In Our Time - Tea

Episode Date: April 29, 2004

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss tea, the first truly global commodity. After air and water, tea is the most widely consumed substance on the planet and the British national drink. In this country it helped define class and gender, it funded wars and propped up the economy of the Empire. The trade started in the 1660s with an official import of just 2 ounces, by 1801 24 million pounds of tea were coming in every year and people of all classes were drinking an average two cups a day. It was the first mass commodity, and the merchant philanthropist Jonas Hanway decried its hold on the nation, “your servants' servants, down to the very beggars, will not be satisfied unless they consume the produce of the remote country of China”.What drove the extraordinary take up of tea in this country? What role did it play in the global economy of the Empire and at what point did it stop becoming an exotic foreign luxury and start to define the essence of Englishness?With Huw Bowen, Senior Lecturer in Economic and Social History at the University of Leicester; James Walvin, Professor of History at the University of York; Amanda Vickery, Reader in History at Royal Holloway, University of London.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, after air and water, tea is the most widely consumed substance on the planet and a British national drink. In this country, it helped define class and gender.

It funded wars and propped up the economy of the empire. The trade started in the same. 1660s with an official import of just two ounces. By 18.0.1, 24 million pounds of the stuff was coming in every year, and people of all classes were drinking an average two cups a day. It was the first mass commodity, and the merchant philanthropist Jonas Hanway decried its hold on the nation. Your servants' servants, down to the very beggars, will not be satisfied

unless they consume the produce of the remote country of China, in which it had been drunk and cultivated for thousands of years. What drove the extraordinary take-up, of tea in this country. What role did it play in the global economy of the empire? And at what point did it stop becoming an exotic foreign luxury and start to define the essence of Englishness? With me to discuss the history of tea is Hugh Bowen, senior lecturer in economic and social history at the University of Leicester, James Warvin, Professor of History at the University of York, and Amanda Vickory, reader in history at Royal Holloway University of London.

Hugh Bowen, long, long before the British acquired the taste of tea, it was widespread in China. Can you tell us briefly when it's supposed to have started there and how it was drunk and what significance it had? Well, tea had been drunk in China for thousands of years. Its significance was in the first instance medicinal and it gathered a reputation as an energising beverage. And it's really contact with that form of the commodity that first alerts the British, and indeed Europeans to its qualities. And we find, therefore, that by the early part of the 16th century, as European contacts are being made with the Far East and with China,

that some interest is being expressed in acquiring the commodity so that it can be brought to the benefit of people in Europe. Let's go back to China for a moment. It was found in northern... On the borders of Burma, India and China. And it was cultivated... It was in many ways. There was green tea and black tea.

Can you just develop the Chinese? The Chinese context, yes. We're talking about two provinces in south-eastern China, Fukian and Anand-Wei province. The tea plants or trees more properly were grown on mountains. They were harvested and then undergo a process of either fermentation or roasting and firing to produce the quite distinctive forms of green and black tea that become so well known to Europeans in the 18th century. And how did it trickle out to Japan?

Because as far as I can understand, the Chinese were very concerned to keep it a secret and the monopoly. Yes, it's very difficult to keep commodities secret. And as China begins to expand its overseas trade and its overseas contacts during the 15th and 16th century, we find Chinese commodities of various types being traded throughout Southeast Asia and it's really informally, I suppose, through links with the Japanese merchants that we find the commodity trickling into other parts of the region.

So in 1660, Sam Peep's recorded as having had tea, quote, a China drink of which I have never drunk before. He probably got a little taste from somebody who vaguely smuggled it in. Yes. It is probable that the early tea that came into Britain came either via Amsterdam, where the Dutch would have imported it, or had been brought surreptitiously into Britain by a sailor on board an East Indianman or what have you.

At that stage in 1660, the East India Company, which possesses the monopoly of trade with Asia and the Far East, was not actually importing tea at all. James Wolbin, how did Britain enter the tea trade directly? We're in 1660, King Charles II has been given the magnificent gift of two ounces of tea but it's still nowhere. And the East India Company goes to Canton,

the only port it's allowed to trade out because China keeps the rest of the fort closed and does the trade there. Can you tell us how it broke into the trade and who they had to deal with? They deal with local merchants that have a monopoly on the export of tea. The interesting thing is that they don't get

any kind of access to the interior of China. They can only do it on a very strict regulations. And at first I think they do it through the good offices of local Jesuit priests. But their accesses... French Jesuit priests. But they don't really trade into China. It's just really got a toehold in Canton.

