Spilling the tea: What should we grow, in this era of oversupply?

Steamy Secrets

- Mridula Ramesh

Reality #1: A global superpower is fuming over a trade deficit and scrambling to even the scales.

Reality #2: It is also trying to steal trade secrets from the other country.

Reality #3: An opioid epidemic is raging.

This isn’t America-and-China today; it’s actually Britain-and-China, in the 18th and 19th centuries. And the object at the heart of it all: Tea.

When Catherine of Braganza wed Charles II in 1662, she introduced tea into the English court. What started as a royal indulgence soon cascaded through aristocratic households. Caffeine colonised England in different ways. Coffee, as we saw in an earlier column, was consumed in coffee houses, sparking intellectual debate among men, but tea... tea was feminine, consumed in a leisurely upper-class ritual.

By 1706, Thomas Twining had bought Tom’s Coffee House in London and started selling readymade tea alongside coffee, and then tea leaves to upper-class households. Meanwhile, the British East India Company (EIC), reeling from the 1720 ban on textile imports, stepped up imports of commodities such as raw cotton, sugar and tea. (Incidentally, Indian sugar was the world’s first fair-trade product, marketed as such because it was produced without slave labour.)

High taxes and the EIC monopoly kept tea prices so high that this fomented colonial resentment, which erupted as the Boston Tea Party, when American revolutionaries boarded British ships in the Boston Harbor in 1773 and dumped 342 chests of tea into the sea. It was a protest against high taxes set by a parliament that contained no representation from the colonies.

A few years later, Britain finally slashed taxes, turning tea into a staple. The English love of this beverage, however, led to a massive drain of silver to China, which was then the world’s sole supplier. To address this, EIC used two approaches.