These words were penned by a professor of the Royal Medico-Botanical Society in the late 1830s to commemorate the “recent discovery in British India of the Tea Plant” (vii). Yet although written near the beginning of the Victorian era, their sentiment – that tea was both an element of national self-definition and a stimulator of the individual prosperity and wellbeing on which that polity was based – nonetheless epitomizes the broader sweep of the nineteenth century's engagement with that article of consumption. How tea came to occupy this role, and why, is the subject of this essay, which focuses on the book-length tea history – a slightly peculiar genre that blurs the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction, advertisement and travelogue, personal account and scientific treatise. These histories appeared throughout the nineteenth century and often were explicitly funded by various segments of the tea industry (thus resembling the nineteenth-century equivalent of an infomercial). Because of their direct relationship to commercial and trading concerns, their role in recording and shaping the taste for the beverage, and their dissemination across a fairly broad public, tea histories offer an important, intertextual index of the Victorians' relationship to the beverage, as well as the way in which the relationship between home and Empire was constituted and changed over the course of the century.Footnote ¹

As is well known, the eighteenth century witnessed the domestication of tea in Britain. Tea was transformed from an exotic luxury consumed primarily by men in public coffeehouses to a necessity of everyday life enjoyed by both men and women in the private, domestic space of the home. In the nineteenth century, tea became an icon of English domesticity and was associated with privacy, intimacy, and the nuclear family. In turn, as domesticity itself rose in prominence and importance in Victorian discourse, the domestic drink of tea soon gained the title of the “national beverage.”Footnote ² According to nineteenth-century tea histories and advertisements, tea helped to define English identity, character, and class values. Tea united the English people, temporarily erasing the boundaries between groups to unify the nation into a coherent whole. As a beverage and as a commodity, tea histories proclaim, tea simultaneously strengthened individual constitutions and the larger body politic of the nation itself.Footnote ³

Configuring tea as a domestic, English commodity, however, raised fears about basing ideals of domesticity and national identity on a foreign product from China – a country that, despite British attempts to penetrate it, had remained frustratingly unknown. As Linda Colley has argued, “we usually decide who we are by reference to who and what we are not.” (“Britishness” 311). Simultaneously perceiving China as the “other” and using Asian tea to foster a sense of English national identity threatened to collapse the distinctions upon which that national identity was formulated.

At the same time, the search for more secure sources of the national beverage – in terms of pricing, availability, purity, etc. – led to a shift in the boundary between commodity and consumer. The desire for a safe, British-controlled source of a commodity that had become necessary to daily life helped to spur the expansion of the Empire, which came to include territories able to produce and manufacture tea, and involved expanding the definition of national identity to encompass an imperial one. British explorers, botanists, and industrialists united in their attempts to establish successful tea gardens in India and Ceylon, and over the course of the century, imports of tea from British-governed plantations gradually increased. They finally exceeded imports of Chinese tea in the late 1880s. Marketing also contributed to this shift. As Erika Rappaport has argued, consumers initially considered black Indian and Ceylon teas to be inferior to Chinese ones, but promoters and advertisers stimulated a taste for them by emphasizing the adulteration of Chinese teas against the purity of teas grown under the British flag.Footnote ⁴

Moreover, the unique position of tea as both a luxury and a necessity contributed to its role in building the British Empire – both ideologically and financially. Historically, at least until the eighteenth century, British writers and politicians viewed luxuries as detrimental to the success of empires; they described foreign imports as enervating, depleting an empire's reproductive resources.Footnote ⁵ Spending money and time consuming luxuries constituted a self-indulgent squandering of men and capital. But tea's ability to exist simultaneously in the opposing realms of luxury and necessity, foreign and domestic, enabled it to animate Britain as an imperial nation, just as it invigorated the bodies of Victoria's subjects.