So they're very much at the mercy of the Chinese traders. Can you tell us, Amanda, whether the East India Company once they discovered that there was a taste for tea in the late 70th century, did they try to stimulate it? Did they try to advertisers, there were coffee houses, there were chocolate houses,

and this rather late come up. Were there any attempt to market it, we would say, now, doesn't we? There definitely were attempts to market tea, but I think the first thing we've got to realise is that it's in the nature of this kind of mercantile exercise that people are going out, they're looking for exotic luxuries, they're bringing loads of different things back in the hope that something's going to fly.

So they don't automatic, well, for instance, a monkey or later pineapples, or later coffee, all sorts of spices. So there's bringing these exotic luxuries back, their rarities, and then they're hoping, well, which one of these is going to take off? And if you look in the letters of the East India Company in the British Library, you can see there they're aware of what the Dutch East India Company is about. So they say things like, they've found this fantastic silk, the Dutch, in Amsterdam,

so why haven't you got it? so they send out letters to their men on the ground, go and find this new thing. So there's a complete flood of different sorts of commodities coming back, and they don't know. It isn't written in tablets of stone that tea is going to take off. And in any case, coffee has the early lead, but gradually tea begins to build up its head of steam.

I just go to James and then come back to you. You wanted to say... One other element here is that, like the Chinese, tea is promoted as a medicinal product in the first case. tea, coffee, sugar, tobacco are all on the shelves of the apothecaries. And in fact, Pepys himself talks about taking it for medicinal reasons. So like the Chinese for hundreds of years, the British picked this up as a kind of part of the pharmacology of the early modern world. And it's in the list of pharmacologists that are recommended for various ailments.

So it's odd to think of it now, but tea along with other exotic commodities is promoted initially as a kind of health product. James is absolutely right. It's marketed as a tonic. It's a benign but refreshing pick-me-up. It is mildly narcotic. It has attractive intrinsic qualities, and quite quickly people realise they've got a bit of a heady buzz from it. And the health writing about it, there is a lot of health writing which may be party-pre. You made that point about marketing. It does seem as if some of the people who are writing this medical literature may have been in the pay of the East India Company or in the Dutch East India Company.

So there's one that I came across. Cornelis Bonteco in 1685 he writes the treaties on tea and says you should have between 50 and 250 cups of tea a day. Well, he was rumoured to be in the pay of the Dutch East India Company. So medical and colonial interests are blended. But it is a tonic, as Jim was saying. So it is at first seen as something that's incredibly healthy. And also people very quickly,

realise that it helps keep you awake, along with coffee. Twinings open a coffee house and a tea house next to each other, in the late 17th century. Well, the Twinies, they first opened their tea as a sideline for coffee, and they think it's going to be coffee. Coffee comes sooner, but very quickly tea picks up the trade. So teas here, it starts with two answers at the court of Charles a second, and that's where you try out new goods if you're lucky.

You get to the court, because lots of young, fashionable people there with very little to do, except be young, young, and spread things around town. Who is drinking tea in this country? Where is it? Do we go around the table? At the end of the 17th century, then we get on to the bigger effects it out.

Who's taking it up, say 40 years on from Charles? Well, the take-up is remarkably slow. The East India Company doesn't, at first, as Amanda implied, realise that it's onto a winner. And if you look at the profile of its commodities that are being returned to Britain in the late 17th century, tea is by no means up there. as a leading commodity.

We're talking about silks, lacquerware, bamboo, ratan, that sort of thing. And therefore, by the end of the 17th century, tea really is only being consumed, I think, within a very narrow, tight social circle. Those in the know, if you like. So it's a narrow Socratic elitist drink. Very much so. No one could have predicted, let's say, in 1690, that in 50 years' time, tea would be a national drink.

No one could ever imagine that. And yet that's what happens. and it is transformed from being a kind of exotic luxury into the kind of commonplace necessity of every single person in the country, more or less. But if you were to reduce it to numbers, at the beginning of the 18th century, the East India Company is importing probably about £100,000 of tea. By 1750, it's importing 5 million pounds of tea,

and that gives you an idea of the scale of the increase after the beginning of the 18th century. But it is seen as an exotic ritual, and I think that's one of the things that's very high. hard for us to get back to now when you know you sling your tea bag in the mug you switch on your kettle. It doesn't convey to us

the glamour and the thrill of having it out in your Chinese porcelain. The tea cups would have been themselves bowls as you would get now in a Chinese restaurant. So the ballast from China in the boat, so tea was very light obviously the ballast was a Chinese porcelain so they were

exporting a lot of posse. Because it's one of the few commodities that wouldn't corrupt the tea. Porcelain will not corrupt it by introducing any smells or it won't dampen it in any way. But Amanda again is, I think, quite right. It's all about the package around it,

around the commodity. We're talking about China cups, sauces, teapots, lacquered tables, and so on. And the ritual, therefore, that develops around that becomes hugely important in the identity of particular social groups in Britain.

