At Home - Bill Bryson [98]
Although pepper and spices were what brought the East India Company into being, the company’s destiny was tea. In 1696, the government introduced the first in a series of cuts in the tea tax. The effect on consumption was immediate. Between 1699 and 1721, tea imports increased almost a hundredfold, from 13,000 pounds to 1.2 million pounds, then quadrupled again in the thirty years to 1750. Tea was slurped by laborers and daintily sipped by ladies. It was taken at breakfast, dinner, and supper. It was the first beverage in history to belong to no class, and the first to have its own ritual slot in the day: teatime. It was easier to make at home than coffee, and it also went especially well with another great gustatory treat that was suddenly becoming affordable for the average wage earner: sugar. Britons came to adore sweet, milky tea as no other nation had (or even perhaps could). For something over a century and a half, tea was at the heart of the East India Company, and the East India Company was at the heart of the British Empire.
Not everyone got the hang of tea immediately. The poet Robert Southey related the story of a lady in the country who received a pound of tea as a gift from a city friend when it was still a novelty. Uncertain how to engage with it, she boiled it up in a pot, spread the leaves on toast with butter and salt, and served it to her friends, who nibbled it gamely and declared it interesting but not quite to their taste. Elsewhere, however, it raced ahead, in tandem with sugar.
The British had always loved sugar, so much so that when they first got easy access to it, about the time of Henry VIII, they put it on or in almost everything from eggs to meat to wine. They scooped it onto potatoes, sprinkled it over greens, and ate it straight off the spoon if they could afford to. Even though sugar was very expensive, people consumed it till their teeth turned black, and if their teeth didn’t turn black naturally, they blackened them artificially to show how wealthy and marvelously self-indulgent they were. But now, thanks to plantations in the West Indies, sugar was becoming increasingly affordable, and people were discovering that it went particularly well with tea.
Sweet tea became a national indulgence. By 1770, per capita consumption of sugar was running at 20 pounds a head, and most of that, it seems, was spooned into tea. (That sounds like quite a lot until you realize that Britons today eat 80 pounds of sugar per person annually, while Americans pack away a decidedly robust 126 pounds of sugar per head.) As with coffee, tea was held to confer health benefits; among much else, it was said that it “assuageth the pains of the Bowels.” A Dutch doctor, Cornelius Bontekoe, recommended drinking fifty cups of tea a day—and in extreme cases as many as two hundred—in order to keep oneself sufficiently primed.
Sugar also played a big role in a less commendable development: the slave trade. Nearly all the sugar Britons consumed was grown on West Indian estates worked by slaves. We have a narrow tendency to associate slavery exclusively with the plantation economy of the southern United States, but in fact plenty of other people got rich from slavery, not least the traders who shipped 3.1 million Africans across the ocean before the United Kingdom abolished the trade in humans in 1807.