The Body and the Nation: Creating Englishness by Drinking Tea

Tea histories explicitly attribute both individual and national wellbeing to tea-drinking, connecting the physical body of individual English men and women with the collective body politic. As Sigmond notes, tea is agreeable, pleasant, and comforting; it both nourishes the body and provides solace for the soul. He emphasizes that the comforting pleasure of a hot cup of tea enables Englishmen and women to temporarily merge their individual and national identities.Footnote ⁶

The daily consumption of tea reinforced its importance in reaffirming questions of self and society, but it also allowed tea to become part of the background of daily life. Sigmond suggests that consumers take tea for granted, and therefore the tea-drinker does not even realize how much physical and cultural nourishment he draws from it, how much he depends upon it to provide a foundation for his actions.Footnote ⁷ Thus one of Sigmond's goals in this text is to bring tea into the foreground, to focus his reader's attention upon its central importance to English life. He claims that tea influences all parts of an Englishman's existence: moral, physical, and social; individual and national. The Englishman, he avers, is “deeply indebted to the tea-plant.” Whereas wheat, barley, potatoes, and wine may offer more “immediate sustenance,” Sigmond credits tea with the ability to “call into action the energies of nations” and to “give rise to the exertion of so much intellectual power” (1–2).

Sigmond also suggests that tea inculcates quintessentially English values of moderation and temperance:

The action of tea within the stomach forges a connection between the body of the individual drinker and the nation as a whole, promoting sobriety and calm interaction. The individual's physical response to the ingestion of tea – soothing the nerves, settling the stomach, and refreshing the system – therefore involves the embodiment of idealized notions of English social practice, such as social charm, personal grace, and lively but polite discourse. In addition, Sigmond's use of the phrase “sobriety of a nation” recalls tea's prominent position within Temperance Reform, which itself sought to create model citizens by affecting bodily changes.Footnote ⁸

Later in the century, Samuel Day was still promoting the ideological connection between the health of individual tea-drinkers and the state of the English nation by highlighting the importance of tea to “the English constitution” in his work Tea: Its Mystery and History (Reference Day1878): “It is not, possibly, too great an assumption to assert that there must exist something about Tea specially suitable to the English constitution and climate” (60). Day suggests that the English character is partly a response to the English climate, and tea assists in nourishing constitutions tailored to that particular climate. The use of the word “constitution” implies the extent to which physical bodies are constructed by the commodities they consume, but it also resounds with political implications. By referring to “the English constitution” as an abstract collective, Day implies that the political make-up of the nation depends upon the shared consumption of tea. Of course, tea itself does not originate within the English environment, as Day himself was patently aware. Nevertheless, tea is naturalized as English through its status as an imperial commodity – part of a circulating network of goods, currency, and labor and a vital source of revenue for the British government.Footnote ⁹

By merging the body of the tea-drinker with the body of the nation, Sigmond's and Day's histories suggest that nationhood resides within the individual subject. Rather than assuming that national identity is simply an overarching abstraction, an imagined community, these nineteenth-century tea histories argue for a more organic model of national identity. Thus tea-drinking becomes vital to the construction of a shared identity that cuts across class and gender lines, performing a similar function to that of beef eating at an earlier period. More importantly, every individual tea-drinker was a regular participant in this polity. Every day and with every cup, the nation was built and strengthened.

In the same way that Victorian tea histories align the tea-drinker with the body politic, they also conflate the domestic sphere of the home with the domestic space of England on the global map. They see the nation as being shaped by everyday domestic interactions within the home and among family members.Footnote ¹⁰ Sigmond explicitly attributes the accomplishments of English men and women, including “industry,” “health,” “national riches,” and “domestic happiness,” to tea-drinking, linking these variously public and private, individual and collective, goods through the consumption of tea. He locates the heart of Englishness within individual households and metaphorically describes the nation as a collective home gathered around a single hearth: “The social tea-table is like the fireside of our country, a national delight; and [it is] the scene of domestic converse and of agreeable relaxation . . .” (3). Within individual households, the abstract concept of the domestic sphere coalesces around the tea-table, invoking essentially English precepts of a moral family life.

By focusing upon family members drinking tea within their homes, tea histories participate in the wider Victorian tendency to publicly examine the details of private life and to draw conclusions about the English national community from the patterns of the typical domestic household. Representations of Victorian tea-drinking therefore offer specific cultural examples of what Karen Chase and Michael Levenson have termed “the spectacle of intimacy”: the increasing visibility of the domestic family (12). Tea histories, advertisements, and novels of the period show the importance of tea-drinking to intimate family gatherings inside the domestic sphere, and they project this vision of intimacy and domesticity outward to form an imagined bond linking all English tea-drinkers.

