Dutch merchants were the first to import tea leaves into Europe in 1609, but by the late 1700s it was the English East India Company, backed by state monopoly, that came to dominate what became known as the ‘Canton Trade’. During its 18th-century golden age, tea symbolised Chinese civilisation’s preeminent standing in the world. The European aristocracy and bourgeoisie fetishised it as a distinctively Asian commodity, the latest in a broader fashion for exotic art, porcelains and silk from the Orient known as ‘chinoiserie’. Tea symbolised the material grandeur of the venerable celestial empire, which the younger European powers admired and sought to emulate.
Over the course of the 18th century, the average English family quintupled its consumption of tea, mixed with sugar and milk, and profits skyrocketed. Demand for tea was so powerful that it fuelled the creation of a British-centred world market, and its taxation accounted for one-tenth of the Crown’s revenue, underwriting the British expansion into South Asia. As the East India Company’s auditor-general declared in 1830: ‘India does entirely depend upon the profits of the China trade.’
The British could offer little in return that Chinese merchants wanted to buy. So, by the late 18th century, British colonial officials began to smuggle Indian opium into the port city of Canton (now known as Guangzhou). When the Daoguang Emperor, who ruled from 1820 to 1850, attempted to enforce a longstanding prohibition on the narcotic, British officials and traders declared war under the banner of defending liberty of trade. The lopsided British victory in the first Opium War (1839-42) inaugurated what is known today in China as the ‘century of humiliation’. Put simply, tea helped launch the British empire while also setting into motion the long decline of China and the Qing dynasty. Only with the rise and victory of the Communist Party in 1949, the nationalist lore goes, could the original shame of military defeat and colonialism be redeemed.
China had been cultivating the tea plant for more than 1,000 years – a wondrous product of nature painstakingly perfected by artisanal masters. England, however, came to the contest with iron ships, powerful artillery and the backing of the world’s first industrial revolution. For scholars of European empire and modern Asia alike, it’s typically at this point in the story – with the rise of the West now firmly established – that the Chinese tea trade recedes from view.
But, in fact, the post-Opium War tea trade has some important things to tell us about the history of capitalism. Looking beyond the North Atlantic world, in the tea districts of 19th-century China in particular, modern capitalism continued to develop, flexible and globally oriented in character. Even in the Chinese hinterlands, we find the accumulation of capital dependent neither upon spectacular technological innovation nor particular class relations, but instead manifest in a new social logic of global competition. After all, the Chinese treaty port system implemented after the First Opium War didn’t spell the demise of the tea industry but its expansion.
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