‘British colonialism pushed tea globally — India paid with indentured labour and damaged ecology’

Erika Rappaport is professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Speaking to Srijana Mitra Das at Times Evoke, she discusses the global epic of tea:

What is the core of your research?

My work looks at the history of how business tries to shape our culture through advertising, stores and other means which mould individual taste and urban space. I look at tea as the foremost way British culture was shaped by its empire as well as how the colonial state advanced the interests of business and vice versa. This British-dominated Indian industry reshaped the global space — it invented many characteristics we have today in global marketing.

Why did tea move from China to India in the 19th century?
The Chinese dominated the global market for tea then. That history was somewhat hidden once the British started plantations in India, Sri Lanka, Kenya, etc. The British really resented the Chinese control of the tea market and being dependent on them — the Chinese and British went to war over trade difficulties. It grew harder for the British to ensure supply and they began looking for options.

From the 18th century, British botanists believed they could grow tea in India but they didn’t have the technology — the history of tea thus has colourful characters who disguised themselves and went to China to steal methods or seeds. Finally, some merchant-adventurer soldiers fighting a war with Myanmar happened to see tea plants growing in Assam. It dawned on the British that there was tea there alongside knowledge of cultivating it — they conquered Assam and started a plantation economy. Assam was imagined as an El Dorado by the British, with people writing about how they’d seen gold, indigo — and tea — there.



When British consumers first tasted tea from India, they didn’t find it palatable. So, retailers began blending it with Chinese tea, teaching people through advertisements that this was a good taste. The tea industry thought deeply about marketing and shifting tastes — no other industry was so aware of sales before market research had even emerged.

DIGNITEA: Tea workers need fairer terms (Pic credit: iStock)

Did land use change?

Yes. The British set up plantations similar to those growing sugar or cotton in the Caribbean and American South. That Atlanticworld model was imported to India for tea, starting in the northeast, then spreading to the south. It came with the expropriation of huge tracts of land and vast labour forces — since many locals could see the extremely hard life tea posed, the British began bringing indentured labour from other parts of India to do this. These were also people facing distress due to British impacts on Indian cotton, damaged by industrial fabric, etc. Many people were also tricked into tea — British growers portrayed tea picking as very easy, skipping over its difficult labour. This system lasted for years — scholars still see legacies of it in harsh work conditions, low wages, long hours and difficulty for workers to unionise.

(Pic credit: iStock)

A plantation monoculture also made it harder for people to feed themselves because they couldn’t grow adequate food locally, the economy becoming skewed towards export.



Does tea hold lessons for the contemporary environmental crisis?

Tea, like sugar and tobacco, was one of the first commodities people learnt to enjoy globally. Instead of locally grown beverages, people looked to this commodity which was literally transported around the world. Apart from the impacts of transport and industrial processes, tea’s environmental consequences include the depletion of the water table and chemical inputs.

How were people in diverse locations taught to want, even need, tea?
Tea became a truly global commodity with a shifting market — today, its highest per capita consumers are in the Middle East while it’s both grown and drunk sizably in South America. The tea industry claims it is the second most popular drink on Earth after water. However, tea has caffeine which makes people need the product. Tea literally shows us how capitalism changed our tastes in ways we cannot see.

My book ‘A Thirst for Empire: How Tea Shaped The Modern World’ discusses the elaborate marketing campaigns for tea. In addition, in the early 20th century, tea growers in Africa and India made deals with owners of factories and mines, telling them they must give their workers tea for increased productivity. So, the globalisation of tea took place through stores, newspaper advertisements and these large-scale industries. Tea was distributed cheaply to schools and charities — once people acquired the habit of a caffeinated beverage, it would stick. A food habit is very hard to alter, unlike, say, fashion. Market researchers find anything we drink in the morning is particularly hard to change while people are more open to experimenting with evening meals. This helped tea become so dominant.

VITALITEA: Tea was sold as energising (Pic credit: iStock)
Can you tell us about your picture of Indian soldiers drinking tea?
Armies are important both for military uses and spreading culture. The British always considered the Indian army’s marketing potential as well — by WWI, tea was provided to it. By WWII, because of transport difficulties, there was a shortage of tea, with rationing in Britain. However, it was available in India and owing to its perishability, it had to be sold fast. So, tea producers decided to develop the local market and spread it through the military — tea was portrayed as a weapon of war, raising morale, providing a moment of rest before battle, etc. The tea industry developed mobile tea carts where women served tea to Indian soldiers — this picture shows that in front of a mosque in Surrey. It’s a grim context and the cups of tea the soldiers are drinking convey a tiny bit of warmth in their lives. These tea carts, worked by women, went to all the major battlefronts.

What should our morning cup tell us?
People should know about the difficult conditions of labour for tea — paying a bit more can help workers. Also, when we look into our teacups, we don’t generally think of Africa — yet, a lot of black tea, marketed as ‘English Breakfast’, etc., comes from there. We need to support equitably and sustainably produced tea — that also involves learning its history.


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