Anxieties of Adulteration and Identity

While Victorian tea histories exhibit confidence in the ability of tea to unify and fortify the British people, they remain anxious about the foreign source of tea. Dependence on a “national beverage” produced outside the bounds of empire raised anxieties about ingestion and fears of permeable cultural, political, and physical boundaries. According to Day, whose text advertises Horniman's Pure Tea, the English were at risk from unscrupulous Chinese tea manufacturers, who used false colorants to produce the brilliantly green tea consumed at the time. The anonymous author of the 1868 article “Leaves From the Mahogany Tree: A Cup of Tea” in All the Year Round similarly claims, “Tea in its finest state never reaches, never can reach, England” (156).

Tea certainly was not the only product to elicit concerns of pollution and adulteration in the nineteenth century. However, within the larger context of the period's discourse on adulteration, the debate over safe, “pure” sources of tea emphasizes “the ways in which botany, chemistry and retailing defined goods, consumers, and healthy forms of production, distribution, and consumption” (Rappaport, “Packaging Tea” 140). Rappaport notes that tea in particular highlights the intersection of domestic and international issues (140). While tea adulteration within Britain was considered a common practice in the eighteenth century, nineteenth-century writers emphasized that English adulteration was a thing of the past, while Chinese adulteration remained a clear and present danger.Footnote ¹¹ Moreover, the fact that the cultivation and processing of tea were carried on within a country that allowed the British no access to its interior, where the tea gardens were located, further elevated fears about adulteration.Footnote ¹² Despite the increasing concessions ceded after the Opium Wars, the Chinese maintained control over the manufacture of their tea.Footnote ¹³

Just as the benefits of drinking tea register on both individual and political levels, so too do anxieties about its foreign sourcing.Footnote ¹⁴ Sigmond explains, “The necessity of avoiding an entire dependence upon China for tea, has long struck some of our most intelligent statesmen” (63). As an alternative to dependence on Chinese tea merchants for supplies of the national beverage, he suggests the possibility of consuming tea cultivated and produced within British-controlled regions of India and thus symbolically within the conceptual boundaries of Great Britain itself. With its date of 1839, Tea: Its Effects, Medicinal and Moral was published at a pivotal point in the global tea trade; Sigmond's treatise marks the start of the transition of tea from a commodity imported to Britain from a foreign nation to a colonial resource cultivated and consumed within its own territories. Sigmond's emphasis on the revelation that tea grew indigenously in the Indian subcontinent simultaneously justifies imperial expansion and reaffirms the place of tea in English everyday life.

The Discovery of Tea in India

British explorers first reported the existence of wild tracts of tea plants in Assam, in northeastern India, in 1823, but cultivation and production of tea in India did not begin until the late 1830s. According to Denys Forrest, author of Tea for the British, the East India Company's government-sanctioned monopoly on all tea imported to Britain from China discouraged the development of tea cultivation. Rather than encouraging internal competition, the Company temporarily ignored the potential for Indian-grown sources of tea, relying instead upon its network of trade relations with Chinese tea merchants (Forrest 107). Parliament dissolved the East India Company's China monopoly in 1833, opening up the China tea trade to independent British interests.Footnote ¹⁵ A decade after the discovery of tea in Assam, the East India Company finally turned its attention to the possibility of producing Indian tea.Footnote ¹⁶ The first shipment of Indian-grown tea was auctioned on the London tea market in January, 1839 (Walvin 147) – the same year that Sigmond's Tea was published in London.

In his treatise, Sigmond celebrates the recent discovery of the tea plant growing wild in the jungles of Assam as follows:

The simple tea shrub, Sigmond declares, has the power to affect the destinies of individuals, societies, and nations, shaking economic and political systems across the globe. Sigmond carefully delineates the “bounds of the wide dominion of Great Britain” in this passage, asserting firmly that the divine providence of “Nature” has placed the tea plant under British dominion. By placing the “wellbeing” of the dormant but mighty resources of India within the hands of “a paternal government,” Sigmond articulates the connection between the budding Indian tea industry and British imperial goals. Cultivating tea in India contributes to a new agricultural industry for British colonial planters and simultaneously participates in the enlargement of imperial territory and power. The investment of British industry and energy into the “dormant,” slumbering resources of its colony will, according to Sigmond, fulfill the agricultural potential of the wild jungles of Assam.