So we're not in getting tea from China, we're getting thousands and tens of thousands a piece of porcelain, which we collectively call China, just like tea was called char, another Chinese word, just before we move on, this massive growth in the 18th century, we're drinking scarcely ending in 1660, quite a bit more by 1,700, by 1750, it's taken off, and it's beginning to characterize the English.

It's wonderful, isn't it? I mean, what characterizes the British? Well, an ancient Chinese custom, which had been last of a 2000 years. So, why briefly... Well, take as long as you want. Why did it take such a grip so quickly? Why did it beat, as it were, in a very simple way, coffee and chocolate? If you think of tea simply on its own growing,

then you're missing the point that what's happening is that the graph of tea consumption and tea sales almost parallels perfectly, the importation and consumption of sugar. And it's not that the British are just drinking tea, but they're drinking sweet tea. And that's what really becomes this peculiar brink. The Chinese didn't drink their tea mixed with cane sugar. They drank it on its own.

It's this fusion, isn't it, in 1720? At that point, black tea overtakes green tea in popularity, and the British do this great thing of adding sugar and milk. Amazing, domestication of a product. And it's a hot, sweet drink. And I think it fills a place. There's a hole there before. It's a non-alcoholic hot drink that you can have at home.

I think there's something else. It does get cheaper. The unique cost gets cheaper. But it's also simple to prepare. It's not like chocolate. The drink of chocolate is very, very complicated to prepare in the period we're talking about it's not like today. Even coffee is slightly more complicated to prepare. But tea is simple.

You just put hot water on it. Right. Now this brings us to move into its financial and even cultural significance. There's two massive global triangles shaping up now. And Britain is at the centre of both of them. One goes from Britain. to India to China back to Britain. One goes from Britain to Africa to the West India's and back to Britain. And for the purposes of this discussion, one brings back tea and one brings back sugar.

So you sitting in broadcasting house in 1725 can have a cup of tea with sugar in it. And this is the take-off. Now, can we just talk about those triangles and how they worked and why they were significant? Start with Hugh Hugh. Let's talk about the eastern triangle. What were we taking to India? How are we getting the money from India to go to China and using that money, because the payment involved is quite complicated and very interesting. It's all very well having a rising demand for commodity,

but you need to be able to pay for it. And the great problem that the British have in the 18th century is actually paying for this commodity. The Chinese want and require very little from Britain. In terms of goods? In terms of commodities. They're not receptive to our water. To woolens and to other sorts of things.

There is an interest in mechanical gadgets and the like, but that is not sufficient to pay for it. And therefore, this very unbalanced trade, was always paid for by the export of bullion, silver. And this really, I think, caused a severe problem for the East India Company because it became the focus of criticism for those who condemned this trade as being a losing trade. It's all very well importing exotic products,

but they can be seen to be of little use to society if that society is exporting that which is hugely valuable to it, silver and therefore while we find one level of criticism against tea that it is a product that is sort of undermining traditional British or English virtues and commodities, on the other hand, it's damaging the national wealth because it's encouraging the East India Company to export increasing levels of bullion. So how do we crack that problem, John? You've got to look at the kind of trading systems in a kind of much broader setting because

the trading systems of the east are actually plugged into the trading systems of the Atlantic and the West and that the generation of trade and wealth is actually interrelated. People don't use the word globalisation but you're actually looking at a genuinely global economy by, let's say, 1750

so that commodities from the Far East are actually being traded in London and then being added to by a product that's produced by labour from Africa and that the commodities that you use for buying the Africans are produced in London and sometimes in Asia itself

for instance you barter trades on the barter for slaves on the coast of Africa with Indian taxis Yes And if you think it's a slightly bizarre

looking about that you have Africans imported in their millions by the British. The British carry more than enough to produce sugar which you mix with Chinese tea to slate the

natural thirst of even the lowest income people in this country and quite rightly I mean critics in the 18th century said What is all this about? This actually is an extraordinary drain on the kind of economy of this country. When you're producing goods that, at its Hughes Point, producing goods that actually are simply unnecessary.

