class. These boundaries were what defined and protected the domestic space within England.2 And England itself, within the larger sphere of the world, was perceived as a domestic space within the empire and within the larger “public” sphere of the rest of the world. Tea helped to comfort those within their domestic spaces but simultaneously jeopardized the ideological safety of those spaces by bringing the public world of the marketplace and the empire into the private space of the parlor.
Resting national identity upon the consumption of tea as a domestic, English commodity raised fears about basing ideals of domesticity and national identity on a foreign product from China—a nation that, despite the best British attempts to penetrate its mysteries, had remained frustratingly unknown. Depending on an Asian commodity to evoke a sense of English domesticity threatened to break down the very boundaries necessary to constructing national identity. As Linda Colley has argued, “we usually decide who we are by reference to who and what we are not.”3 Simultaneously perceiving China as the “other” and depending on Asian tea to produce a sense of English national identity threatened to collapse the distinctions upon which that national identity was formulated. Nineteenth-century tea histories suggest the potential dangers of consuming the Orient—anxieties of ingestion, the threat of pollution, and frighteningly permeable cultural boundaries.
In response, histories of tea articulate three strategies for reaffirming English physical, political, and cultural boundaries to reconstitute English identity. Each strategy emphasizes the boundaries that were compromised by England’s reliance on global commodities to affirm its sense of national self. One strategy suggests replacing the apparently failed boundaries of nation with commercial boundaries—emotional and financial boundaries of brand loyalty to ensure “pure” tea and physical boundaries of newly invented individual paper packages to maintain tea’s purity from wholesaler to consumer. A second strategy suggests accepting and even reveling in the permeable boundaries created by globalism, taking pride in Britain’s position as a consumer of the world’s goods. This strategy proposes that English men and women reenvision themselves as global consumers consuming the world, adopting a new hybrid form of consumerism that encouraged porous boundaries between nations and allowed for a more cosmopolitan sense of identity within the world at large.
While these two strategies may have helped to alleviate some of the anxieties associated with consuming imported commodities, the search for more-secure sources of the national beverage—more secure in terms of pricing, availability, and purity—eventually led to a shift in the boundary between foreign commodity and English consumer. A third, more powerful strategy involved shifting the boundaries of nation—expanding the British Empire to include territories able to produce and manufacture tea, thus creating a safe, British source of the national beverage. Tea histories reveal that the British tea industry’s central strategy for procuring safe, secure sources of tea was to transform tea from a foreign commodity into a product of the British Empire.
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, all European imports of tea came from China. The early-nineteenth-century discovery and cultivation of tea in British-controlled regions of India resulted in a precipitous decline of China tea imported to Britain. British imports of tea continued to increase throughout the nineteenth century, as they had from tea’s first introduction to Britain in the 1650s, but more and more tea imported to Britain came from the British colonies of Assam and Ceylon.4 Late-nineteenth-century publications sought to establish that tea was not only consumed by tea drinkers in the cultural center of British power but also was produced by British planters and therefore originated from an outpost of that cultural center. By encouraging tea drinkers to envision themselves as contributing to the growth of British naval, economic, and colonial power, the tea industry helped to construct the image of England as an imperial nation.
The unique position of tea as both a luxury and a necessity contributed to its role in building—both ideologically and financially—the British Empire. Historically, until the eighteenth century, luxuries had been viewed as detrimental to the success of empires; foreign imports were described as enervating, depleting the reproductive resources of an empire.5 Spending money and time consuming luxuries was considered to be a form of self-indulgent squandering of men and capital. But the ability of tea to exist simultaneously in the opposing realms of luxury and necessity, foreign and domestic, enabled tea to foster the growth and power of Britain as an imperial nation, just as it invigorated the individual bodies of English men and women.
The Body and the Nation: Creating Englishness by Drinking Tea
Tea histories explicitly attribute both individual and national well-being to tea drinking, connecting the physical body of individual English men and women with the collective body politic. G. G. Sigmond declares, “Amongst the endless variety of the vegetable productions which the bounteous hand of Nature has given to [man’s] use is that simple shrub, whose leaf supplies an agreeable beverage for his daily nourishment or for his solace; but little does he estimate its real importance: he scarcely knows how materially it influences his moral, his physical, and his social condition:—individually and nationally we are deeply indebted to the tea-plant” (1). According to Sigmond’s Tea: Its Effects, Medicinal and Moral (1839), tea is agreeable, pleasant, and comforting; it both nourishes the body and provides solace for the soul. Sigmond emphasizes that drinking tea enables an English man or woman to temporarily merge individual and national identity in the comforting pleasure of a hot cup of tea. Sigmond claims that tea influences all parts of an Englishman’s existence: moral, physical, and social; individual and national. The Englishman, for Sigmond, is “deeply indebted to the tea-plant”; thus, the English owe their existence, their identity, their sense of self and the boundaries that demarcate individual and national identities to their habit of drinking tea. English men and women depend on it to construct who they are in domestic rituals repeated every day in homes throughout England.
Sigmond suggests that tea fundamentally contributes to the values of moderation and temperance in English society: “[N]o beverage that has ever yet been introduced sits so agreeably on the stomach, so refreshes the system, soothes nervous irritation after fatigue, or forms a more grateful repast. It contributes to the sobriety of a nation; it imparts all the charms to society which spring from the enjoyment of conversation, without that excitement which follows upon a fermented drink” (95). Sigmond transitions seamlessly between the individual stomach of the tea drinker to the “sobriety of the nation,” forging a connection between the physical body of the individual English subject and the abstract political nation. The action of tea within the stomach of the tea drinker is broadcast in larger terms within the population of England as a whole, promoting sobriety and calm interactions among the English people. The physical responses of the body to the ingestion of tea, such as calming the nerves, soothing the stomach, and refreshing the system, directly engender the ideal English society, complete with social charm, personal grace, and lively but polite discourse. The body of the tea drinker thus becomes the body of the nation, and the consumption of tea enhances both bodies simultaneously.
The physical effects of tea on the body create social and moral characteristics within an individual tea drinker and contribute to the cultural characteristics of England as a whole. The phrase “sobriety of a nation” recalls the prominent position of tea within temperance reform in nineteenth-century England, and many tea histories devote considerable portions of their texts to the role of tea in the drying out of the nation. In Tea: Its Mystery and History (1878), Samuel Day attributes the civilizing of the population to tea drinking: “Since the introduction of Tea into England, but more especially since the British public has patronised it, a marked improvement characterises the tone and manners of Society” (60). Specifically, according to Day, tea represents a “pure” beverage, and the continued increase in tea drinking in England would benefit the country: “Intemperance is the bane of the nation. . . . And there can be no doubt that if the masses could be induced to substitute the pure beverages Tea and Coffee for the deleterious fluids they are wont to imbibe, the country would be vastly benefited by the salutary change” (69). Thus, Day elucidates, England would experience an improvement in health through the change in consumption