Sigmond emphasizes that the tea found growing in Assam is not only biologically identical to the tea cultivated in China, but also indigenous to it, rather than having been introduced from across the border in Yunnan. He quotes the Agricultural Society of Calcutta, which declared that a discovery had taken place, which

The Society and Sigmond see the discovery of the “real and genuine tea-plant of China” growing natively in Indian soil as having the potential to revolutionize the embryonic tea industry of British India. Sigmond asserts: “There cannot be the slightest doubt of its being the genuine produce of the real tea-plant” (78).Footnote ¹⁷ Rather than attempting to work with seedlings taken from China, British tea planters could cultivate the native resources of India to produce an authentically imperial form of the national beverage.

In celebrating the potential for British-controlled, Indian-grown, genuine tea, Sigmond employs a rhetoric of “discovery.” He focuses most upon the fact that the tea found in India was planted “by the hand of Nature,” rather than by the hands of British growers. According to this rhetoric, the tea plant grew wild in the jungles of Assam before the arrival of British colonists, awaiting the moment when East India Company explorers heralded it as an imperial source for tea. Discovering tea, the English national beverage, growing natively upon Indian soil suggests that Nature has authorized British expansion into that region, affirming the natural right and responsibility of a “paternal government,” as Sigmond puts it, to rule Indian territories and to reap the benefits of Indian resources. The tea industry had already proved profitable to the British government through the monopoly of the East India Company; finding tea growing wild in the Honorable Company's territories in India just when its China monopoly was dissolved appears to be divine intervention, providing both the Company and the nation with a new source of the “tea of commerce,” as Sigmond calls it (22).

Even more fundamentally, the discovery of a source for the beverage that had become part of the fabric of daily life in England proved that India was indeed destined to become a great asset to the British Empire and 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 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 pre-existence of the tea-plant in India, which pre-dated British exploration and colonization, suggests a logical syllogism which helps to naturalize the process of imperial expansion and which provides explicit justification, for Sigmond, of British rule in India. It is important to note the timing of Sigmond's declaration: Upper Assam, where this tea was found and where the first plantations were to be situated, became a British protectorate in 1833 and was only annexed in 1838.

Discovering tea growing wild within the bounds of the British Empire offered a way out of the conundrum of basing national identity upon a product imported from foreign sources – essentially domesticating the potentially troubling exotic origins of the national beverage. Rappaport's work reveals that at this date, Indian tea was popular neither with consumers, who greatly preferred the taste of Chinese tea, nor with grocers, who found it inferior to Chinese tea and feared for their customer base. In fact, extensive marketing was required on the part of producers in South Asia and wholesalers in Britain to change the public's taste in tea (“Market Empire”).Footnote ¹⁸ Nevertheless, Sigmond is making a rhetorical argument about the place of tea in domestic culture. He 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 aberration in the history of tea-drinking in England. The discovery of “real” tea growing within the Company's territory in India manifestly could correct this mistake, restoring tea, from bud to leaf to teapot, to British hands. Once plantations could be established, British supervision of all stages of the cultivation, production, and shipment of Indian-grown tea would be able to assure English consumers that the beverage filling their teacups was authentic, genuine, and pure.

Thus Sigmond asserts that the discovery of the tea plant in India accomplishes two goals. First, the new tea industry in India provides the East India Company and the British government with a profitable addition to their financial and territorial empire. Sigmond quotes from the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal, which argues that “Assam may yet be found to be one of the most valuable acquisitions to the British empire” (80). Second, the revelation that the tea plant grew within India ensured that the English taste for tea one day could be satisfied from within the Empire. Sigmond proudly proclaims that the nation can now rely upon Assam tea production to replace the China tea trade: “there can be no doubt that an ample supply for European consumption can be obtained [in Upper Assam]” (81).

