and 1886 the exports of China tea doubled; but in the same period the exports of Indian tea increased fourteen fold,” and he entitles this historical moment “The Revolution in Tea.”46 Suggesting rebellion through this title, the author hints that Britain has successfully thrown off the yoke of Chinese oppression by cultivating its own, British-owned and -controlled source of tea. The author of this article goes on to detail the exact ways in which the Indian tea industry has managed to achieve this “revolution,” specifically by replacing small familygrown plots of Chinese tea, which passed through multiple hands of processors, transporters, and brokers, with mechanized plantation systems in India, in which every step of the process from seeding to the final auction was under the supervision of a single British planter. Baildon similarly praises this innovation of the Indian tea industry: “In India, from first to last, producing the crop and hearing of its sale is the care and anxiety of one man” (33). The author of “The Revolution in Tea” sums up his article with a rousing moral, “illustrating how a great nation may lose a great industry by carelessness and dishonesty, and how a few energetic and honest traders may build up in a short time an enormous traffic. It is natural and proper that our sympathies should be with the triumph of our Indian industry” (504). Echoing Baildon’s Darwinian rhetoric, this author returns to the concept of “natural” to justify and encourage individual tea drinkers’ participation in the British Empire through drinking Indian tea.
According to Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney’s anthropological investigation of the correlation between eating habits and identity, “Food tells not only how people live but also how they think of themselves in relation to others.”47 By the early nineteenth century, tea had penetrated the inner workings of British daily life, becoming a central part of physical existence and social interaction. Victorian tea histories exhibit anxiety over the extent to which tea drinkers had become immured to tea’s foreign origins and to the distinction between self and other that had become blurred by the adoption of tea as a daily necessity. Although tea had become known as the “national beverage” during the eighteenth century, due to the fact that English consumption of tea far outstripped that of other European nations, tea nevertheless remained a foreign import and contained potentially dangerous implications of dependency and pollution. But during the course of the nineteenth century, as Britain began producing tea for its own consumption within its “Indian empire,” the significance of tea’s label as “the national beverage” acquired new meaning. Consuming tea became a method of absorbing British imperialism, of literally and physically participating in the vital circulation of goods maintained by the British Empire. According to nineteenth-century tea histories, tea constituted British national identity both metaphorically and bodily, contributing to the continued strength of Britain and its people.
The Necessary Luxury of Tea: Defining a Nation and an Empire
The crucial role of tea in the process of creating and strengthening the British Empire stemmed in part from its status as a commodity that crossed ideological boundaries. On the one hand, tea was an exotic luxury imported over vast distances from a culture that was very different from Britain. On the other hand, tea had become an irreplaceable necessity of English everyday life. The position of tea, straddling the boundaries between the ontological categories of luxury and necessity, was critical in the ideological development of an imperial nation. Historically, luxuries have been viewed as potentially dangerous for the continued success of empires. According to Roman writers toward the end of the Roman Empire, the importation of foreign luxuries drained resources—both financial resources of monetary funds and human resources of virility and power—from the imperial homeland.48 Nineteenth-century writers, however, insisted that tea did not fit traditional definitions of a luxury. Tea elided the boundary between luxury and necessity by simultaneously existing in both categories at once. Tea thus became both a daily fixture of English culture and an exotic imported consumable, playing a crucial role in domestic and imperial affairs. Rather than enervating the empire, tea served as a reason for extending British territory in India and as a cash crop for British planters. By spending money and time consuming a foreign luxury, English tea drinkers were ultimately participating in the continued success of the British Empire.
In his work on the history of luxuries, sociologist and philosopher Christopher J. Berry argues that commodities have a transient, dynamic status on a continuum that ranges from luxuries at one end to necessities at the opposite end.49 Many luxury goods, according to Berry, have historically moved out of their luxury status into the position of a social necessity, part of everyday life for most people in a given culture (18). Berry argues that in the process of moving from luxury to necessity, a good that becomes socially necessary effects physical changes within the person who needs that good; new needs “actually affect the constitution of those who need them” (179). Berry’s use of the word constitution recalls Samuel Day’s and Charles Ashford’s representation of the role of tea in the English constitution and suggests that the shift of tea from a luxury to an English necessity produced physiological changes in the English people.50
A few passages from nineteenth-century texts appear to agree with the concept of a continuum of goods, suggesting that tea definitively moved out of the category of a luxury as it became increasingly necessary to daily English life. The anonymous Tsiology: A Discourse on Tea (1827) asserts that “[f]rom a fashionable and expensive luxury, [tea] has been converted into an essential comfort, if not an absolute necessary of life” (19). Samuel Day’s Tea: Its Mystery and History outlines this gradual shift in the location of tea within daily life from a luxury to a necessity—from a product that was expensive and unneeded, an extra expense for an item purely for pleasure (whether appetitive or social), to a commodity so important within the daily diet that its absence would be felt as “deprivation.” Day quotes “an eminent statesman” who declared, “What was first regarded as a luxury, has now become, if not an absolute necessity, at least one of our accustomed daily wants, the loss of which would cause more suffering and excite more regret than would the deprivation of many things which once were counted as necessaries of life” (Day, 70). In this passage, Day maintains a binary between luxury and necessity, basing these definitions on the importance of tea to daily life. According to Day’s quotable statesman, tea had not merely traversed the divide between luxury and necessity but had worked its way so far into the fabric of everyday life that it had become even more important than other things that had once been considered necessary. Tea had replaced older, existing necessities of life such as beer and ale, reflecting a new hierarchy of priorities within daily life.
In these passages, Day and the author of Tsiology appear to uphold the distinction between luxuries and necessities, but both texts eventually collapse that binary by insisting that tea can occupy positions as a luxury and as a necessity simultaneously. According to Berry’s analysis, a luxury good can be universally desired and widely consumed, but it cannot, by definition, be a social necessity; once it has moved on the continuum toward the position of being socially required to satisfy the needs of individuals within a certain culture, it can no longer be defined as a luxury. But tea histories maintain the status of tea as a luxury—as an exotic, pleasurable indulgence—even as they celebrate tea as a daily necessity within English life. By retaining the nuances of luxury in their assessment of tea, nineteenth-century tea histories and advertisements signal their position within a historical debate over the social effects of consuming luxury commodities. Cultures throughout the Western world have contributed to a growing literature dedicated to illustrating the pernicious nature of luxury consumption.51 But shifts in national economies sparked a radical reassessment of the effect of luxury consumption on the welfare of nations in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The consumption of luxury goods imported from foreign locations became increasingly important to European economies, and foreign trade became associated with the wealth and prosperity of the English nation.52 Tsiology counters the claim that tea is an “enervating luxury” draining the nation of needed resources and energy, by arguing that “no article of extensive commerce can possibly exist—whether a mere luxury or a positive necessary—without enriching a nation in proportion to its extent” (105). The author of Tsiology dismantles the association between luxury and the fall of empires by asserting that