You don't really need sweet tea. People have got by without it since time out of mind. On the other hand, the fact is this began to stimulate and even lubricate the economy. Would you like to take that up, Amanda? Well, I think also what this massive reorientation of trade does, it changes British geography. If you think about it before, in the 16th and the 17th century, the key ports really are around. on the eastern seaboard. You know, if you go to Kings Lynn today, it's this perfectly preserved

port. By the mid-18th century, you've had this massive reorientation, the continuing growth of London as the European entrepaux, but also the growth of the great ports on the western seaboard. You've got Glasgow with tobacco, Liverpool, Bristol,

sugar and slaves. And then the balance of the population start to shift to the north and west. I still want to get back to this tea, Hugh. How did it come to be paid for. As I understand it, it was the Mughal Empire gave the collecting of taxes over to the East India Company

and they got that money in India and that was the way that they got round the problem of silver, didn't they? That is a key development. Obviously this demand, growing demand is very important but I think by 1750 the East India Company has reached a point where it can't really take the trade much

further because it doesn't have the means to pay for it. The crucial development, therefore, is the British acquiring control of territory and revenue in Bengal in the 1760s, because this gives them a huge surplus of funds, which they can then use to invest in Indian textiles, raw cotton and the like,

which can then be exported to Canton, and the proceeds from sales there can be invested in tea. So what we find happening between 1750 and 1780 is this connection of trade, an empire which acts as a further stimulant to the growth of the T-trade. So we've got it stimulating the empire in terms of money and trade and being key to these two great global triangles with all little other geometric figures springing off from it.

But back in this country, Amanda, it is actually penetrating society with every sort of height and length of the word S quite strongly, particularly through women's, control of the teapot, as it were. I think women have always been targeted, really, by the whole kind of tea trade. And it's been a tonic that was aimed at women particularly. But I think women too take a particular pleasure in tea.

And if you look at women's letters early on, if they're aristocratic enough or rich enough to have husbands traveling to Amsterdam, in the end of the 17th century, they're saying, and while you're at it, would you get me a bit of green tea? So you see that in their letters, they start talking about it, or they comment on other ladies' tea sets. And then by, I think, as early as 1710, the tea table can become a shorthand

for either a domestic grouping or a group of women. And so, and there are many poems and satires which tease women really about how much they love tea and that about how any gathering of women over the teapot is likely to produce scandal. Yeah, because what's happening is not merely that it's made its way into kind of fashionable homes this way, But it's also, I could say percolated down, it's the wrong word.

It's spread down, kind of plebeian life as well. So it's not just a fashionable society with its porcel and teapots and sugar bowls, but even the poorest of the poor by the mid-18th century think that tea is absolutely basic to the way they live. And if they can't afford tea, they will pour hot water over burnt bread. Or they'll steal it as well. I mean, I've looked in women's diaries, and they're always complaining that their servants have been pilfering the tea. and they're coming to them in the kitchen, they say they're at the tea again and they're breaking white sugar to have with it, what's to become of poor housekeepers?

And so canny servants then start demanding that they have an allowance for tea written into their contract. Well, it's still rather bewildering, isn't it, that it takes off, it doesn't take off to this extent in Europe, although the Dutch were ahead of us in importing it. They stick more far more with coffee and chocolate, but it really takes off. Is it just the sugar that we're talking about, James, or Hugh, what? Is there another element? We can't be particularly, I can't think it's any national characteristics that we like tea when other people don't.

The Chinese have liked tea long before us. So what's going on? I think we're finding the consequences of this demand spreading amongst the social classes, but also the regularity and the strength of the supply is important here, the pushing of this commodity as being hugely important to government, the East India Company and so on. they both have a vested interest in making sure that this commodity is consumed in large quantities. And I think the effect of that is seen very much in a kind of attitudinal shift towards tea.

We see the reduction in the opposition to tea drinking occurring. In the mid-18th century, tea drinking was often condemned as being of no benefit to the labouring poor and all the rest of it. But in 1780s... Quote from quotation of Dr. Johnson, which I'm going to read it, we're written down here, said, tea's proper use is to amuse the idle and dilute the meals of those who cannot use exercise and will not use abstinence. Johnson was...

He described himself as a shameless tea drinker and apparently he said his kettle was always hot and he referred to it as that fragrant leaf, that special leaf. He absolutely loved tea. And is the TAC and the great Boston Tea Party, were they? The tea then goes from across the Atlantic

having come across other oceans is chucked into the harboured Boston. That is partly because not paying tax, but it's also a big, there's a cultural statement there as well, isn't there? Very much so. I mean, it's important to recognise that an awful lot of the tea that came into Britain was re-exported, and huge quantities were exported to North America in the early 18th century, and the elites in colonial America defined themselves by their consumption of tea.