Sigmond's predictions proved to be correct; the discovery and cultivation of tea in British-controlled regions of India resulted in a precipitous decline of China tea imported to Great Britain. English imports of tea continued to increase throughout the nineteenth century, as they had from tea's first introduction to England in the 1650s, but over time, more and more tea came from Assam and Ceylon. By the late 1880s, English imports of Indian tea outpaced tea from China.Footnote ¹⁹ Far from relying upon the uncertainties of foreign merchants and the mysteries of Chinese tea manufacture, Sigmond suggests, England could now entirely 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.

The Necessary Luxury of Tea: Defining a Nation and an Empire

The significant role that tea played in the process of creating and strengthening the British Empire from the 1830s onward stems, in part, from its status as a commodity that crosses ideological boundaries. On the one hand, tea was an exotic luxury imported over vast distances from a culture very different than England's. But on the other hand, tea had become an irreplaceable necessity of English everyday life. Tea thus occupied the binary-straddling position of being physically and morally necessary as an article of daily ingestion and of retaining the characteristics of a pleasurable indulgence to be savored and enjoyed. Tea's oscillation between the ontological categories of luxury and necessity was critical to the ideological development of an imperial nation.

Historically, empires have viewed excess consumption of luxuries as threatening to their survival. For instance, Roman writers toward the end of the Roman Empire thought that the importation of foreign luxuries drained resources – both financial and human – from the imperial homeland.Footnote ²⁰ Cultures throughout the Western world have contributed to a growing literature dedicated to illustrating the pernicious nature of luxury consumption.Footnote ²¹ But in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, shifts in national economies sparked a radical reassessment of the effect of luxury consumption upon the welfare of nations. The consumption of luxury goods imported from foreign locations became increasingly important to European economies, and foreign trade became associated with the wealth and prosperity of the English nation.Footnote ²²Tsiology, a tea history written in 1827, counters the claim that tea is an “enervating luxury” draining the nation of needed resources and energy by arguing that “no article of extensive commerce can possibly exist – whether a mere luxury or a positive necessary – without enriching a nation in proportion to its extent” (105). The author of Tsiology suggests that whatever tea's status as a luxury or necessity, tea as a commodity has in fact enriched Great Britain. By spending money and time consuming it, English tea drinkers were ultimately participating in the continued success of the British Empire.

Many advertisements and histories of tea grapple with the shifting definitions of luxury and necessity in an attempt to adequately describe tea's evolving place within the English household during the Victorian period. Day's 1878 Tea: Its Mystery and History outlines a gradual shift in the location of tea within daily life from a luxury to a necessity – from a product that was costly and unneeded, an extra burden upon the household, and an item purely for pleasure (whether appetitive or social) to a commodity so important within the daily diet that its absence would be felt as “deprivation.” Day quotes “an eminent statesman,” who declares, “What was first regarded as a luxury, has now become, if not an absolute necessity, at least one of our accustomed daily wants, the loss of which would cause more suffering and excite more regret than would the deprivation of many things which were once counted as necessaries of life” (70). In this passage, Day maintains a binary between luxury and necessity, basing these definitions upon the importance of tea to daily life. But tea has not only traversed this divide, it also has worked its way so far into the fabric of everyday life that it has replaced older, existing necessities of life such as beer or ale, reflecting a new hierarchy of quotidian priorities and a new sense of Englishness.

More often, however, nineteenth-century tea histories and advertisements differ from modern analyses of the concept of “luxury” by insisting that tea can occupy positions as a luxury and as a necessity simultaneously. Sociologist and philosopher Christopher J. Berry has suggested that goods have a transient, dynamic status upon a continuum between luxury and necessity.Footnote ²³ Many goods have historically moved out of their luxury status into the position of a social necessity, part of everyday life for most people in a given culture. Berry argues that a luxury good can be universally desired and widely consumed, but it cannot, by definition, be a social necessity; once it has moved on the continuum toward the position of being socially required to satisfy the needs of individuals within a certain culture, it can no longer be defined as a luxury. Tea histories, however, attempt to defy this imperative by allowing tea to be both at the same time.

