Summary

Tea’s modern ubiquity as an international drink belies its origin as a plant—typically one of two varieties of Camellia sinensis—grown, harvested, and prepared for consumption in various Southeast Asian countries for millennia. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, historians with interests across the fields of trade, botany, and cultural studies have become increasingly interested in this remarkable transition and the perspectives it affords on global histories of labor, imperialism, mechanization, consumption, production, and transculturation (to name but a few). Tea’s foodways are both ancient, associated with cultural practices and origin stories found across the countries in which it flourished as an indigenous species, and profoundly modern. It is the ultimate convenience product, mass-produced and packaged in the form of cheap tea bags and bottles of the soft drink known as “ice tea.” Indeed, as a product of international trade since the early 16th century, tea has shown an astonishing ability to transform and redefine itself.

European travelers to China and Japan first encountered tea in the mid-16th century, and it was probably first imported into Europe in small quantities at around this time by Portuguese traders active in the area around Macau (澳門). In Great Britain, where drinking tea became recognized as a domesticated component of national behavior by the early 19th century, tea was first advertised for sale in the late 1650s. Across the 18th century, it increasingly became the focal point of the lucrative “East India” trade (as Europeans conceived maritime commerce with the Indian Ocean world), and its taxation as an article of consumption encouraged the formation of violent smuggling networks. During the same period, the establishment of a semi-regular overland trading network between China and Russia enabled tea to reach the eastern extremities of Europe via a caravan trade that was to persist until the mid-19th century. In the colonies of North America, tea became in the 1780s a focal point of the movement for independence, culminating in a series of protests remembered in national mythology as “the Boston Tea Party.” The rapid growth of the transoceanic trade in the 19th century, together with British imperial ambitions in India and beyond, led to the establishment of tea monocultures in India, Sri Lanka, and, in Africa, Malawi and Kenya, further extended in the colonial infrastructure of other European nations. The emergence of these tea plantations leveraged both the development of intensive practices of cultivation and mechanization (which were to shape global tea-production in the 20th century), and the consolidation of ownership and production by multinational corporations which continue to dominate the tea trade into the 21st century.