovery which must materially influence the destinies of nations; it must change the employment of a vast number of individuals; it must divert the tide of commerce, and awaken to agricultural industry the dormant energies of a mighty country, whose wellbeing must be the great aim of a paternal government” (3). The simple tea shrub, Sigmond declares, affects the destinies of individuals, societies, and nations, shaking economic and political systems across the globe. Sigmond carefully delineates the “bounds of the wide dominion of Great Britain” in this passage, asserting firmly that the tea plant was discovered growing within those borders and thus within British territory. By placing the well-being of the dormant but mighty resources of India within the hands of “a paternal government,” Sigmond articulates the connection between the budding Indian tea industry and British imperial goals. Cultivating tea in India would contribute to a new agricultural industry for British colonial planters and simultaneously participate in an enlargement of imperial territory and power. The investment of British
