Tea thus occupied the binary-straddling position of being physically and morally necessary as an article of daily ingestion and of simultaneously retaining the characteristics of a pleasurable indulgence to be savored and enjoyed. Robert Fortune’s Journey to the Tea Countries of China (1852) explains in greater detail exactly how this dual nature of tea helped to enrich the English nation and the British Empire. Fortune, a Scottish botanist, was hired by the East India Company to infiltrate Chinese tea plantations to gain knowledge about cultivating and manufacturing tea and to acquire thousands of tea seedlings to transport to fledgling tea plantations in India.54 At first, Fortune maintains a rhetorical divide between the concepts of “luxury” and “necessity,” and he suggests that tea has “almost” traversed the divide between luxury and necessity: “In these days, when tea has become almost a necessary of life in England and her wide-spreading colonies, its production upon a large and cheap scale is an object of no ordinary importance” (394). Tea, originally an expensive luxury, had become an item of everyday consumption. But as Fortune explains the importance of tea to England, India, and the British Empire, he emphasizes the qualities of tea that continued to define that commodity as a luxury—Fortune describes tea as an item that was essential to English notions of comfort and pleasure.
Fortune carefully delineates a twofold rationale for how growing tea in India would benefit both England and India. Production of tea within the confines of England’s “wide-spreading colonies” would, of course, offer tea produced on a “large and cheap scale” from a territory much more accessible and economically beneficial for export to England. But Fortune’s justification suggests that while growing tea in India would increase English access to tea, Indian cultivation of tea would also serve to benefit and civilize the natives of India by giving them access to some of the luxuries currently available to the English middle classes. Fortune provides a detailed vignette of Indian peasant life and suggests precisely how the introduction of tea plantations would materially enhance the culture and comfort of Indian men and women:
[T]o the natives of India themselves the production of [tea] would be of the greatest value. The poor paharie, or hill peasant, at present has scarcely the common necessaries of life, and certainly none of its luxuries. The common sorts of grain which his lands produce will scarcely pay the carriage to the nearest market-town, far less yield such a profit as will enable him to purchase even a few of the necessary and simple luxuries of life. A common blanket has to serve him for his covering by day and for his bed at night, while his dwelling-house is a mere mud-hut, capable of affording but little shelter from the inclemency of the weather. If part of these lands produced tea, he would then have a healthy beverage to drink, besides a commodity which would be of great value in the market. Being of small bulk compared with its value, the expense of carriage would be trifling, and he would have the means of making himself and his family more comfortable and more happy. (394–95)
According to Fortune, the Indian hill peasants’ poor living conditions were linked to their inability to elide the distinction between necessity and luxury. Fortune initially employs this distinction to judge the Indian hill peasant’s incapacity to provide for himself and his family. The peasant before the cultivation of tea can scarcely buy necessaries, and certainly no luxuries. Fortune does not specify what necessities and luxuries are in this context, but he seems to assume that there is a clear distinction between these two categories. The introduction of tea plantations, however, would blur the boundary between these two categories by raising the peasant’s standard of living enough to enable him “to purchase . . . the necessary and simple luxuries of life.” In this sentence, luxuries have suddenly become necessary—there are no longer two categories, of essential and nonessential-but-pleasant. With the introduction of tea cultivation to India, goods previously considered nonessential could become “necessary luxuries.”
According to Fortune, the ability to grow, transport, and sell tea would transform the Indian peasant into a middle-class British subject. As the British tea drinker would attest, the ability to purchase necessary luxuries such as tea was crucial to the definition of that subject position. As the Indian subjects rose in financial and moral health, they too would begin purchasing the “necessary and simple luxuries of life,” bringing them fully into the circulation of goods between colony and metropole and providing a market both for Indian tea and potentially for British goods as well.55 Tea thus literally and figuratively expanded the boundaries of the empire—adding territory to the British-controlled regions of India for the cultivation of tea while simultaneously creating more British subjects who would conform to the characteristic requirements of the middle-class national identity. Ensuring the successful cultivation and production of tea into India thus became a moral imperative for the British, so that they could help bring the Indians into the middle class—a privileged position poised on the boundaries of economic, social, and linguistic categories.
The British reader, sitting comfortably in his or her parlor, could vicariously experience the thrill of Fortune’s forays into forbidden Chinese sanctuaries and the hope of successfully cultivating tea in India by reading Fortune’s Journey to the Tea Countries. But as Fortune emphasizes, the reader’s participation continues well past the end of Fortune’s narrative. While Fortune suggests that the British cultivation of tea in India would transform Indian peasants into middle-class citizens of the British Empire, he also implies that British readers in England could physically participate in the process of building the empire by purchasing and consuming Indian-grown tea. Fortune’s text offers a tangible way to experience the full cycle of colonized and colonizer, of colony and metropole. By drinking tea produced in India, the British tea drinker simultaneously enriched his or her own body (and thus his or her small physical piece of the British Empire) and contributed to the physical, moral, and financial health of the expanding empire in India. The British cultivation and production of tea in India would enable the poor Indian peasant to become part of the capitalist system of exchange and to rise economically to a position of middle-class comfort. The cycle was completed by the journey of Indian-grown tea back to England, where the British tea drinker would purchase it and consume it, thus contributing simultaneously to the expansion of the empire, the increasing wealth and comfort of the inhabitants of British India, and his or her own sense of English national identity.
By emphasizing the status of tea as a luxury and a daily necessity within English culture, nineteenth-century tea histories and advertisements suggest that the tea trade held a critically important position within the English national economy, just as the wise purchase of tea was central to an individual English household’s domestic economy. An advertisement for the United Kingdom Tea Company offers visual evidence of the role of luxury in the continued strength and success of the British government and its empire (see fig. 1.4). The ad depicts the female figure of Britannia, complete in flowing Roman robes and plumed military headdress, reclining at a small table and pouring herself a cup of tea. Drawing upon the glory and military strength of the Roman Empire to assert similar praise for the empire of Great Britain, this ad suggests that, far from enervating and destroying the imperial power of England, commercial trade in luxury goods supported and strengthened the nation. In the background, figures representing China, India, Ceylon, and Assam—the major regions of tea production—bring chests of tea to Britannia. In the foreground, she calmly focuses her gaze on her tiny teacup, into which she is pouring tea from a small, round teapot labeled, in case there was any doubt, “United Kingdom Tea Company’s Teas.” Thus, Britain consumes and enjoys teas imported from around the world, supported by the labor and the service of numerous foreign nations and colonies, represented by various forms of cultural dress and racial appearance in the ad.
Each chest of tea within the ad, including those carried by the figures of China and India as well as the one on which Britannia reclines, portrays the trademark image of the United Kingdom Tea Company: three young women in three distinct national costumes. Although this image is indistinct and obscured by the folds of Britannia’s robes in this ad, the same image appears, larger and more clearly, in other ads for the United Kingdom Tea Company. The woman in the center wears the dress of early nineteenth-century
