A Necessary Luxury. Julie E. Fromer

that India was indeed destined to become a great asset to the British Empire. Finding tea, planted by the hand of Nature and thus approved of by cosmological forces, within the territories of India suggested that India had, in some sense, always been British. The expansion of British rule and agriculture merely actualized the latent Britishness of India, symbolized by the presence of the authentic tea plant, planted by the hand of Nature and hidden by the dense jungle until the British were ready to nurture it into commercial profitability. The historical preexistence of the tea plant in India, which predated British exploration and colonization, suggests a logical syllogism that helped to naturalize the process of imperial expansion and provided explicit justification, for Sigmond, of British rule in India. If to be British included the choice of tea as a beverage and as an item of commerce, and if India revealed itself as a natural source of indigenous, genuine tea, then India must have been predestined to become part of the British Empire, an empire that depended on the circulation and the consumption of tea.

      At the same time, discovering authentic Chinese tea growing wild within the bounds of the British Empire removed any lingering anxieties of basing national identity on a product imported from foreign sources—essentially domesticating the particularly troubling exotic origins of the national beverage. Finding tea in India affirmed the connection between drinking tea and English national identity, while also ensuring a secure, domestic source for the beverage that had become crucial to nineteenth-century culture and society. Sigmond suggests that tea really was fundamentally English; the fact that tea had been cultivated and produced beyond national borders could only be viewed as a temporary aberrance in the history of tea drinking in England. The discovery of “real” tea growing within the East India Company’s territory in India manifestly corrected this mistake, restoring tea, from bud to leaf to teapot, to British hands. With British supervision of all stages of the cultivation, production, and shipment of Indian-grown tea, English consumers could rest assured that the beverage filling their teacups was authentic, genuine, and pure.

      According to Sigmond, the discovery of the tea plant in India accomplished dual goals. First, the new tea industry in India provided the British government with a profitable addition to its financial and territorial empire. Sigmond quotes from “the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal,” which avers, “Assam may yet be found to be one of the most valuable acquisitions to the British Empire” (80). The discovery of the tea plant in Assam led to the annexation of that region as part of the Indian territories under British rule, significantly expanding the British Empire. At the same time, the revelation that the tea plant grew natively within India ensured that the English taste for tea could be satisfied domestically, from within that empire. Sigmond proudly proclaims that the nation could rely on Assam tea production to replace the China tea trade: “[T]here can be no doubt that an ample supply for European consumption can be obtained [in Upper Assam]” (81). Charles Bruce, whose report includes his firsthand account of surveying the tea tracts of Assam, reports areas of wild tea so large that he “did not see the end of it,” suggesting the vast, unending profits available in those unexplored jungles (127), and he confidently asserts, “I feel convinced the whole of the country is full of tea” (128). Far from relying on the uncertainties of foreign merchants and the mysteries of Chinese tea manufacture, as Sigmond and Bruce suggest, England—through imperial expansion—could at last take on the responsibility of supplying its own citizens with the national beverage. Rather than remaining dependent upon China, England became indebted to the tea plant, a commodity crucial to English culture and identity, and, henceforward, to the expansion of the British Empire.

      Arthur Reade’s 1884 treatise also embraces the benefits of bringing the tea industry into the British sphere of influence. While his rhetoric encourages tea drinkers to consume the commodities of the world as a global endeavor, Reade nevertheless agrees that the cultivation of Indian tea would permanently solve the threat to English identity posed by Chinese tea:

      The tea plant, although cultivated in various parts of the East, is probably indigenous to China; but is now grown extensively in India. In consequence of the poorness of the quality of the tea imported by the East India Company, and the necessity of avoiding an entire dependence upon China, the Bengal Government appointed in 1834 a committee for the purpose of submitting a plan for the introduction and cultivation of the tea-plant; and a visit to the frontier station of Upper Assam ended in a determination on the part of Government to cultivate tea in that region. In 1840 the “Assam Company” was formed, and it is claimed for them that they possess the largest tea plantation in the world. . . . Every year thousands of acres are being brought under cultivation, and in a short time it seems likely that we shall be independent of China for our supplies of tea. (19–20)

      According to Reade, British consumption of Chinese tea formed the basis of commercial and political dependency, a relationship that weakened Britain’s international position. He emphasizes the need to avoid “an entire dependence upon China” and enthusiastically champions the goal of finally becoming “independent of China for our supplies of tea.” For Reade, tea had become an essential part of the colonizing process; his history of the British colonization of Assam is integrally linked to the need for British sources of tea.

      The cultivation of tea in India, on British-ruled soil, allowed the British to maintain control over the entire process of tea production, from the initial planting through the plucking and drying of leaves to the final exportation to Britain. As tea imports from the colonies in India and Ceylon increased, British cultural reliance on tea as part of national identity acquired imperialistic overtones: “A large quantity of tea is now imported from this island [Ceylon], and new plantations, it is reported, are being made every month; day by day more of the primeval forest goes down before the axe of the pioneer, and before another quarter of a century has passed it is anticipated that the teas of our Indian empire will become the most valuable of its products” (21). Tea was no longer an exotic commodity imported to Britain from uncertain, malevolent, foreign sources; instead, tea had become a product exported from within the British Empire. Reade asserts possession over Indian teas, the teas of “our Indian empire,” and he equates tea production with Victorian pride in national and technological progress. Tea, for Reade, has become an essential product of English imperialism; at the same time, he also illustrates that English imperialism was clearly a product of the growing British taste for tea.

      The English tea-drinking public had to be convinced, however, to switch to drinking Indian tea. Even as late as 1861, more than twenty years after Sigmond’s ringing endorsement of British tea in India, an article in Chambers’s Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Arts asserts, “Reader, if you wish some little information on the subjects of tea-growing, gathering, curing, and shipping, you must come with us to China.”⁴² China was still considered the primary tea-producing region of the world. However, the rhetoric of periodical articles, as well as Sigmond’s and Reade’s treatises, suggests that drinking Indian tea was patriotic. An 1868 article in Charles Dickens’s journal, All the Year Round, delineates all the ways in which the Chinese were known to adulterate tea intended for English consumption and then prays, “If tea can only be grown in Assam, there may be soon found a remedy for all this cheating.”⁴³ Even at the end of the century, in 1894, Mrs. A. H. Green attributed the increasing Indian tea imports in England to “our national—and often personal—interest in India” rather than to a taste preference for Indian tea. Mrs. Green personally favored the “softness of flavour” found in Chinese teas and asserts that they have more “romance” than Indian teas.⁴⁴ But tea drinkers had to give up more than pleasantly exotic notions of Chinese pagodas and priests making tea by hand; whereas China imported both black and green teas to Britain, Chinese teas tended to be mild in flavor. Indian tea plantations produced black tea almost exclusively, and Indian teas offered bolder, more-assertive flavors. Once Britain began importing predominantly Indian tea, the nation’s beverage came to be brewed with black tea. By the late 1880s, English imports of Indian tea had outpaced England’s consumption of tea from China.⁴⁵

      The years surrounding the shift from a predominantly Chinese to a predominantly Indian supply of tea for English consumers produced a flurry of tea-related texts asserting the superiority of Indian tea. Samuel Baildon’s Tea Industry in India: A Review of Finance and Labour, and a Guide for Capitalists and Assistants (1882) emphasizes that India—not China—ought