A History of the World in 100 Objects - Dr Neil MacGregor [233]
You would have had hundreds of acres being turned over to tea, especially in northern parts of India. They also had success when they took it to places like Ceylon. It would have had an impact on the local population but it did bring jobs to the area, although low-paid jobs – it started off with males being employed, but it was mostly females clipping the tea. Local communities in parts of India and China were benefiting from growing the material and also being able to sell it. But added value from the trade and packaging would have really occurred within the empire and especially within Britain.
Fortunes were made in shipping. The tea trade required huge numbers of fast clipper ships for the long voyage from the Far East, which docked in British harbours alongside vessels bringing sugar from the Caribbean. To get sugar on to a British tea table had until very recently involved at least as much violence as was needed to fill the teapot. The first African slaves in the Americas worked on sugar plantations, the start of the long and terrible triangular trade that carried European goods to Africa, African slaves to the Americas (as we saw in Chapter 86) and slave-produced sugar to Europe. After a long campaign involving many of the people who supported temperance movements, slavery in the British West Indies was abolished in 1833. But in the 1840s there was still a great deal of slave sugar around – Cuba was a massive producer – and it was of course cheaper than the sugar produced on free plantations. The ethics of sugar were complex and intensely political.
The most peaceful part of the tea set is, not surprisingly, the milk jug, though it too is part of a huge social and economic transformation. Until the 1830s, for urban dwellers to have milk, cows had to live in the city – an aspect of nineteenth-century life we’re now barely aware of. Suburban railways changed all that. Thanks to them, the cows could leave town, as an 1853 article in the Journal of the Royal Agricultural Society of England makes clear:
A new trade has been opened in Surrey since the completion of the South-Western Railway. Several dairies of 20 to 30 cows are kept and the milk is sent to the various stations of the South-Western Railway, and conveyed to the Waterloo terminus for the supply of the London Market.
So our tea set is really a three-piece social history of nineteenth-century Britain. It is also a lens through which historians such as Linda Colley can look at a large part of the history of the world:
It does underline how much empire, consciously or not, eventually impacts on everybody in this country. If in the nineteenth century you are sitting at a mahogany table drinking tea with sugar, you are linked to virtually every continent on the globe. You are linked with the Royal Navy, which is guarding the sea routes between these continents, you are linked with this great tentacular capital machinery through which the British control so many parts of the world and ransack them for commodities, including commodities that can be consumed by the ordinary civilian at home.
The next object comes from another tea-drinking island nation, Japan. But, unlike Britain, Japan had done all it could to keep the rest of the world at bay and joined the global economy only when forced to do so by the United States – literally at gunpoint.
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Hokusai’s The Great Wave
Woodblock print, from Japan
AD 1830–1833
In the early nineteenth century Japan had been effectively closed off from the world for 200 years. It had simply opted out of the community of nations.
Kings are burning somewhere,
Wheels are turning somewhere,
Trains are being run,
Wars are being won,
Things are being done
Somewhere out there, not here.
Here we paint screens.
Yes … the arrangement of the screens.
This is Stephen Sondheim’s musical tableau of the secluded and calmly