Robert Fortune's Journey to the Tea Countries of China (Reference Fortune1852) explains in greater detail exactly how this dual nature was conceived at mid-century. The book offers an extended first-person account of Fortune's travels in native disguise, in order to circumvent Chinese controls and to gain access to tea plantations' secrets as well as samples of their cultivars. It also includes a “short notice” on plantations in India. Fortune, a Scottish botanist, was hired by the East India Company to infiltrate Chinese tea plantations in order to gain knowledge about the cultivation and manufacturing of tea and to acquire thousands of tea seedlings to transport to fledgling tea plantations in India.Footnote ²⁴ At first, Fortune maintains a rhetorical divide between the concepts of “luxury” and “necessity,” and he suggests that tea has “almost” crossed the line between them: “In these days, when tea has become almost a necessary of life in England and her wide-spreading colonies, its production upon a large and cheap scale is an object of no ordinary importance” (394).

Fortune emphasizes that to be English is to drink tea, but he also reinforces the concept of England as an imperial force, since one does not have to physically live in England to participate in the quintessentially English ritual of tea-drinking. England as a nation has lost its physical borders; the concept of what it is to be English has expanded, according to Fortune, to fill “her wide-spreading colonies.” Fortune carefully delineates a two-fold rationale for how growing tea in India would benefit both England and India. Production of tea within the confines of the Empire would, of course, offer tea produced on a “large and cheap scale” from a territory much more accessible and economically beneficial for export to England. But Fortune also suggests that Indian cultivation of tea would also serve to benefit and civilize the natives of India. Fortune provides a detailed vignette of Indian peasant life and suggests precisely how the introduction of tea crops would materially enhance the culture and comfort of Indian men and women:

Fortune represents the natives as so poor that they are unable to sufficiently feed, clothe, or shelter themselves without British intervention. The criteria of self-sufficiency that Fortune posits, however, is capitalist – the problem is that Indian peasants cannot sell their grain for enough money to cover the cost of transporting it. Fortune assumes that marketing surplus produce for cash profit is the norm of agriculture, and he identifies the paharies as held back by their lack of participation in a circulation of goods. For Fortune, introducing the cultivation of tea to India offers a “boon” to Indians: a cash crop that is physically easier and therefore cheaper to transport, thus bringing their labor into the capitalist market. And by stimulating tea consumption among Indians, it also provides significant benefits to the population's health and industry and brings them into the body politic of the Empire.Footnote ²⁵

Thus Fortune presents the Indian hill peasants' poor living conditions as being linked to their inability to elide the distinction between necessity and luxury. Fortune initially employs this distinction to judge the Indian hill peasant's incapacity to provide for himself and his family. The peasant before the cultivation of tea can scarcely buy necessaries, and certainly no luxuries. The introduction of tea cultivation, however, will blur the boundary between these two categories by raising the peasant's standard of living enough to enable him “to purchase even a few of the necessary and simple luxuries of life.” In this sentence, luxuries have suddenly become necessary – there are no longer the two categories of essential and non-essential but pleasant. With the development of tea cultivation, goods previously considered non-essential will become “necessary luxuries.”

In its position on the cusp between necessity and luxury, tea epitomized Victorian notions that the middle class were members of a socioeconomic category that gave them sufficient wealth to indulge physical pleasures, plus the moral fortitude to withstand habits of excess or gluttony. According to Fortune, the ability to grow, transport, and sell tea will transform the Indian peasant into a middle-class British subject. As the British tea-drinker would gladly attest, the ability to purchase necessary luxuries like tea is crucial to the definition of that subject position. As the Indian subjects rise in financial and moral health, they too will begin purchasing the “necessary and simple luxuries of life,” bringing them fully into the circulation of goods between colony and metropole and providing a market both for Indian tea and for other British goods as well. Tea thus literally and figuratively expands the boundaries of the empire – adding territory to the British-controlled regions of India while simultaneously creating new British subjects who will conform to the characteristic requirements of the middle-class national identity.