And I think, therefore, when they get into political conflict with the British government in the 1760s, and in particular greatly resent the imposition of taxes. Their, firstly, non-importation of tea, they have agreements not to import it, and then the throwing of the tea into Boston Harbour signifies, yes, opposition to a specific tax, but also a rejection of particular types of British behaviour, if you like.

They become coffee drinkers. America's self-consciously set out to drink coffee in the early years of the Republic. In order to be un-British. So we have, we've just touched on America. but then back to China, the opium wars, again, and this massive, come about through the tea trade. Yes, we're back to that problem of how do the British... How do we pay?

How do you pay for it? And what begins to happen is that more and more commodities are exported by the East India Company or crucially by private traders from India to Canton. And the receipts of those commodities, from the sales of those commodities, are paid into the company's treasury in Canton so that they can purchase tea. And what happens is, of course, that opium is recognised in the 1770s, 1780s as being a commodity that although prohibited in imperial China is greatly in demand. What the East India Company does is itself proclaim loud and long that it won't engage in a trade in an illicit commodity such as opium. But it nevertheless turns a blind eye to those.

private British traders who are prepared to export it into China. And therefore we find during the late 18th century the growth of this illicit trade in opium occurring really to pay for tea. The fact that the English, the East India Company had trouble getting, always had trouble getting tea out of China, although they shifted millions and millions of tons, that made them want to grow it elsewhere, i.e. India. They made several attempts to grow at that and failed. Finally, they cracked it in India, and the Indian tea trade grew up, and therefore you could more or less bypass China as happened. Can you tell us a bit more about that?

The East India itself didn't grow tea in India, but it had long believed that it would be possible to grow tea elsewhere and therefore engages in trials. In the 1780s, Joseph Banks, for example, is promoting attempts to grow tea in Calcutta. The Eastern India company itself remains very half-hearted about this for a very good reason. In 1813, it loses its monopoly of trade in India.

And I think, therefore, it was quite reluctant to promote the growth of tea in India because it felt it would then be circumvented or undercut by private tea growers. Because it keeps its monopoly in China. It keeps its monopoly in China until 1833, and therefore it's not until that monopoly is broken that we see the shackles come off everywhere, as it were.

And it's no coincidence that at that moment projects seriously begin to develop to grow tea elsewhere, notably, of course, in Assam in the 1830s. I don't think we should be surprised by this, though. It's a key colonial strategy to try and control the trade of an exotic product. And if possible, you control its production, and if not, its distribution. So the same would be true of coffee. Coffee originally is found in the Yemen. Let's get the coffee out to the West Indies.

The Dutch are trying, they're also experimenting, aren't they? On Java are trying to get the tea to take. But I think knowledge of tea remains very confused. They don't even, they think there's lots of different kinds of tea bushes. They don't realize that green tea and black tea come from the same bush. And I think, I don't know whether the Chinese absolutely block knowledge of tea or whether they confuse people. But I suppose when you can't even land in Canton, you can't get inland to where the tea is grown.

Yes, before the 18th century, before the 19th century, few Britons had actually seen the tea process firsthand, and therefore a lot of this is sort of received wisdom and a lot of half-truths are peddled about how tea is produced. One of the romantic and beguiling things about the history of tea there is it's moved from the exotic to the commonplace, isn't it? Yes. Amanda touched on it earlier, and that is that here's a commodity that does become the kind of commonplace drink,

and yet even contemporaries couldn't understand how that had happened. If you look at any number of commentators talking about the poor, mid-late 18th century. Even Frederick Eden writing in the terrible years of the 1790s, 95, 97, even he scratches his head. Why is it that this commodity brought tens of thousands of miles is still within the reach of very poor people? It is a kind of social economic conundrum

that they didn't fully understand and nor do we. But it does become a national symbol, does it not? And I think if you see any Second World War film, there's ever a tragedy, out comes the teapot. Let's have a nice cup of tea. and in fact people joked at the time that if Hitler could only cut off tea supplies he would bring the nation to its knees and the government went to great lengths to move the tea out of the warehouses

along the Thames and to get it hidden so much as it's a part of the fabric of national life by 1940. Where did they put it? I think it went hidden about all over the country. Like the pictures at the National Gallery, they hid them from the bottoms. The tea and the pictures went together. I think that's a good place to stop, don't you? Thank you very much indeed.

I enjoyed that. That's to Amanda Vickory, Hugh Bowen and James Walvin. Next week we'll be discussing heroism. Thank you very much for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.uk forward slash radio 4.