The History and Roots of Tea

Abstract

This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Food Studies. Please check back later for the full article. Tea’s modernubiquity as a drink imbibed and (increasingly) cultivated around the world belies its origin as a plant – typically one of two varieties of the camellia sinensis – grown, harvested, and prepared for consumption in various south-east Asian countries for millennia. In the late-twentieth and early twenty-first 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 labour, imperialism, mechanisation, 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 a component of local flora, 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-sixteenth century, tea has shown an astonishing ability to transform and redefine itself. European travellers to China and Japan first encountered tea in the mid-sixteenth 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. In Britain, where drinking tea became recognised as a domesticated component of national behaviour by the early-nineteenth century, tea was first advertised for sale in the late 1650s. Across the eighteenth century, it increasingly became the focal point of the lucrative European ‘East India’ trade, and its taxation as an article of consumption encouraged the formation of violent smuggling networks. During the same period, a regular overland ‘tea road’ was established between China and Russia, a caravan trade that was to persist until the mid-nineteenth 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 increasingly widespread practice of drinking tea with sugar also connected British consumption with the sugar plantations of America and the Caribbean, where sugar was grown and harvested by enslaved people from Africa and elsewhere. British nineteenth-century dominance of the trade, together with its imperial ambitions in India and beyond, led to the establishment of a tea monoculture over vast tracts of land in India, Sri Lanka, and various African countries such as Malawi, Kenya, and Zimbabwe, that was further extended in the colonial infrastructure of other European nations. The emergence of these tea plantations leveraged both the development of intensive practices of farming and mechanisation (which were to shape global tea production in the twentieth century), and the consolidation of ownership and production by multi-national corporations which continue to dominate the tea trade into the twenty-first century.