Fortune also implies that British readers in England could physically participate in the process of building the empire by purchasing and consuming Indian-grown tea. His text offers a tangible way to experience the full cycle of colonized and colonizer, of colony and metropole. By drinking tea produced in India, the British tea-drinker simultaneously enriches his or her own body (and thus his or her small physical piece of the British Empire) and contributes to the physical, moral, and financial health of the expanding Empire in India. The British cultivation and production of tea in India enables the poor Indian peasant to become part of the capitalist system of exchange and to rise, economically, to a position of middle-class comfort. The cycle is completed by the journey of Indian-grown tea back to England, where the British tea-drinker purchases it and consumes it, thus contributing simultaneously to the expansion of the empire, the increasing wealth and comfort of the inhabitants of British India, and his or her own sense of English national identity.

By emphasizing the status of tea as a luxury and a daily necessity within English culture, nineteenth-century tea histories and advertisements suggest that the tea trade held a critically important position within the English national economy, just as the wise purchase of tea was central to an individual household's domestic economy. Luxury goods played a dual role in the development of British commerce, providing both the increased consumer commodities instrumental to revising images of consumption and indulgence and simultaneously offering a rich source of revenue for the British government. Goods imported from abroad – from both British colonies and from independent powers such as China – thus stimulated both consumption and production within England and its empire, causing English philosophers and political economists to reconsider earlier criticisms of the role of luxury items in Western culture. As a necessary luxury, tea collapses the geographical distance between colony and colonizer; bringing the exotic elements of the empire within the domestic drawing room, the rituals of the tea-table essentially domesticate the Empire and transform imperialism into a daily necessity of English life.

A late Victorian advertisement for the United Kingdom Tea Company offers visual evidence of this recasting of the role of luxury (Figure 11). The ad depicts the female figure of Britannia, complete in flowing Roman robes and plumed military headdress, reclining at a small table and pouring herself a cup of tea. Drawing upon the glory and military strength of the Roman Empire in order to assert similar praise for Great Britain, this ad suggests that, far from enervating and destroying the imperial power of England, commercial trade in luxury goods supports and strengthens the nation. In the background, figures representing China, India, Ceylon, and Assam – the major regions of tea production – bring chests of tea to Britannia. In the foreground, she calmly focuses her gaze upon her own tiny teacup, into which she is pouring tea from a small, round teapot labeled – in case there were any doubt – “United Kingdom Tea Company's Teas.” Thus Britain consumes and enjoys teas imported from around the world, supported by the labor and the service of numerous foreign nations and colonies, represented by various forms of cultural dress and racial appearance in the ad.

Figure 11. “Tea First Hand,” United Kingdom Tea Company. Courtesy of Bodleian Library, University of Oxford: John Johnson Collection; Tea and Coffee Box 2.

Each chest of tea within the ad, including those carried by the figures of China and India as well as the one upon which Britannia reclines, portrays the “trade mark” image of the United Kingdom Tea Company: three young women in three distinct national costumes. Although this image is indistinct and obscured by the folds of Britannia's robes in this particular ad, the same image appears, larger and more clearly, in other ads for the United Kingdom Tea Company. The woman in the center wears the dress of early nineteenth-century England; her gown is slim and high-waisted, she carries a small purse with a long ribbon as a strap, and her hair falls in curls around her face. The woman on the left wears Scottish highlander dress, including a long plaid skirt, a tam upon her head, and a traditional sporran (a leather pouch with three tassels) by her belt. On the right, an Indian woman wears a flowing sari, ornamented along the edges and wrapped around her waist and her arms. The trademark image of the United Kingdom Tea Company visually represents the main peoples who make up the United Kingdom and its empire (minus Ireland, Wales, the West Indies, and the subjects of colonies in places such as Africa). Each of the three women hold a teacup emblazoned with the initials “UKTC,” and they stand with their arms linked together, physically united. The image of Britannia, sitting upon the crate of tea, literally rests upon a foundation of foreign trade and domestic female tea consumption shared by all the races and cultures of the Empire. Far from posing a threat to the stability of the country and the colonies, the trade in tea, “One of the Greatest Luxuries of the Day,” as the ad proclaims, here appears to serve, support, and strengthen both the Company and the United Kingdom itself.Footnote ²⁶